This is something we hear often from our audience or members of Soul Sanctuary. Sometimes a few weeks have passed, or sometimes it’s been much longer. We've had it all - work became super busy, a holiday shifted my usual rhythm, an injury changed what felt possible, I don't feel comfortable in my body anymore, pregnancy or motherhood brought an entirely new relationship with my body, grief left very little space for anything beyond moving through each day.
Often, life has simply become full and yoga has quietly slipped out of the rhythm of it. So, before we go any deeper, here are a few simple things that can make finding your way back to the mat feel a little easier.
EIGHT SIMPLE TIPS TO GET BACK ON YOUR MAT:
🔸 START SMALL: Ten or fifteen minutes is enough, you don’t need to wait until you have an hour free to practise.
🔸 MAKE IT EASY: Leave your mat somewhere you can see it and save a few classes you know you enjoy, so there’s less standing between you and pressing play.
🔸 PUT IT IN THE DIARY: It sounds simple, but if you’re waiting for a free moment to appear, yoga can easily keep getting pushed aside. Look at the week ahead and choose one or two realistic pockets of time for your practice. Treat them as you would any other plan you’ve made for yourself.
🔸 CREATE YOUR SPACE: You don’t need a beautiful home studio, but a few small things can change how it feels to arrive on your mat. Clear a little space, open a window, light a candle, put your phone away. Make those few minutes feel like time you genuinely want to step into.
🔸 FOLLOW WHAT FEELS GOOD: A favourite teacher, a familiar class, something slow, something strong. Follow what you feel drawn towards rather than what you think you should be practising.
🔸 EASE BACK IN: Your strength, flexibility and energy may have changed. Let yourself come back without comparing today’s practice to the one you had before.
🔸 REMEMBER THE BENEFITS: The quieter mind, softer shoulders, deeper sleep, or simply feeling a little more like yourself. Let that be part of what brings you back.
🔸 PRACTICE TOGETHER: Returning doesn’t always have to be something you do alone. A live class, a challenge, practising alongside a friend or simply being part of a community that’s moving with you can give you that little pull back towards your mat.
BEGINNING AGAIN
Somewhere along the way, you begin to miss it. Maybe you miss the beautiful feel of just moving your body, the embodied feeling you experience during your practice or the saturated feeling after practice, the quiet in the mind that comes from spending time with your breath, or simply having a small pocket of the day where you can come back into yourself and just be.
Returning to your practice after a time can feel strangely vulnerable though. The body might feel different, familiar postures may suddenly feel unfamiliar, and the practice you once loved might no longer be what you need. There can also be an expectation that returning means picking up exactly where we left off ....
But we don’t think it has to.
LET YOUR PRACTICE CHANGE WITH YOU
Your practice has seasons too, just like you. There may be times when you crave movement every morning and others when your mat stays rolled up for weeks. Pregnancy, injury, grief, burnout, holidays or simply the changing rhythms of life can all alter what we need from our practice, and stepping away doesn’t mean that everything you’ve built has disappeared. The awareness you’ve cultivated, the relationship you’ve built with your breath and everything you’ve learnt about your own body are still there when you return.
We can spend so much energy trying to get “back” to where we were that we miss the chance to discover what feels right now. Before automatically choosing the class you think you should be able to do, check in with yourself. Maybe you want to sweat and feel strong; maybe you need a slow stretch, some intuitive movement or ten minutes lying on the floor and breathing. A teacher can guide you towards a posture, but only you can feel what is happening inside your body, so allow yourself to respond to it. Stay somewhere longer, come out earlier, soften your knees, close your eyes or skip the vinyasa altogether. Let your practice be yours.
Coming back to the mat can also reveal a lot about the way we move through life. Do you push harder when something feels difficult? Become frustrated when your body can’t do what it once could? Struggle to take rest when it’s offered? Dr Joe Dispenza speaks about becoming conscious of familiar thoughts, feelings and behaviours, and there is something valuable in bringing that same curiosity into our practice. We can notice what comes up without rushing to change it, and begin to recognise where those same patterns might be appearing beyond the mat.
For us at Soul Sanctuary, this is where yoga becomes so much richer than the physical shapes. The body, breath and mind are constantly informing one another, giving us another way to understand ourselves through our own experience. This is the kind of body alchemy we’re endlessly curious about, and something our practice can continue to reveal as we move through the different seasons and experiences of our lives.
FINDING YOUR RHYTHM AGAIN
Often, the hardest part of returning isn’t the yoga itself, it’s stepping onto the mat. Without realising it, we can create quite a few conditions around what a practice needs to look like. We need an hour, a quiet house, enough energy, the right clothes and the motivation to begin. Most days won’t hand us all of those things at once, so make the doorway smaller.
Ten minutes can be enough to reconnect with your body. A few Sun Salutations before breakfast, some gentle movement at the end of the working day or five minutes with your breath before bed can begin to create that familiar rhythm again.
James Clear writes about habit stacking in his book Atomic Habits: placing a new habit alongside something that already happens naturally within your day. We love this idea for yoga because it can take away some of the pressure of trying to "find more time". Perhaps your morning coffee becomes the cue to roll out your mat. Maybe it’s after the school run, before opening your laptop, or when you finish work and want to shift out of the day. Look at the life you already have and see where your practice might comfortably belong within it. We’d much rather you create a relationship with yoga that you genuinely want to return to than turn it into another task you feel guilty about missing.
If you’d like a little structure while finding that rhythm again, our free COMMIT Challenge on YouTube (and the membership) is made up of 10–15 minute practices and is a lovely place to start.
Plus our Beginners Series within the Soul Sanctuary membership is also there whenever returning to the foundations feels right (and foundations aren’t only for beginners). There is always something new to feel in a familiar posture when we stop assuming we already know it.
REMEMBER WHAT BRINGS YOU BACK
If motivation feels distant, forget about how often you think you should be practising and ask yourself something much simpler:
Why do I want to come back to my mat?
Maybe your body feels better when you move. Perhaps you sleep more deeply, feel calmer or have more patience with the people around you. Maybe yoga gives you somewhere to process what’s on your mind, or perhaps you simply feel more like yourself afterwards. Let that be the reason you return, and when you do, choose a practice because you’re curious about how it might feel.
Finding your way back doesn’t need to be a grand return. It might simply begin by rolling out your mat, taking a breath and seeing what you feel like doing from there.
A FEW QUESTIONS TO EXPLORE:
If you’re finding your way back to practice, you might take one of these questions onto your mat or spend a little time journalling with them afterwards:
- What do I need from yoga at this point in my life?
- Am I holding my current practice against an older version of myself?
- Which parts of yoga make me feel most like myself?
- Where in my practice do I notice expectation, and where do I feel freedom?
- What would my practice look like if nobody else could see it?
- Where could ten minutes of yoga comfortably live within my day?
- How do I feel when I step off the mat, and is that a feeling I’d like more of?
Your practice doesn’t need to look the way it did before or even need to look the same from one day to the next. Give yourself space to listen, move in the way that feels right for the body you’re in today, and allow your relationship with yoga to find its own rhythm again.
If you’re feeling called for a little more guidance, more space to explore your practice, or simply a community to practise alongside, there will always be a place for you at Soul Sanctuary. Our membership is a space to move, breathe, learn, rest and reconnect, with practices to meet you through the many different seasons of life. Come exactly as you are, take what you need, and move at your own pace.
Whenever you feel ready to return to your practice, we’d love to meet you on the mat again.