Today we’re talking about how we sabotage ourselves, both in regular life and in our yoga practice.
Everybody has this issue.
You could have the best day at work you’ve had in your life and then come home and pick a stupid fight with your spouse. You might book a vacation you really deserve and then get sick on the first day so you can’t enjoy it.
These are two real life examples of self sabotage I’ve experienced myself two ways I’ve sabotaged my own success and my own happiness.
The same can be true of yoga practice. You’ll have a consistent run of showing up to your mat every day. You’re doing the work, feeling great, but then you injure yourself at home in a stupid kitchen accident, or you con yourself into believing that you don’t really need it anymore.
This is much like taking medication. You get to a point where you feel much better, so you tell yourself you don’t need to swallow those pills anymore. But the moment you stop, those symptoms will come back.
This happens in yoga too.
If we stop our practice, all of those old patterns, all of those things that drove us to yoga in the first place… they come back.
These are known as samskaras – an ancient Sanskrit term for those deeply ingrained patterns we all have. Yoga will never erase these patterns completely, but it can help us manage them.
The Yoga Sutra is filled with some really good techniques and advice on how to prevent this self-sabotage.
Patanjali reminds us that the time to do all the work, the time to be hypervigilant on your path to spirituality is the the moment when things seem to be going really well.
You want to continue on that path, on that upward trajectory.
So when your yoga practice is going really well, when you’re sleeping well, and eating well, when your stress levels are low… that when you should be doing your maintenance work to make sure those old issues, those samskaras, don’t creep back in.
The Yoga Sutra also teaches us how painful falling off the wagon can be. When we have had a taste of how amazing it feels to practice regularly – how much more conscious and alive you feel – it seems that much worse when we “mess up”. We know what we’re missing when we get to the point, and we know that we have to start from the beginning.
If this is resonating with you, please don’t judge yourself.
Don’t overanalyze – we all sabotage ourselves to some degree. The good news is that you can change it. Yoga is about more than just physical fitness – yoga philosophy is your best tool for helping you to stay on the right path from a spiritual perspective.
Yoga is a tool to help us live a life of more freedom, more clarity, more joy, more peace.