“Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present.”
― Alan W. Watts

With the semester of grad school in the rearview mirror, I’m finally doing some much-needed self-care and I joined a local yoga studio. I’ve been inconsistent in my practice with everything going on in the world and the added time strain of grad school on top of working full-time. But since I am doing a lot, it makes it all the more essential that I find time for self-care, too.

While my yoga practice was a lot less frequent in the past few months, with me just dropping into outdoor classes once a week, I did work toward cultivating something else. I started taking mindfulness and meditation a lot more seriously in the last year. I’ve done everything from quiet time on my own to a Calm trial to meditation sessions on Clubhouse. It felt like an uphill climb at first, but now that I am making stronger routines around meditation, I’m finding it tremendously easier to be mentally present when pull my mat out of the closet to practice yoga.

Mindful presence is the most underestimated component of yoga for some practitioners. Even if you’re on the mat and going through the motions, your mind could be elsewhere, racing at a thousand miles an hour. The more stress and responsibility you have in life, the harder it is to unplug from all of that and just be you and be mentally present in a moment.

Moving with your breath is just as essential in yoga as learning the postures.

I always underestimated the importance of breathwork in the earlier years of my practice. I would try to both keep up and control my breathing, but when you’re new to the practice, it’s tricky to do everything at once. Though I was very serious about learning good alignment and working on smooth transitions between poses, I neglected to master the breath.

Looking back now, I really see the flaw in my old approach there. The breath truly, truly is a huge part of yoga. It’s hard to breathe mindfully when you’re trying to become stronger and more flexible, but truly moving with the breath like teachers always encourage forces you to be more present. It’s engrossing and immersive. It takes a lot of focus to synchronize your movements with your breath.

Even if it seems really hard to you like it was to me at first, keep working at it. As the poses become more familiar and a little bit easier, breathing through them comes a little more naturally. The act of synchronizing movement and breath makes every pose almost feel like an event. You’re preparing for each moment when you inhale and exhale. It makes the sensation and the stretch of every pose a little more powerful. When you’re taken by those feelings and sensations, it becomes much easier to be mindfully present in your class.

In stillness, counting breaths is incredibly grounding.

“Be in your own skin, as an act of self-loving.”
― H. Raven Rose

It’s such a simple thing to do — count how many seconds pass during your inhale and exhale. It’s a common tip when entering a meditation practice since it lets you do something with your mind that is related to the action you’re taking. So often, when you’re preoccupied with your thoughts, the things going through your head have little to no relation to what you’re physically doing. For example, when you’re driving, you typically aren’t thinking about the act of driving every second you’re behind the wheel.

If you have a hard time quieting your thoughts, using your mind to count each breath is an excellent grounding technique. I used to not be able to stop my mind from thinking at all. That simple, automatic act of counting numbers made it dramatically easier to work my way to true meditation.

Additionally, if you are in the wind-down phases of a yoga class, it can be helpful to purposefully lengthen your exhalations. This is a technique that has been proven to slow down your heart rate. If you’d like a little science talk, that simple act of making your exhalations longer than your inhales serves as a stimulus to the parasympathetic nerve, which helps you relax. If you’re calming down and working toward shavasana, it’s a great way to slow down.

Visualization techniques can help quiet chaotic thoughts.

If your mind doesn’t want to stop, try to do something more soothing with it. Trying to visualize things and see them with your mind’s eye takes a lot of mental power to keep doing.

I started experimenting with visualization during shavasana when I practiced at a studio that always played music. I would have such a tough time just to stop thinking, so I would try and keep my mind quiet, and just visualize things that went along with the music. Sometimes, I’d imagine myself floating if the music sounded a little nautical. Other times, I’d just visualize colors moving around in abstract ways.

Visualization is incredibly personal and up in the air. If it’s helpful, you could try visualizing yourself doing the most perfectly aligned version of a pose. You could visualize yourself standing on the beach or at the peak of a mountain as you do the pose you’re in. You can visualize anything at all that calms you and keeps you grounded in the moment.

Take note of when your mind wanders and bring your thoughts back gently.

“Feelings come and go like clouds in a windy sky. Conscious breathing is my anchor.”
― Thich Nhat Hang

This is another technique that comes up a lot in meditation, but it applies to yoga classes beautifully as well. We can all benefit from treating ourselves a little more gently. When you do feel your mind start to wander, gently nudge it back, and don’t beat yourself up for getting distracted.

Practicing mindfulness and presence is a surprisingly personal process. You read dozens of tips like these, but sometimes, it helps most just to try everything and see what works best for you. We’re all incredibly unique individuals inside of our minds. Since are all so different from each other on the inside, it can help to experiment with different techniques.

Do specific things distract you? If so, ask yourself why.

Do you find yourself becoming distracted by the same things time after time? At my old yoga studio, it was right next to a residential house. Sometimes, the residents of that home would come out their back door to take their trash or recycling out. It was in plain sight of the large side windows in the studio. I would always get hopelessly distracted by this. The first few times it happened, I remember thinking it was slightly annoying.

But then, after a while, I realized that wasn’t the most productive way of thinking and reacting. The better question was asking myself why I was feeling that way. What was actually so engrossing about someone taking out their garbage? Why was it so distracting? I don’t have one singular answer, but I think part of it was that I was taking interruptions personally for no logical reason whatsoever.

If you find yourself distracted by the same things again and again, take note of what those things are. Ask yourself if there’s a deeper reason for why they seem to distract you but perhaps not distract those around you. If you can, when it happens again, try to let it go, just like disruptive thoughts when you’re trying to meditate. Let it run off like water off of a duck’s back. Let it go and return to yourself and focus on the present moment.

“Looking at beauty in the world, is the first step of purifying the mind.”
― Amit Ray

Wherever you are in your journey with yoga and mindfulness, give mindfulness some serious thought. It can be a really wonderful way to make your practice into something that truly becomes a mind and body experience. If you’re taking the type to do yoga for the physical benefits it promises your body, it doesn’t hurt to use that time and try to encompass the mindful aspects as well.