The commitment to daily practice represents your promise to create healthy habits as you get stronger in mind, body, and spirit.
If you’re not entirely convinced as to why a virtual yoga challenge is for you, here are 30 life-enriching reasons to dedicate yourself to a month of practice.
A ritual brings your awareness to the present moment; it’s a way to transform the mundane into something sacred. Rituals don’t have to be fancy. It could be as simple as taking five deep breaths, lighting some incense or a candle, or pausing between each bite of food. The power of ritual is in the presence you bring to the moment—no matter how great or small the action.
Setting aside a few minutes for conscious breathing has the power to shift our overall mental, physical, and emotional health. By committing to 30-days of practice, be it meditation or a movement, can transform and enrich your lifestyle by elevating your awareness of your body and mind.
A month of yoga asana builds strength and enhances flexibility through postures. Each vinyasa class offers plenty of modifications for participants to add intensity to create more heat. The offering is to observe how you feel and how your body responds to the poses.
Discipline means you can commit to something and follow it through, which is essential in setting goals. When we commit to our goals and follow through with our intentions, this builds positive self-esteem and inner strength. A strong sense of discipline will help you persevere through challenges.
Emotions live in the body. We revitalize the parts of the body that hold stored emotions through movement. The release of tissues, muscles, and organs may surface emotions such as sadness and fear. Yoga may offer a moment of freedom to clear stuck energy and emotions.
The calendar and journaling prompts are resources provided in the challenge for you to track your results, specifically how you feel and perceive your practice as we move through the month.
A skill is a practice that’s been refined over time. This challenge focuses on one thing; making it to your mat. The goal is to do the daily class or take 5-minutes to be conscious of your breath.
Dance in your body. Breathe deep. Take in the elements around you. Revel in the sight, sound, taste, and smell of your environment.
Vinyasa classes that build to a peak pose mean you’ll get to test your tapas with crow pose, handstand, wheel pose, and other yoga postures to learn about the body and the demands of each pose.
Share how you feel and what practices you prefer with a community of yogis worldwide. The challenge supports conversation in the app in the comments and in our private community Facebook Group where practitioners can share feedback, photos, and emoji’s on each day of the challenge.
A big part of the challenge is the community support in holding each other accountable as we commit to 30-days of yoga. Posting in the community Facebook Group or sharing your comments in the app holds you accountable to your shared goal.
Through yoga classes that weave in the yoga sutras’ wisdom embody the philosophy that formed the Asana’s primary practice.
Sometimes clearing lethargy and anxiety needs to be expressed through the body; flow through classes to burn off excess energy, and take restorative yin classes to ground and connect to inner calm. The challenge provides the space to honour how you feel and hit reset on whatever you’re feeling that day.
Especially if you’re new to yoga, a 30-day yoga challenge is a perfect opportunity to push yourself out of your comfort zone in the comfort of your home. Embracing a new pose or style of breathing may show you how capable you are in developing strength and perseverance.
It takes courage to try something new. When you accept the challenge and commit to the 30-days, you may feel how your mind and body adapt and receive physical and mental demands. Practitioners of past challenges have said that witnessing their practice’s evolution helped them develop faith in their capabilities.
No two people enter and exit a pose the same way. This act is no different from how we live our day-to-day lives. Hopefully, as you move through the 30-days, you begin to trust in your process and celebrate how unique your practice looks and feels each day.
Idle time is significant to make space for play and daydream. Let yoga become your playground.
There will be a day (or more) during the challenge you don’t want to practice. Showing up for the community may encourage you to push through mental and physical roadblocks.
When we devote ourselves to someone or something that is not us, it sparks a sense of compassion and curiosity we may lack when considering ourselves. Devote yourself entirely to your commitment to show up, be present, and contribute to the collective to develop Bhakti, the practice of devotion.
As you develop your practice on the mat, you’ll start to see how yoga benefits your lifestyle off the mat. When we take care of ourselves, we’re better able to tend to others. If you come with us for the challenge, write down how your overall mood and reception of those around you shift throughout the month.
We tend to live in the busyness of the mind, the constant chatter, and ongoing thoughts. The practice is one place you might release your mind, put it all down, and surrender completely to the body and the ride of the subconscious.
