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I’d always wanted to go on a meditation retreat, but the notion of spending all that time with just my thoughts terrified me. My previous efforts at maintaining a regular meditation practice had resulted in utter frustration. For a Type-A personality like me, meditation became just another thing to get “good” at. And when that approach failed, which it inevitably does (what does it even mean to succeed at meditation anyway?) I pushed harder, and then, of course, berated myself for my contemplative ineptitude. Needless to say, this approach was not working for me. Who knows? Maybe a few days immersed in mindfulness would give me a taste of the stillness I’ve been seeking with such ardor.

Fast forward several weeks and I’ve arrived in Vermont at the most breathtaking location. Skymeadow Retreat Center, perched atop a hill amidst bountiful forest trees, is surrounded by rows and rows of gardens, around which you can find a hive of honeybees, as well as sheep, chickens, swimming ponds, cabins, and even a few llamas. I knew I was in for a remarkable weekend.

It was remarkable, all right. The next three days produced a roller coaster of emotions. During some meditation sits I squirmed on my cushion, cursing my inability to find stillness while everyone around me had clearly settled into an almost trance-like silence. Perhaps I was just not cut out for mindfulness.

But then moments of complete acceptance and total surrender arose within me, and I experienced the most exquisite sense of inner peace. These flashes of stillness may have been few and far between, but they gave me a glimpse of what meditation felt like, leaving me wanting more. After the weekend was over and the dust settled, a few realizations—or rediscoveries—emerged.

1. Awareness is something like a muscle we’ve forgotten how to use. I learned that I couldn’t simply scurry through my entire life in a mindless daze and then sit down and instantly find stillness. That’s like being a couch potato all your life and suddenly deciding to lift heavy weights at the gym. It’s both painful and frustrating. Instead, I needed to build my “awareness muscle” gradually. I learned that I needed to start small, paying attention to the breath or to the physical sensations in my body. No need to force anything. Just like any other muscle in the body, the more we use the awareness muscle the stronger it’ll be, until one day we find that we’re able to return to our calm center even during a very challenging time. Eventually it becomes a tool not only to regulate the breath, but also to create space around our habit energies, our emotional triggers, and our unconscious and reactionary behavior in everyday life.

2. I also learned more about how the mind works when we demand it to be still. In the beginning, it’s normal for the mind to try to devise inceasingly clever or willful ways to resist thinking. When this happens, we must remember not to fight it or condemn it. Just recognize that this voice is your mind. Bringing awareness to the mind’s habits by observing what’s going on is all you need to separate your self from your thoughts. Seeing the mind for what it is without fighting it is the essence of Vipassana, or insight, meditation.

3. Finally, I learned to hold my thoughts loosely, to allow them in. Instead of being swayed by these fluctuations, we observe them neutrally, maintaining a distance between the thoughts and ourselves. Instead of resisting, we embrace and allow. The only way to release thinking is to surrender to it, to soften and yield completely.

In retrospect, as “unsuccessful” as many of my meditation sits were during those three days, each helped to burn away my mental karma, lightening my load of unconsciousness baggage. My first retreat was an unforgettable experience, a way of giving myself the gift of deep peace and rejuvenation. It was a courageous shortcut to unveiling a great deal about myself, paving the way for deeper stillness.

Have you ever tried to change one of your habits? Maybe you’re determined to go gluten-free, wake up earlier, eat healthier, or just cut ties with your coffee addiction. It seems so simple. But, as yoga practitioners know, it takes dedication and determination—or what we call tapas—to really pull it off.

I certainly discovered that last month when I embarked on a personal challenge to stop eating dairy and sugar. Cue a sudden proliferation of free chai offers, food covered in cheese, and desserts wherever I turned.

Against those odds, however, I survived—and in the process, learned how making small commitments to a new habit boosted not only my health, but my confidence and sense of empowerment.

According to Zen Habits founder Leo Babatua, one of the best ways to fail at new habits is to give yourself too many things to do at once. Or surround yourself with what you’re trying to avoid. So what does work?

Sometimes you just gotta start simple. Take 10-15 seconds before every meal to relax and re-focus. Try a 12-hour fast. Or choose one time of the day to practice an unfamiliar form of relaxation: diaphragmatic breathing with a sandbag; yoga nidra; even just 3 rounds of nadi shodhanam.

If none of these works for you, challenge yourself to do one thing every day for a set period of time, something you know will provide immediate health benefits.

That’s what I did when I chose to avoid dairy and sugar—just for a month. I already knew that I didn’t tolerate dairy well, but permanently quitting seemed impossible. So I promised myself I’d eliminate it for only a month. It worked.

Strangely enough, now that I’ve discovered how healthy I feel without dairy, I’m not tempted to eat it again. A no-strings-attached, one-month challenge gave me the confidence I needed to keep going. And that will happen if you create a micro-challenge to regularly run, practice yoga, or even just keeping a journal of your practice.

Our little experiments each day build tapas, giving us with the determination to do anything. It wasn’t always easy. I’ll admit that. But it was definitely worth it.

What’s your challenge? What habits do you want to change? Let us know—we might even blog about with you.

Photo by Hannah Sue Gray

We’d love to get your feedback on what cover we should use for the fall issue of Yoga International. You can help us out by taking a brief survey—we promise it’ll only take a minute!

Access the survey by clicking HERE.

—Yours truly, the Editors

How many yoga tattoos do you spy at your local yoga studio? Obviously there’s the obligatory om symbol. The lotus flower. And a host of other possibilities, some highlighted in a New York Times photo essay, which noted, “for some yoga practitioners, the body presents a blank movable canvas for images that inspire and inform their practice.”

