A practice in your pocket isn’t about downloading an app you can tap into anywhere or belonging to a club, gang, or team. It’s about knowing how to access your practice without needing to recall a single pose.
Like good personal trainers or physiotherapists, yoga teachers should advocate for agency—helping students take what happens on the mat out into life and to be able to practice without them.
We often talk about the experience of yoga. Yes, that encapsulates the feel, the vibe, the high, the music—the tangible buzz a practice can bring. Sometimes it’s about the people you share the room with, the teacher’s energy, or simply a time of life that holds meaning. I look back fondly on my hot yoga days: hard, exhilarating, sweaty—and when that track dropped, the feeling was unmatched.
With maturity, for me, I realised it was a little like school assembly.
Being in a group, lifted by music, utterly exhilarated by songs about Jesus—only later realising it was perhaps the joy of sound and live performance more than religion itself. In the same way, those classes were more about the experience than the yoga.
So how do we build a practice that doesn’t rely on remembering sequences, having space for a mat, or curating the perfect playlist?
How do we truly make a practice portable—something we can carry anywhere?
Over time, every class should leave a little behind. Each small grain sticks, and slowly they gather, like rice forming a firmer ball with every layer.
What matters is rarely in the teacher’s delivery – poems, quotes, even the Sanskrit. It lies in the space they create. The space that allows you to explore the mind, to make your own choices, to opt in or opt out, to develop true choice. That space doesn’t come from offering levels, variations, or modifications. It’s the comfort of knowing you can stand still, lie down or even leave.
We can’t hold that freedom in the same breath as saying progress, achievement, patience, or goal-setting. Dosn’t our yoga philosophy encourage us to do the thing, to just take the action based not on outcome or reward? To take action without goals, gains or aspirations? The action The Gita speaks of actually isn’t to feel good, feed or please us but to see how it plays out, to notice our patterns, to get comfortable with the inevitability of the unknown.
So perhaps a portable practice is simple. It’s the breath we notice in a traffic jam. The pause before we respond. The recognition of a trigger before it takes hold. The quiet smile when we catch our old loops of behaviour. The standing still in class whilst everyone tries a pose you know you can impress and smash the hell out of.