The challenge is designed to stress specific muscles on set days so your body has time to restore and release. Each day offers a different class style, such as vinyasa, restorative, Hatha, mantra, and meditation. Varied and creative sequencing means you’ll never be bored or want to check out.
The repetition of yoga poses throughout the challenge is ideal for beginners. Attending to a new skill every day will accelerate your learning and understanding of each pose physically and mentally.
To enhance your learning development, practitioners of the challenge have the option to engage with fellow yogis in the challenge and with Clara in the community Facebook Group. Dissection of poses, questions and feedback are all welcome and encouraged.
Once you stick it out and commit to one thing entirely, it becomes easier to commit yourself fully to your next goal. Sustainability is a skill that you’ll develop during the 30-day challenge.
Surrendering to breath and body is a crucial ingredient in yoga, and it doesn’t always come easily. Letting go takes practice, but the more you can release what doesn’t serve on your yoga mat (for example, negativity or ideas that are not your own), the more you’ll be able to take this practice of surrender off your mat and into the world.
Talking about health with people who are conscious of feeding their bodies and minds nourishing things will encourage you to do the same.
As you feel the positive results of the practice in mind and body, spending time on destructive habits may be less enticing. Once you start the shift to a more positive and productive lifestyle, you’ll be able to see with more clarity all the ways certain habits may be holding you back.
Yoga reminds us that we are in constant flux. Nothing stays the same, and we receive the practice based on how we are doing on that particular day. Through yoga, we witness our potential for beauty and despair. Yoga teaches us that we can welcome all the aspects of ourselves, especially when we show up feeling anxious, angry, tired, fidgety, and dull.
Yoga reminds us of how to be with ourselves. Through movement, philosophy, and attunement to breath, the practice of yoga may teach us how to come back to our hearts and receive all the things that light us up! It’s a space we come back to and remember our inner quiet and how to attune to our body.
We’ve partnered with some amazing brands for each event who donate gifts to be raffled off at the end of the 30-day yoga challenge.
The idea for the challenge was to look at all the ways we interact with the world and within ourselves to see how we might engage with more compassion and loving-kindness.
Seva is performing selfless service for others and the environment without attachment to the outcome or personal profits or gains. The Bhagavad Gita, the much-loved mythical tale of Arjuna on the battlefield, shares the wisdom of performing actions for the sake of action and not the results.
Krishna says to Arjuna, “You have a right to your actions, but never to your actions’ fruits. Act for the action’s sake. And do not be attached to inaction.”
We asked our community to examine their relationship to selfless service and provided the community with 50 Acts of Seva to inspire a daily ritual.
Participants were treated to two LIVE yoga sessions each week!
The slower-paced classes varied each week to feature Slow Flow, Hatha, Yin, and Restorative styles.
Shadow School is your summons to acknowledge your wild side, surface intense emotions, and expunge the parts of yourself you no longer need. You are ready to face the core beliefs, motivations, desires, and aspirations that bring darkness and lightness into your life.
Shadow School Yoga Challenge asks that you be open to receiving all parts of yourself; the sticky, uncomfortable, and undesirable.
You will be supported by a community AND prompted to reflect with meditation, journaling questions, and classes themed on the emotions we’d rather ignore.
Shadow School takes this concept one step further to consider the unconscious aspects of the psyche, or as Carl Jung calls it, the Shadow.
Rob Brezsny writes: “Neuroscientists at Britain’s Bristol University have concluded that playing in the dirt can make you feel really good. That’s because most soil is crawling with species of bacteria that interact favourably with the human body, strengthening the immune system and stimulating the brain in the same way antidepressants do.
The goal for 30-Opportunities was to present a unique variety of classes to engage students in recommitting to yoga during the pandemic. I carefully constructed each day based on the muscles strengthened and stretched the day before to allow the body to rest and rejuvenate so students would not get burnt out.
The journaling questions are included with the class in the Apps. We also post them to the Community Facebook Group, where participants are welcome to share their answers with the community and express how they feel.
The questions received 50-60 responses per day in our first challenge, a fantastic feat to witness. We want the Facebook Group to feel like a yoga studio where practitioners can talk and hang out to share ideas and inspiration. The journaling questions were a way to get the conversation started and see how everyone was feeling and all that came up along the way, much as we would in a shared space at a yoga studio.
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