No Matter How Much Time You Have, You Can Do Some Yoga

21st century western yoga practices are obsessed with time. We talk about completing 200 hours of training, we delineate our physical practice into 1 hour time slots, if it’s longer than that it becomes a workshop (whether it has any of the characteristics of a workshop or not), when we talk about meditation it’s often in the scope of how much time we spend doing it. This is not of course reserved solely for yoga, our obsession with time can be found in all aspects of our busy lives, but this fixation can be a problem for developing a yoga practice. 

Before I go further, I should acknowledge that here I’m referring only to a  physical yoga practice and perhaps also a meditation practice. These are just two aspects of the eight-fold path, or the eight practices we must follow to live a yogic life according to the ‘father of yoga’ Patanjali. (more on this later). The other limbs of the eight-fold path include principles for our everyday behaviour such as not-harming ourselves and others and self-acceptance. These cannot be so easily packed into a one-hour slot (perhaps this tells us something about why they are often missing from a western yoga practice), and are the kinds of things we ought to be practicing all the time. 

Looking particularly at the physical yoga practice, it has been very neatly packaged to fit into our fitness culture. Classes are 1 hour because that suits a studio timetable, not because that’s necessarily the optimal amount of time to practice yoga. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with parcelling a physical practice into a one-hour slot. It’s a pretty good amount of time to settle in and focus, warm up, try something challenging, cool down and relax. Personally I like at least an extra 15 minutes to allow for a nice long relaxation in savasana at the end. However whether these timings work for yoga or not, they have very little to do with what makes a ‘good’ yoga practice.

It’s About Quality not Quantity

I think we need to try and shift our mindset away from the quantity of yoga we do (i.e. how much time we spend on it) towards the quality of our practice. Are we focused? Are we tuned into our bodies? Or are we just marking time? 

When I first qualified as a teacher (completing my 200 hours, yet another time-delineated achievement), I suddenly lost all my motivation to practice. It was almost like an anti-climax – I’d worked so hard to become a teacher and was so excited to finish my training and then I just didn’t know what to do with myself. Suddenly I felt the pressure of no longer being a trainee and felt like I had to become a ‘super-yogi’. This meant that I attached too much of my self-worth to the amount of time I spent practicing yoga, whether in a studio class or at home. I found myself going through the motions and even clock watching while I was practicing. Or if I didn’t have a big enough chunk of time to practice (i.e at least 45 mins), I just didn’t do anything. This began to happen more often than not and I found myself as a newly qualified yoga teacher who did not practice yoga… 

Illustration by @beckyjluffman

What got me out of this pattern was letting go of the time pressure. I started by doing 1 sun salutation (takes only a couple of minutes) every day. For that small sequence I was fully there and focused on what I was doing. Some days I just did that and moved on, others I went on to do another sun salutation, and another, and before I knew it I was doing 30-45 minutes of yoga without noticing the time passing. The only way I managed 45 minutes of yoga, was by letting go the idea that I had to spend 45 minutes on it.

We don’t actually know how much time the yogis of 4,000 odd years ago spent on their physical practice, some may have spent hours a day, others perhaps much less. After all it was only ⅛ of their practice. We do know that the more yoga we practice, the greater the benefits we will feel. But the way I see it, if we don’t practice at all because we don’t have an hour to go to a class (or let’s face it at least an hour and a half or two hours by the time you’ve travelled there and back), we’re not going to feel any benefit at all. Also if we’re just going through the motions and marking time, rather than being engaged with and focused on what we’re doing, we’re going to miss out on so many of the great benefits of our yoga practice.

Having Time for Yoga is a Privilege, but 5 Minutes is Enough

So many people say ‘I should really give yoga a try but I don’t have the time’. I completely understand this feeling. In our society it appears that you have to put hours per week (and perhaps one week per year on retreat) into classes in order to be a good yogi. We have to remember that time is a privilege. (Not forgetting that we also charge by the hour and so this commitment can become pretty pricey). Many of the people who need yoga the most have the least time to practice it. So we need to find ways to do 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 30 minutes of yoga (youtube is excellent for these kinds of sessions if you’re looking for a guide), and let go of the pressure to put the hours in. If you’re thinking you’d like to try yoga, but you’re not sure you’ve got the time, I completely understand. Find the amount of time you can give, even if that’s just 5 minutes a week, and that is enough to get started.