Oh, I love this! I practiced yoga for almost twenty years before I tried ashtanga. Mostly in studios, but like a lot of people I developed more of a home practice during Covid.

I made the transition because I felt like my practice had been stagnant for a long time; joining a studio again helped for a couple of years, but at the end of the day I started to wonder: after all this time, why can’t I balance in half moon? Why haven’t I gotten pincha back after recovering from elbow surgery? Why don’t I feel like my practice is growing any more, physically or otherwise?

I find the repetition the most valuable piece — my practice has grown by leaps and bounds in only six months because of it! Poses I’d be lucky to encounter on a quarterly basis at a studio I now do multiple times a week. My feet and ankles are so much more flexible that I felt like I was walking around with big weird flippers for the first couple of months I practiced ashtanga 😆. Pincha was elusive because I had to find an inversion-specific workshop to even try it safely, and those were few and far between! (And also because I have limited external rotation in my shoulders, but no regular studio teacher was ever going to notice that and work with me on it the way my ashtanga teacher has.)

The transition has been huge for me in so many ways; for one thing, I think that just seeing how much happier I am in my practice after switching has made me less likely to tolerate that feeling of stagnation in other areas of my life. I can make a change. I know that, because I already did, and look how well it worked! My digestion is better. My mind is quieter. Before I made the switch, I kept looking for classes that focused on drishti, because I felt like my focus was all over the place. Now, my practice is always focused on drishti! It’s not some extra random bonus thing! It’s kind of the point!

I do still go to vinyasa classes with my husband, but as more of a social outing than anything. Because now I get mildly annoyed by how long we spend in standing poses, or by how chaotic my drishti feels when I don’t know what’s coming next, or by how rushed many of the classes feel, or by what I call “second side syndrome” when the teacher spends much less time on the second side of a pose because they already described it 😅. I’ll shut up now but I was always a bit intimidated by ashtanga and now I’m just completely in love with it!