Practicing yoga daily can enrich your lifestyle, but it’s not the same as living the yoga lifestyle itself.

If your goal is to embrace yoga and its philosophy on every level, you will need to let it into every part of your life, from your eating habits to your home to your attitude towards others and even yourself. In the long run, this new lifestyle might lead you to change your job, relocate, and go through a complete makeover as it did for me.

These are a few components of the yoga lifestyle that are beyond the practice itself.

• Eating
• Meditation
• Mindfulness
• Attitude towards yourself and others

Yoga eating habits: Ahimsa & veganism

By now you should know that the right kind of healthy diet can help you achieve inner balance. However, yoga eating is a bit more than just this. In fact, if you want to embrace the yoga lifestyle fully you might want to consider going vegan because ahimsa is one of the leading principles of this lifestyle.

Yoga eating means looking not only at the nutritional value and “healthiness” of food but also where it came from. At the very least, you should start looking for labels such as “fair trade” and “kosher” on the products you intend to put into your body. Veganism should be considered because the yoga lifestyle rejects cruelty in all its forms. If this is how you feel you would wish to live your life, consuming the meat of slaughtered animals would be out of the question. And you will also need to take a look at all your cosmetics, cleaning products, and clothing and where necessary, switch to cruelty-free brands.

Meditation as a way to connect your body and mind

Meditation should be a part of your daily routine regardless of whether or not you choose to embrace the yoga lifestyle fully. The benefits of it are many and there is scientific evidence to back them up. Most importantly, meditation helps improve your well-being on physical, mental, and spiritual levels.

According to the data from the Institute for Health Metrics Evaluation, about 13% of the world’s population struggles with mental health issues, and this data is approximate at best. Meditating daily will help you avoid becoming a feature of this statistic and it will promote your healing if you are currently struggling. While meditating, you reconnect your body and mind so that, by the end of it, you are ready to face the world as a stronger and more balanced person.

Mindfulness in every breath

To practice mindfulness is to be aware of every moment of your life and everything that surrounds you can have an impact on it. Even your home décor has an influence on mindfulness, which means that embracing the yoga lifestyle fully might mean doing some renovations.

Mindfulness is an inherent part of the yoga lifestyle, which trains you to pay attention to everything around you and feel it to the fullest. Be aware of every breath you take and every action and every precious moment. In this way, you will develop a better understanding of your body, and of the world around you and your place in it. The consistent practice of yoga will help improve your mindfulness and combining it with meditation will help you to come to peace with yourself and the world, thereby achieving the level of happiness you might not otherwise have imagined possible.

Be truthful, faithful, and generous with others (and with yourself)

The yoga lifestyle embraces ahimsa, non-violence towards yourself and others, but it doesn’t stop there. To adopt this kind of life philosophy fully you will also need to accept other values of a yogi:

• Speaking only the truth.
• Considering the impact of your words before you speak them.
• Not coveting that which you do not need to live and help others.
• Being faithful to people and your words.
• Taking only what you need.

As you can see, leading a yoga lifestyle means being a minimalist and stopping once you have enough to maintain your chosen lifestyle. Everything else you can use to help others because treating people with kindness and compassion is just as important a part of this lifestyle. The most important thing you should always remember, and let it guide you through your change to this new way, is that every life is precious. Be it your life or someone else’s, every moment of it is a jewel unique in its beauty. Recognising and appreciating it, as well as respecting everyone and everything else with which you come into contact in this single moment of a lifetime – this is what the yoga lifestyle truly is.

Do I live a true yoga lifestyle? I wish! Whilst I have totally embraced some aspects of the yogi lifestyle over the years which have meant changing my job, location, practice and diet, the rest is still very much work in progress. I continue working on myself with plant medicines to remove old patterns I acquired in this life or were passed onto me from previous generations to become the best person I can be in this life.

Namaste

Christel 🙏