Beyond Ten Minutes: Building a Daily Practice That Lasts

“Without morning sādhanā, yoga is just a bunch of words.”
— T. K. V. Desikachar

As yoga teachers and dedicated practitioners, we know—deep in our bones—that practice is essential. Many of us have tried to build a daily sadhana, only to find that practicing every day is surprisingly hard to get going and even harder to sustain.

Starting the day without breathing well, with clogged nostrils, an achy body, and a scattered mind is also a habit. Most people don’t realize that how they start the morning is training the nervous system just as surely as any yoga practice.

If you want your daily yoga to become as natural as breathing, you have to translate the hope for practice into a concrete, repeatable ritual. After many years of broadcasting a 6:00 am breath meditation class, I’ve seen some patterns clearly—and one of them is this:

The common advice “Ten minutes is enough” almost never leads to a stable, lifelong practice.

“Ten Minutes” Is What We Want to Hear

“Ten minutes a day” sounds inviting and accessible. It’s no surprise that many teachers, websites, and even AI say some version of, “Ten minutes is good enough to start—increase it when you can.”

The intention is kind. We don’t want to scare anyone away. But this message quietly sabotages a successful mindset for long-term daily practice.

Low Expectations Create a Low-Value Habit

“Ten minutes” feels like a token gesture—something to squeeze into your To Do List. When we set the bar that low, we’re unconsciously telling ourselves this isn’t very important.

If you haven’t yet experienced how profound a daily morning practice of breathing and stretching can be, you have to take it on faith at first. But starting with the mindset, “What’s the smallest I can get away with?” devalues practice right from the beginning.

Morning practice—breathing well and feeling great before the day begins—casts a glow over everything that follows. To believe that ten minutes will reliably carry us into that transformational territory is, honestly, a bit of self-deception.

The Nervous System Needs Time

The nervous system doesn’t shift on command. It needs time.

A true morning sadhana is more than a quick boring routine; it’s a living ritual. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end—each phase doing something important.

• First, we ground and arrive. We notice “what condition our condition is in.”
• We set an intention.
• We release tight, achy areas in the body.
• We listen to the breath, and our listening is an ongoing evolution.
• We concentrate the mind to focus. We want the mind to serve us rather than sabotage us.
• In our breath-centered practice, we create a pattern of focusing left and right, similar to nadi shodhana/anuloma viloma. We just call it Left Right Breath. This has turned out to be the most important practice of all, just as Swami Kripalu promised.

Our practice also needs a spark of daily inspiration: a repeatable structure plus a touch of newness—learning something, seeing something, experimenting a little each day so we keep growing.

Even with excellent focus, the nervous system generally needs more than ten minutes to settle, expand, and shift into a different state of being.

Ten Minutes Lacks Depth—and Without Depth, Habits Don’t Last

A ten-minute practice almost always lacks depth. There simply isn’t enough time to move from scattered to spacious, from distracted to clarity, from “going through the motions” to genuine connection.

Without depth, there’s little reward.
Without reward, the habit doesn’t survive.

From years of leading this class every morning, my best guess is that there is a minimum threshold for beginning of a tangible transformation, and it lives somewhere around 30 minutes. I have come to believe that a Left Right practice, is the most time efficient method of all.

Make 30+ minutes your mindset as a minimum. When we touch that feeling every morning, practice becomes something we want to do—not just a routine dead space that serves no purpose.

The Practice Must Bring Daily Joy

For a habit to endure, it cannot be built on discipline alone. Yes, a bit of discipline is needed at the beginning to get the habit established. But over time, the practice itself must become self-reinforcing.

A daily breath-centered practice becomes sustainable when it:

• Gently energizes the body
• Clears and organizes the mind
• Softens the heart
• Connects us to something larger than ourselves

These experiences create an inner reward system. They are the reasons we keep coming back, day after day. Make the start of each day a priority, a sacred time in your life. Go to bed a little earlier. Get up a little earlier. Notice the habits that pull you away from what you know to be true. And when you miss a day—as everyone does—practice forgiveness, let it go and begin again.

A Promise to you

You will never regret the mornings you choose to practice. You will never regret investing thirty minutes of your life each morning in the greatest adventure there is: the slow gradual awakening of your spiritual life.