When I was a kid, I thought my elementary school teachers lived at school. I remember looking around the classroom for the cot. Maybe it's behind the desk... How do they wash their hair if they’re at school? Imagine my surprise when I spotted my gym teacher at Wal-Mart!

What do the yogis do when they aren’t doing yoga?

Fast-forward twenty years or so, and I found myself wondering the same thing about yoga teachers and dedicated practitioners. I mean… what do they do for fun? How do they walk in this world? The fact that monasteries and ashrams exist supported the assumption I had that yogis had to do something overtly yogic at all times.

Whenever I talked to a teacher, I felt like I was speaking to a realized being that had come down from the mountain. It didn’t matter how imperfect they said they were or that they talked about regular stuff like taking the kids to school or going grocery shopping.

I wondered, in all my averageness, if I could ever be as grounded as these people seemed to be. I wanted to know the secret that made it possible for teachers and fellow students to seem centered when the world felt so chaotic.

My desire to learn was so great that I entrenched myself in the studio world. I even took a 200-hour yoga teacher training. What happened next was like seeing my gym teacher at Wal-Mart.

Yogis are everywhere

For those of you who have been at this yoga thing for a while, this fact may be obvious, but it took a while for my brain to square what I saw with the story I created in my head. Yoga teachers and super-dedicated students were subject to the same forces that we’re all subject to in our day-to-day lives.

We pay bills. We scrub toilets. We work jobs that have zip to do with mindfulness. We haul our mats across town on public transit, and we pass out on the couch watching reruns of The Golden Girls because we’re tired and just want to watch something well-written and ahead of its time. (Okay, maybe that last one was just me…)

When we think of yogis, we often think of sadhus, holy people and ascetic yogis, as the pinnacle of yogic devotion. It is only recently that I learned that the path of householder practitioners is also well-trodden. Early branches of Tantra, which ultimately influenced hatha yoga, which, in turn, influenced modern postural yoga as we know it, included plenty of householders. (You can learn all about this in Tantra Illuminated by Christopher Wallis.)

In other words, there’s a long history of yoga and yoga-adjacent disciplines welcoming people with regular lives on the trip to the liberation station. This brings me to my final point.

Yogis mow the lawn

The other day I push-mowed my lawn. To help you get a picture of how this looked, it was over 90 degrees, and my mower is too large for me to operate with any semblance of grace. My land is sort of like a mullet: the front is a semi-flat piece of business, and the back is an aggressively-sloping party. The neighbors slow their cars during mowing sessions to take in the spectacle of my sweaty, 5'2" self digging heels into the dirt to cut swaths of yard. I swear I can detect hints of pity and amusement on their faces.

As you can imagine, mowing puts me in a cranky headspace. I cursed the institution that is the American lawn! Why can’t I just let it be a meadow? I grumbled about how I’d never seen any monks pushing such a loud machine around any of the temples I’ve visited. This felt like such an un-yogic thing that I had to do. The belly-aching continued for a few minutes.

While making laps around the lawn, I dodged a few bumblebees trying to get nectar from the clover I'd allowed to grow for too long. Pre-yoga me would have run right over them without a second thought. As if I couldn't have looked any more unhinged, I suddenly laughed out loud at the thought that anything could be truly un-yogic.

As I continued to dance with the thoughts, the unholy roar of the engine receded, and the narrator in my head stopped talking. The separateness of me as the yogi and me as the person doing yardwork reconciled with each other.

Before I knew it, I wasn’t mowing the lawn anymore. I was making a mandala. Sure, it was slightly oval-shaped, and sure, it didn’t consist of any sacred geometry, but it was a thing I meditated on while I was making it. Lawn mowing may not be in any of your standard yoga manuals, but that day I learned that it can also be a practice.

We’re not always practicing yoga, but we can always practice yoga

Public school teachers don’t live in schools, and only some yogis become ascetics. Your yoga does not have to be the yoga of caves and renunciation to be a solid practice. The way you spend your time might change as you walk this path, but it won’t be because anyone told you that you had to do it to be a yogi.

You can find yogis in every line of work and in every walk of life. When we go to the park, we still have to bag up our dog’s poo just like everyone else. No aspect of life is separate from yoga if you choose to make it so. All of it is yoga.

My challenge to you

What if putting away your laundry or doing the dishes could become an expression of your practice? How would that shift your mindset about these activities? How would that alter the way you carry out these everyday tasks?

My challenge to you is to pick a chore (any chore) from your to-do list. If it feels weird to you to turn an everyday thing into an aspect of your practice, then start with housework that gives you a neutral feeling when you do it. (For those of you wanting a bit more challenge, select a task that makes you grumble.) Decide that you will make this chore another form of your yoga.

Making this task part of your practice doesn't mean you have to like doing whatever the thing is. Just do your best to do it well. If your mind tells you a story about the thing you're doing, notice the story. Do this every day, and add additional work to your non-yoga yoga routine as you see fit. See what comes up for you.

It’s not what you do. It’s how you do it.

As always, if you have any questions or just want to share what you're working on, I'm always here for you. If you choose to take the challenge, I'd love to hear what task you chose, and what you learned.