I wholeheartedly agree. I have three of them, all black—like little symbolic sketches intended to encourage me to keep going. One hitch, however, is that one of these looks like a coffee stain. How does that inform my yoga practice?

At the deepest level, it is a simple reminder for me to embrace imperfection. When I got the tattoo I was 18 years old and attending art school in Chicago. I really wanted to be bold and confident. But I was just awkward and anxious. To the max. The coffee stain didn’t change that, but Buddhism, in a roundabout way, did. It didn’t alter how I felt, but it showed me how to accept it.

My coffee stain came about when I began to explore Buddhist art; I became enamored with the horticultural art of both bonsai and ikebana. I realized that in spite of any asymmetry or obvious imperfection I noticed, I still experienced the inherent beauty.

I wanted to remember that feeling every day. So I picked up a painting of an irregular, misshapen enso, or circle, and had it tattooed on my forearm. Is it a coffee stain? Is it a Zen tattoo? I don’t care. It’s beautiful to me either way.

Of course, I don’t always apply this “embracing imperfection” to my asana practice. Instead, I’ve repeatedly pushed myself beyond my own limits and gotten injured instead of inspired. But what would happen if I focused more on accepting who I am? “That’s key,” says Kat Heagberg, co-founder of the Anahata Co-Op, in Portland, Oregon. “We don’t all look a certain way. Why do we expect our practice to always look or feel a certain way?”

According to Sharon Gannon, co-founder of Jivamukti Yoga in New York, changing these habits and attitudes can begin before we even step onto the mat. “What you think about when you practice yoga will determine the result of your practice,” she says.

Want additional wisdom for your practice on the mat? Try these other tips on for size:

Recognize What Makes You Unique
Because not everyone can or should have an identical asana practice. Sometimes, it’s merely because of differences in anatomy. “If I’m sitting in dandasana, there’s no way I’m gonna get my hands flat to the floor,” says Heagberg with a laugh, “Because my arms just aren’t that long.”

And adding a bind to a pose is “nearly impossible,” she says. On those rare occasions when she can bind safely, “It does not look very pretty. But that’s ok. My body doesn’t have to look pretty.”

Use Your Breath to Experiment
You’ve probably heard a yoga teacher tell you to breathe into a pose. How does this help you know your limits? “If you’re in a pose, and you literally can’t breathe or you’re holding it involuntarily,” says Heagberg, “then that’s probably a good sign that you’ve gone too far in one direction and you just need to soften.”

Practicing compassion towards yourself has some unexpected benefits: according to a recent study, simple acts of self-kindness promote better mental health, and can help us more quickly reach our goals.

So repeat after me. Imperfection is beautiful, and so are you.

Photo (cc) by Flickr user Grufnik

On the fourth of July I used to dress up in a bespoke, multi-layered dress that really belonged on an immigrant from early 1800s-era America. I’d then jump in a car and head down to Historic Fort Snelling, in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where my parents were historical re-enactors—and so was I.

Now that I’ve left the home front, I don’t quite know how to relate to the 4th. There aren’t exactly a whole lot of obvious tie-ins when you write for a yoga magazine. And at the Himalayan Institute, where I live, I can definitely say that there are no patriotic speeches, no two-day pig roasts, and no third-rate farces. No re-enactor will shout at me about Great Britain while pork fat drips down his face and small pieces of meat fly to the ground as he jabs at the air with a pig’s head on a sword.

Amateur history lessons aside, however, yoga does have a lot more in common with why America celebrates the 4th than I realized.

Pandit Rajmani Tigunait illustrated some of the similarities a couple weeks ago. The founding fathers, he noted with a laugh, probably never read the Vedas. They didn’t practice yoga or host study groups to understand the wisdom of the Yoga Sutra. But they still wrote “the finest piece of Vedanta and yoga,” he said, in the form of the American Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence: two documents, at heart, about the pursuit of happiness and “liberty and justice for all.”

Isn’t that what yoga is all about? The idea that anyone can experience bhoga (freedom) and apavarga (happiness) in his or her own lifetime? More to the point, Panditji noted, none of this depends on our religious or cultural beliefs, and the Founding Fathers (for their part), understood that. Because it’s a path inherently accessible to everyone: yoga practitioners, spiritual seekers, and global wanderers alike.

That’s inspiring.

Whether or not you celebrate the 4th of July, if you practice yoga or study yoga philosophy, this is one idea worth contemplating. The signing of the Declaration of Independence is just one example among many, of universal wisdom manifesting itself everywhere in the world—even in politics.

For my part, I will be celebrating. Probably not in costume. But definitely with my whole heart.

Yoga Philosophy In-Depth

When Panditji speaks of bhoga and apavarga, he’s referring to concepts from yoga philosophy noted in Yoga Sutra verse 2.18:

“The objective world is made of elements and senses. Illumination, action and stability are its inherent qualities. The objective world furnishes conscious with the means of achieving fulfillment and freedom.”

For an expanded commentary on the meaning and purpose of the sutra, check out Panditji’s full commentary online here. Or take a look at our discussion with Four Desires author and Yogarupa Rod Stryker on (pursuing) happiness.

Bonus: Interested in studying the Yoga Sutra further? Our complete yoga sutra study guide is free and accessible online, where you can access Pandit Rajmani Tigunait’s commentaries on each verse, read translations of the devanagari and original transliterations of each verse, and listen for comprehension to DC Rao’s audio recitations.