Yoga is connection to the life force—your own, your teammates’, and your competitors’.

Athletes don't need anything for a yoga practice outside of their intention to be present here and now.

The practice of full presence is connected to higher performance, empirically and anecdotally.

Any gold medalist will tell you that at the highest levels of sport, you’re often training for that 1 percent edge over yourself and your past performances and over your competition, who are also taking exquisite care with the finest details of training.

It’s a lot to manage. On top of managing emotions and expectations and relationships. On top of managing everything else life throws at you.

Yoga is about not-managing. Which can be scary for athletes. Terrifying, even. And maybe even sounds contradictory to some research about the importance of attentional control in sport and high-performance endeavors. But only on the surface. Instead of holding the reins on our attention so tightly, yoga asks us to allow whatever is present to be present so that we don’t waste energy suppressing thoughts or feelings we wish didn’t have. Which matters massively for athletic performance.

A yoga practice doesn’t have to mean the poses you see on Instagram. It doesn’t have to mean any poses at all. A yoga practice can look a lot of different ways that may or may not involve things you do with your physical body.

You don’t need a mat. You don’t need a thing, outside of your intention, the intention to be here, now, with what is, in this moment. And maybe you........

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