As well as discovering powerful tools for self-exploration and well-being, the key is to practise them regularly. As a yoga teacher, the difference in the impact of practice on students who come regularly and others who come occasionally is a game changer.
The gift of regularity
It's a big step forward when someone commits to practising regularly.
It means that they see the potential of the practice, not just a short-term pursuit of pleasure, but the profound transformation that can take place in the long term. What's more, they know and feel that they deserve it and that their life deserves it: their body and their relationship to life.
Commitment is a great act of self-love and love of life, and one of the best ways to express dedication to one's wellbeing.
Now, regularity doesn't mean that you never have a day when you don't show up. In fact, it's not a punishment, but a sincere intention, a love for life and what it has to offer.
How this can make a difference
As a Yoga guide (or teacher, as it's more popularly known), the difference is enormous.
I have less drive to teach for classes that follow a commercial scheme where there are a majority of new students each week and a few regular. Why ? Because the quality of what I am sharing is so important to me. When teaching to always new students each week it feels like fast food to me. A fast food teacher. Which can be what some teacher can enjoy !
Now, when students come regularly it offers a continuity within the practice. It allows to integrate the subleties and techniques of asanas (meditative poses), and the layers and paradoxes of existential perspective. Like a fruit you want it to let it takes its time to grow and nourish itself from life so that it naturally is ready at its own time and spontaneously. Yoga shares are so powerful that it takes time to integrate them within your body and within yourself.
To allow to be guided by a vision/clairvoyance/intuition and safe space to unfold is so precious. This way the teacher can adapt the session to the class and propose an evolution within the teaching, the teacher can less focus on the superficiality and dive more and more deeply when the students have already integrated that aspect.
Marie Mazeau, Lifexploratrice, certified full-time Yoga teacher in Paris, specialising in gentle, joyful, educational and meditative sessions online, one-to-one, in associations, companies and studios.