New Year’s Eve is probably my favourite holiday, second only to Halloween. You might think it’s because I like to get all dolled up in fancy clothes and costumes, but you would be wrong: I’m usually in yoga pants for both holidays.

That being said, I also really enjoy yoga. You might think that’s why I wear yoga pants all the time, but you would be wrong again: I can’t justify the time and money involved with attending classes at a studio, though I will say that I have always really enjoyed any classes I have attended as well the general ambience of most studios. I just find that the whole experience requires more time, effort and money than I would like to spend. This is also why I prefer to buy my yoga pants at Joe Fresh – you can’t go wrong spending $25 on a pair of classic black pants that are still in great condition now two years later.

Given my general frugality, online yoga classes seem like the perfect solution. Late last year, I decided to ease myself into a routine by searching for very short morning and evening practices. From my travels into the online yoga community, I came across Yoga with Adriene. Adriene offers an excellent 5 minute morning practice and a relaxing 7 minute evening practice. All in, I was able to spend a total of 12 minutes and $0 per day on my new at-home yoga practice.

Shortly before NYE, Adriene starting talking about Home: A 30 Day Yoga Journey. Perusing her YouTube channel, this seems to be her regular January programming, as she has posted a themed 30 day program every January for several years now. I was enjoying the short morning and evening practices, so I decided to commit to the “journey” and signed myself up. Initially, there were three very obvious benefits to doing so:

1) I get to do more yoga. 

As I mentioned, it’s a pain to do yoga at a studio because of the time commitment. For example, I find that a one hour class is actually more of a two hour affair, door to door. Don’t get me wrong, the studio experience is wonderful – the calm environment, the soothing scents, the experienced instructors, the dedicated time and space for practice. However, with a bit of effort and commitment, it is possible to save money and time by recreating this experience to a certain extent in your own home, which I did. 

I’ll admit, it’s not easy. In terms of space, mine is small so I have to reposition my mat depending on the practice in order to avoid kicking furniture and walls. To create a sense of ritual, I’ve got a little beeswax candle that I will light which doubles as a source of warm light and scent. To enhance the scent factor, I clean my mat with a homemade blend of essential oils. I might also add that the bonus of at-home yoga is that you can do it in your pjs if you want, which I did often want, because why not?

2) I get to build confidence.

I reasoned that if I could stick with a regular practice for 30 days, I would be able to figure out how to incorporate more yoga in my weeks and months moving forward. In turn, being able to accomplish this relatively small task would help build my confidence for other goals that I would like to pursue, such as writing more (tah dah!).

Sure, I was worried about fitting in 20-30 minutes of yoga on busy weekdays between commuting and cooking and cleaning and spending some quality time with Kyle. However, I also saw this an opportunity to really sharpen up our planning skills – we already do some meal planning for the week, we just needed to be a bit more on top of it so that we weren’t scrambling for figure out dinner (and by extension lunch) and so that I wasn’t sticking Kyle with all the work. 

3) I get to build strength. 

Adriene’s program is great because it gives you a little bit of everything – some sessions are more intense than others, some sessions are slower. There is enough variety in the yoga itself as well as the guiding principles for each of the sessions that you really get to try a bit of everything, all the while building strength. With my other fitness goals for the year in mind, which include participating in my first ragnar, this was a great way to start building some core and overall strength as well as the mental stamina to keep pushing through to the end. 

So here’s how it worked:

Every day, Adriene released a new video on her channel and I tried to fit it into my evenings during the week and my mornings on the weekend, before we got distracted by going out and doing something fun and not supportive of my practice, like drinking beer. I did paint myself into the proverbial corner one Sunday night and had to do the day’s video around 10pm after coming home from such an evening. It was definitely not ideal, but it was a lesson in planning ahead which I will try to keep in mind for the rest of the year. Planning is key to the success of any practice or project. 

One aspect I really appreciated of the program was how thoughtfully Adriene crafted the schedule of themed practices. I really began to notice this on Day 5, the theme for which was “Soften”. Here, early on, Adriene encourages you to examine what you’re doing in order to essentially work smarter, not harder. 

As an instructor, Adriene is very thoughtful, carefully building on her themes within the greater context of life in general – yoga for Adriene seems to be neither a means to an end nor an end in itself, but rather a practice that can be supportive of many aspects of life, most obviously physical and mental health. Even though she is not there in front of you at the head of a class, Adriene still manages to successfully create a warm, welcoming and patient atmosphere free from any sense of pressure. She is funny, well-spoken and encouraging – she is there as a guide, not as the rule, and encourages her students to develop their “vocabulary” in order to develop their own style, based on their own comfort level and individual preferences. 

I won’t lie to you: in the beginning, I ached like hell for at least a week. Downward Dog hurt my wrists and haunted my shoulders for days. I dreaded Chaturanga. Far from lowering myself with control, I often felt like I was straight up belly flopping onto my mat. When transitioning into low lunges from Downward Dog, I’m fairly certain passersby could hear me flinging a foot forward onto my mat – it was not graceful, I assure you. But you know what? On Day 15, I realized that Downward Dog had started to feel kind of good. On Day 20, I realized that I could do Chaturanga with more control. By Day 29, I was thinking less of what I was doing and more about how I was doing it. 

As I followed along, I began to notice some other interesting developments. In general, I felt a heightened sense of gratitude and self-awareness. For example, I felt grateful to have a space in which to practice, as tiny as it is. I felt grateful for Kyle’s support of my goal – from cleaning up the breakfast dishes to cleaning out the cat litter to allow me the time to practice. On the more difficult days, I just tried to focus on leaning into the practice, into really engaging with every movement in order to remind myself to appreciate this experience. 

I knew this 30 day journey was going to be ambitious, but it really helped me to realize – in the truest sense of the word – that if I just shifted the order of events from stepping in the door to stepping into bed, I could fit this in to my daily schedule. The flip side of this is also true, which is that if there is something that I really want to do, I now know that I am able to restructure my time to make space for it, and my space to make time for it. 

My key takeaway from these 30 days with Adriene is something she pointed out during one of the practices: Where attention goes, energy flows. A simple concept, but one worth remembering throughout the day, the week, the month, the year. As Annie Dillard said, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives”. 

– Yvette