Did it Work?: Yoga With Adriene- Dedicate (30 Day Yoga Journey)

February 6th 2019

The first month of 2019 has come to a close, and I want to take a few moments to reflect on my month long yoga journey~

One of my big goals for this year was to incorporate yoga into my everyday life. Prior to this month, I was doing yoga every morning from Tuesday-Friday. However, I really wanted to make the leap of doing yoga 4 days a week to doing it 6-7 days a week. Lucky for me, this transition has been made simple with help from Yoga With Adriene, a YouTube Yogi with over 4 million subscribers (that are totally well deserved).

Every year, Adriene puts out a 30 Day Yoga Journey from January 2 until January 31 where she teaches people to gradually integrate yoga into their daily lives. The practices can be as short as 15 minutes to as long as 50 minutes with each day coupled with an intention that you should keep in mind. Adriene really works hard to make sure that each video is more than just a physical practice, and encompasses some level of personal self-discovery, which I really enjoy.

I did my first 30 Day Yoga Journey with Adriene back in 2016 when the theme of the year was Yoga Camp and when I say it was life-changing, I mean it. After doing Yoga Camp, I immediately enrolled in a studio that I have now been with for 3 years and I was even inspired to go on and get my RYT-200 certification to teach yoga myself!

Despite my love for the first year I did it, I found that I didn’t do the 2 following years of Yoga Journey Series because I guess I was just too busy. However, this year, I decided that I wanted to come back full force and do the Dedicate series this year followed by going back to previous years and doing them for the rest of the year. Here are a few takeaways I want to share before I get into my whole honest review:

1. This was incredibly all-level friendly!
2. The short videos made it easy to carve out time to practice.
3. Adriene is incredibly comforting which made her practices good for any time of the day whether you were waking up to start the day or winding down to sleep.
4. The videos are always there so you don’t need to be on pace with the videos in order to complete the journey.

So the first thing I want to say is I give this series 5 stars for being so friendly to people on different parts of their yoga journey. As someone who has been doing yoga for years, I found that the pacing and focus in these practices really helped me get deeper into my practice and encouraged me to slow down and learn. I had gone in worried that it was going to be too easy for me since I have been doing yoga for so long. But I found that there was always something new to challenge me which I enjoyed!

On the opposite end, I have a friend who was entirely new to yoga and she was telling me how beginner friendly she felt the whole series was because Adriene took the time to give great instructions and verbal cues, as well as always offering and demonstrating any variations for people with different bodily needs.

The second point I would like to mention is the fact that these videos were really schedule-friendly. It wasn’t that hard to carve out 15-30 minutes a day to get on my mat for a little bit. Plus the videos are on YouTube so they can be done from anywhere! It was crazy that taking such a short amount of time a day to get on the mat could make the hugest difference.

Along with the practices not being very time consuming, I also felt that they were a perfect way to wind down before bed. Adriene has such a calming energy and it really just put me at ease watch her and listening to her speak as her dog, Benji, just roamed or stared out the window in the background. I would recommend these videos to someone who is a bit stressed and anxious about getting active in the new year because they were so low pressure!

Speaking of low pressure, the videos don’t need to be done once a day every day. Some days, I would get busy and miss, and other days I’d feel super hyped and do 2 videos in one day! It is all about how you want to pace yourself. This journey and her previous year’s journeys are still up for you to start whenever you want. To be honest, I am going to try to cycle through the journeys all year, along with her other videos to help me do yoga every day I can!

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So here is my personal review about my individual experience with the series. Going into this journey, I had really felt I had plateaued in my practice and my love for my practice. This journey has helped me not only rekindle my love for yoga, but also has helped me build a little extra strength to help me more forward towards improving my practice.

I had fallen out of home practices around when I started my yoga teacher training due to some mental roadblock. I found that when I rolled my mat out at home, I often couldn’t get inspired to think of new flows or put too much pressure on myself to create incredibly creative flows instead of just listening to my body.

By doing Dedicate, I felt at ease and less stressed about creating flows because they were created for me, and the practices kept my mind clear and open. Now that I have gone through the month, I feel a lot better about going back to independent practices when it feels appropriate and without putting too much pressure on myself.

Overall, I would like to give Yoga With Adriene’s 30 Day Yoga Journey 2 big thumbs up and a “yes, it does really work!”

Jess~

PS- I think I am going to turn this “Did it work?” thing into a series of reviews. If there is anything you want me to review, let me know!