What Makes A Sustainable Ashtanga Practice?

What you do on your yoga mat each day changes. Even if you did the exact same postures in the same order every day, your practice would be different every day. This is because you are different every day. Shaping the specifics of what we do on the mat each day to fit who we are, our age, our fitness level, our goals, our injuries, and the reasons we do yoga is what we mean when we talk about making our Ashtanga practice sustainable. If we are different every day, shouldn’t our practice be a little different each day?

The reality is that long-term practitioners have already done what they need to do to make their Ashtanga practice sustainable. If they hadn’t, they wouldn’t still be doing Ashtanga. So what are long-term practitioners doing to make their practice something they still want to show up for year after year? And why don’t we talk about it? In this article, I’ll explore those questions and more.

Why does our Ashtanga practice need to be sustainable?

We won’t experience the benefits of a yoga practice if we quit. But we don’t all have time and energy in every stage of our life for a dynamic two-hour practice six days per week while working full-time, having a family, seeing friends, etc. When people quit Ashtanga or when they tell you that Ashtanga is broken, what they’re actually saying is, “I’m in a different place than when I started. I don’t know how to practice with who I am now, and nobody taught me how to shape my own practice to fit the changes in day-to-day circumstances.” What we think Ashtanga is, matters to how we can make it sustainable. I haven’t considered quitting Ashtanga. But, like all long-term practitioners, how I understand Ashtanga has grown and evolved. Sustainability is fundamentally about relating differently to practice.

Elements of a sustainable Ashtanga practice

A sustainable Ashtanga practice has several elements. Practitioners who maintain their practice over time have learned to use the benefits of repetition and structure without falling into dogma and rigidity. They have identified and cultivated an interest in the subtle elements of breath control, concentration, and awareness within the practice as much as individual postures or sequences. They have developed agency to shape their own practice, comfort with the ambiguity of not knowing if something is exactly right, and the skills to individualize their practice. More than likely, those long-term practitioners who have sustained their practice had a good teacher who modeled those skills and supported them with a healthy dose of positive reinforcement.

Let’s explore all of these elements in more detail.

Benefits of repetition

Ashtanga sometimes gets maligned, especially by non-practitioners, for its repetition. Is Ashtanga yoga the sequences? No, but Ashtanga yoga does have a structure. Variability in exercise does have positive impacts. But, so does repeating the same things consistently in order to develop a skill. Repetition carves a groove in the nervous system that creates a habit. Having a habit makes it easier to sustain things. Repetition also supports awareness at a greater level of detail and nuance because you’re looking at the same thing day in and day out. Less novelty means you have the potential to notice in greater depth. The structure gives you something to work within, and that makes it more likely that you’ll practice consistently rather than get distracted. The structure provides us with a starting point and a direction to go. Something that reinforces consistency also reinforces sustainability over time.

Structure can support agency

The greater depth of awareness, as well as the long timeline of observing your own body in specific ways, creates the experience you can draw from as you adapt your practice to changing circumstances in your life. Having a container to work within, like the structure of the Ashtanga practice, can enable greater agency. This is because, once you have a basic facility with the practice, you don’t need a class nearby. You don’t have to try to create a yoga practice from scratch. You now own your practice and can just begin.

Structure can ease discomfort with ambiguity

There’s a certain amount of ambiguity that you meet when exploring the practice. Especially in the last 10 years, people have gotten very nervous about yoga in general, Ashtanga in particular, and whether or not they’re doing it right. They seem to imagine that if they don’t do it right, something bad is going to happen. The alternative is just hanging out there, not knowing. But that is part of the yoga aspect of the practice, just showing up in the structure without knowing exactly how it’s going to go.

Having a structure to work within can also help create sufficient comfort with the inevitable ambiguity that arises in our yoga practice. We never know what the next day will bring or necessarily what our next best step is in our Ashtanga practice. Working within a general structure assures that it’s not a free-for-all. If you start practice by using the Ashtanga structure, do the breathing and pay attention, the inevitable unknown of how practice will unfold becomes more tolerable.

