If you want to be happy, at peace, in balance and have an all-around sense of well being, there are certain attitudes and actions you should avoid, and certain attitudes and actions you should cultivate. Taking Yoga Off Your Mat is a metaphor for practicing actions and attitudes that bring body, mind and spirit into alignment, and help you remain focused, calm, and non-reactive in the face of life’s inevitable challenges.
Whether the practices you cultivate are practices you learn in yoga or in psychological counseling, you must apply these practices to your daily life in order to reap the benefits. In other words, to derive maximum benefit from psychological counseling you have to take your therapy off the couch and apply what you learn in therapy to your everyday life. By the same token, to derive the maximum benefit from yoga, you have to take your yoga off the mat and apply what you learn to everyday life so that everything you do and say becomes an asana.••