So you want to start a home yoga practice, but you aren’t sure how. Home yoga practices have many advantages including solitude, privacy, and the freedom to tailor your practice to your specific needs.

For best results, you’ll want to buy some of the basic equipment. You should purchase a good yoga mat, a block, and a yoga instruction manual (book or DVD is fine) so you’ll have several yoga asana (poses) onhand for referral. You’d probably appreciate a set of yoga clothes too; any form fitting but stretchy outfit will do.

Since this is your practice, you get to select the specific asana for your routine. If you like to follow an instructor, you’ll want to rent or buy DVDs or books and find a routine that you enjoy. A traditional routine might follow the twenty-six asana laid out in the Ashtanga sequence, which you can find in a traditional yoga book or Ashtanga DVD. Or you can create your own unique routine, made up entirely of your own poses.

Make sure you begin your practice with a session of meditation in a lotus position, grounding yourself in your intention. Then assume a stretching series of poses, such as sun salutations. After some stretching, you can move through a series of athletically challenging poses, resting when needed. End in corpse pose; while there, allow yourself to relax completely, releasing any negativity.

You’ll want to learn pranayama, or breathing exercises, so that you learn how to breathe through the poses. You may find it powerful to add a form of spritual meditation into your routine such as metta meditation (loving kindness) or vipassana meditation (accepting physical sensations and emotions as they come). As you develop and expand your home practice, you will find yoga brings a sense of calm and peace to your life.