Structure as a container for breath, concentration, and awareness

The structure of Ashtanga yoga has many benefits, but ultimately it exists as a container for the particular ways we explore breath, concentration, and their larger effects. These elements are subtle, easy to overlook, and often under-taught—yet they’re what keep practice interesting and dynamic over time AND what makes practice resilient. These deeper elements of practice endure even when our physical capacity changes. I learned the practice with a focus on breath, attention, and sensation. If I do all of that, it feels like I’ve done a practice. It’s then much easier to let go of how many asanas I did. If, as Ashtanga teachers, we emphasized breath regulation, attention as our primary effort, and sensation as moment-to-moment feedback, would students find their practice more sustainable? I think so. Those parts of the practice are what keep it interesting for us.

Make peace with plateaus and interruptions

Plateaus, illness, stress, and injuries are not bumps or interruptions. They are a normal part of the ebb and flow of practice. Strength, mobility, recovery, and resilience fluctuate over time. We often accept this more easily in other arenas of skill-building, playing an instrument, for example, or learning a sport. You can’t play 100% every day. Some days you play scales or practice techniques. Some days feel hard, frustrating, or boring. Ashtanga yoga practice is similar in that it requires learning new skills and practicing them over time. In order to sustain it, you need to choose discipline, but not in a way that you’re harsh or rigid with yourself. It just means showing up on your mat consistently with an open mind and working with what is there each day.

The reality is that long-term practitioners see their bodies change from day to day and year to year. They modify postures, make intentional changes to the sequences, drop postures entirely that no longer work for their body, and do abbreviated practices some days. I would venture to say that they all still consider what they’re practicing to be Ashtanga yoga because some aspects of the structure remain, no matter how lightly they’re holding it.

Teaching agency and self-inquiry

As I’ve already alluded to, our teachers contribute to how we understand the Ashtanga practice. Good teachers teach students how to feel confident using agency in their own practice. When teaching, I often ask students questions that lead to more questions with no single answer. My intention is to help students develop skills of self-inquiry. This gives students confidence that they can often answer their own questions, especially as they gain more years of experience in their practice.

My Western teacher, John Scott, modeled that practice of self-inquiry. John was willing to come at things from different directions and explore a little bit. I’ve tried to teach from that perspective as well. As teachers, we have to teach students how to discern what they are trying to achieve in their practice and to give themselves credit for being an intelligent human being who can ultimately learn what postures can or can’t achieve, and how to change them for different goals.

Keep the structure, but hold it lightly

Practices that begin as supportive structures can slowly harden into rules that limit growth if, as teachers and as a community of long-term practitioners, we don’t model what it looks like to mature in our practice. Dogma often doesn’t start as dogma. More likely, it starts as helpful guidance and a supportive structure. When we, as teachers, don’t help students understand how to replace rules with self-inquiry as they gain experience in their practice, we don’t do our job to help practitioners cultivate agency. Unexamined rules will eventually outlive their usefulness. Burnout, chronic pain, loss of motivation, or quiet disengagement are common outcomes of long-term rigidity.

As teachers, we need to teach students to move from external authority to informed self-regulation without guilt, fear, or the need for permission. That means teaching students how to explore postures and look to see if there is a way that works better for them. It also means that we need to set an example that that kind of exploration is normal, and part of the process. It’s how individuals’ practices evolve. It’s also how the larger Ashtanga practice as a whole evolves, if we are willing to let it. Agency, however, doesn’t mean doing whatever you want. It means understanding why you do what you do. It’s our job as teachers to give our students the skills to make informed decisions in their practice and the confidence to stay with the ambiguity of not knowing if it’s exactly “right.”

Practice positive reinforcement

Positive reinforcement from a teacher also creates a more sustainable feedback loop with practice. In its best form, the teacher says, I’m going to support you. I’m going to recognize your effort and support the belief that you are already fine. When I travel to teach, I say at the beginning of day one, just do your normal practice. Just be yourself. Whatever your practice is, it’s great, and we’re still going to give it some direction and shape because you’re here to learn things. However, you don’t actually need me in order to practice.