New Year's Resolution

Every January we see old friends returning to the yoga center to reinvigorate their practice, and bright beginners hugging new yoga mats as they embark on their first class. The most popular time of the year to start or re-start a yoga practice is right after the New Year.

Yet many times New Year’s resolutions, including starting a regular yoga practice, do not work. How many people do you know, for example, that resolve to lose weight ever year and never succeed?

Here is the way to make this New Year’s Yoga resolution the last one you will ever have to make!

Making a New Year’s Resolution is about embracing change. Change is powerful, exciting and fulfilling, but ultimately difficult.  If change were easy, we would all have changed into our perfect, healthy selves years ago.

Yoga is the ultimate agent for change.  I often joke with new students, “If you don’t want to change, please don’t do yoga."

Unlike changing your diet, your job, or even your relationships, yoga changes you on a more fundamental level.  Yoga creates a permanent change from which all your other changes can occur.

Yoga was developed over thousands of years with one purpose in mind: To change the practitioner into a fully realized human being.

The only problem is that yoga must be done again and again.  With yoga, the change is permanent as long as your practice endures.

If you do commit to practice yoga regularly for the rest of your life, you will never need to make another resolution!