Does Yoga Get Boring After 30 Years?

How stopping doing yoga keeps my practice fresh

After more than thirty years of practice, I think I can say with some confidence that yoga absolutely can become boring.

If yoga is simply an endless endeavour to make shapes with your body, eventually there comes a point where it all starts to feel dully repetitive. There are only so many ways one can arrange one’s limbs on a yoga mat before the novelty wears off.

Even the most skilful of practitioners’ yoga can lose its lustre from time to time. Recently I went through a period of quite low mood where I found myself questioning the point of almost everything. It was a kind of world-weariness where I woke up in the morning pondering the point of getting up and doing it all again. There was a feeling of moving through life slightly flatly in that way we do when we are not quite sure of the meaning motivating our actions.

As always, my yoga practice was the mirror that reflected back to me the quality of how I was living at that time.

Going through the motions

As I moved through trikonasana, parsvakonasana, whateverasana, I had the uncomfortable realisation that I was largely just going through the motions. Doing the shapes. Following familiar pathways and failing to feel anything.

It made me think quite seriously about what keeps yoga alive over decades of practice. Because if it’s only shapes, I’m not convinced it does stay alive indefinitely.

What shifted things wasn’t discovering a new style of yoga or suddenly becoming inspired by advanced postures. Instead, I did nothing. I let go of forms and labels and stopped trying completely. Instead, I became more interested in simply paying attention. I allowed movement to move through me and I watched it, and noticed what I felt. Sometimes that looked like yoga poses, sometimes it looked pretty random. Sometimes I was in motion, sometimes I was still and holding a stretch for a really long time, breathing and watching my body relent and reshape itself.

The key is to stop doing yoga

What occurs to me as I write this is that I stopped doing yoga during that time and instead I let yoga happen to me.

As we read in Sutra 1.2 of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras – yogas citta vrtti nirodhah yoga is the stilling of the thought waves of the mind. Yoga happens when we notice patterns, moods, attachments, aversions and habits without immediately trying to fix them. This witnessing presence is the stillness.

The Yoga Sutras, in their essence, are less philosophical theory and more a description of ordinary human experience.

Particularly the idea of swadhyaya — self-study.

The only agenda here is study – curiosity and a driving desire to understand reality.

This happens through observation.

In this process of letting go, we also can consider the relationship between abhyasa and vairagya — practice and non-attachment.

I still practised. But I loosened my grip on what the practice was supposed to achieve.

When yoga is just another distraction from meaninglessness

Modern yoga culture can still be remarkably achievement-oriented underneath the surface. We simply replace conventional success markers with more socially acceptable yoga ones. More advanced poses. Cleaner diet. Better habits. Better nervous systems.

But at a certain point, constantly trying to improve yourself becomes exhausting. All the herbal tea and bamboo clothing in the world cannot make it otherwise, and the funny (ha ha) thing is, that these objectives become just another distraction! Just more things to do to occupy our monkey minds and help us forget the smallness of our existence and the inexorable onslaught of time.

The answers are all there in a 2000 year old text

The beauty of the Sutras, however, is that they are a treatise on human suffering (dukkha), not performance or success. In order to live a life of ease (sukkah), we have to sit with our discomfort. Rather than distract ourselves with a pretty sequence or a diverting playlist, the endeavour is this: do nothing. Wait for nothing to happen. Witness what is playing out in this one unique moment in time. Be with life as it happens.

Have you ever stopped trying to happen to everything? Try for thirty years and let me know how it goes. The sutras teach us that life is a co-creation. We co-happen with everything around us. What lifted me out of my low mood was the embodied understanding that I don’t have to do it all myself, in fact I don’t have to do anything. Life happens anyway.

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