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Posts Tagged "crucible"
I didn’t succeed at my 200 day challenge. I just couldn’t complete the number of classes I would need to make up to do it. I took my son to New Mexico for spring break, I couldn’t find a yoga studio, I got asked to work in California, and I realized I was just not going to complete my 200 days of yoga challenge. It was a disappointment to realize I wasn’t going to make 200 yoga classes in 200 days. It was a challenge I liked. In the back of my head, I had hoped I could continue and could actually do 365 classes in 365 days. I wanted to know what a year of yoga would do for my body. How would I be different. I was fascinated by the idea that I would do yoga every day and I could see the impact it would have on my life. But I never scaled back my travel or other activities. I wanted it all. I realized I am more diverse than just yoga. I want a rich and full life and I want to travel. I am not willing to give up travel to do yoga. So here I am, trying to find a standard and doing mostly daily yoga. I have been trying to figure out my “new normal.” If I don’t do yoga every day, then how much yoga do I do? I also love the benefits of going almost every day. I like how daily yoga impacts my life. It is a practice and I like practicing yoga almost every day. I really struggled over this and it felt like a real journey for me to figure it out. In my life, I haven’t been good at regular exercise. I don’t wake up and think “exercise sounds good” because mostly it doesn’t. I would rather read a book on the couch. So I had some fear that if I didn’t do yoga every day, then I might just stop...
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I breathe, I rest, I lie face up on my mat with my head toward the mirror. I feel my shoulder blades under me opening up my chest. I stretch my feet just outside the sides of my mat. I place my heels just over the ridge that is my mat onto the floor. I let my feet fall outward. My palms face up. Ready to receive, I think. My head tilts back slightly. I breathe deep into my belly. When I do the first deep breath on my mat, sometimes there is a breath so deep it is like it finds an extra pocket in my lungs and more air goes in at the end. Not every breath is like that but when it happens there is a sweet release. My favorite breath starts with a really good exhale. Sometimes I realize I don’t really finish breathing out before it is time to breathe in again. I lie in shavasana trying to keep my mind clear, focusing on my breath. As thoughts come, sometimes I try to clear them, sometimes I watch and release them, sometimes I work too hard trying to turn them off. As I become more fit, my mind is more and more active. I am having more and more challenges as my mind tries to get work done during my yoga practice. In the beginning, this was almost a non-issue. I was really working on the postures and breathing and I didn’t have all those racing thoughts. Now I actually need strategies for my emerging thoughts. I have tried breathing and holding a thought like “clear” or “present’ in my mind with each breath. The other night during a discussion about meditation, a guy I had just met told me to notice my thoughts and release them so I have been trying that, although I have to admit, I may lack some discernment by implementing new methods into my yoga practice just because I talked to a guy...
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I think I just committed to 200 days of yoga. As I wrote the title, it seemed right. I missed my 100 yoga classes in 100 days but I realized that if I extended the time, I could catch up. I am still down 8 classes, but I can make up those classes and still meet the 200 days of yoga goal. I had to really think about why I am doing this yoga challenge. For a while I wondered if I am being obsessive in my daily commitment. I found it incredibly challenging to be with failing to make my 100 day goal. Often in my life, not making a goal would make me quit and wander off–losing the benefit of what I was doing. In this case, I was more interested in digging deep, to keep going, and to try to meet a future goal. When the people at the studio found out I was doing a 100 day challenge, I noticed a little touch of ego. It got me attention and that worried me. I don’t want my daily practice to be about feeding my ego. I want it to be about the practice–me, my mat, and my breath. I have wondered if I could trust myself to let go of my daily routine because I am not sure I trust myself to make good decisions about exercise if I don’t have strong boundaries. I didn’t like setting a goal that was about me not being good enough to do it without a daily commitment. It seemed to be coming from fear instead of abundance. I have been really paying attention to why I love daily yoga so much. There is something I get if I go daily that I wouldn’t get if I went 3 or 4 times a week. It is rest. When I am there daily, it is impossible for me to work out hard every day. I get tired. My feet hurt. I get sore. Going...
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Some days I am overcome by love. When I pull up at the school and let my kids out, I watch them tromping off with their lunch boxes and backpacks and my heart fills up until it overflows and fills my eyes with tears. I love being married and seeing how good we can make it and how fast we can recover from when we make it bad–when we mess up and have to fix it or get over it. I read a friend’s blog recently. He was describing the death of his lover. His raw words of love touched me deeply. It was as if he opened his heart on the page–splayed open for everyone to see. It was just love. I loved him for the open-hearted love he shared. I watch my parents aging and I want to ease their way. I want them to stay eternally young like they are in my mind. I want to be able to spare them the agony of growing older. I want to protect them from the elements of time and my heart fills with love and compassion for their humanness and frailty. I love them so much and yet my love can’t keep them from experiencing their challenges. I think of two family members who got mad at me and don’t talk to me anymore. On bad days I protect myself with anger and on good days I remember that their anger can’t make me stop loving them. Memories of them fill my heart and I surreptitiously send loving thoughts their way and wish them well. I love dinner parties. There is something about the echo of laughter over food that fills my heart. I love the people I laugh with. Especially if they think my jokes are funny. I love saying I love you to friends. It was something I realized years ago. It did once go bad when I told my friend Mara I loved her in a phone message. Her husband listened...
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A few months ago, Mel spent the evening making some home-made applesauce with the apples from our tree in the backyard. He used his grandmother’s recipe. The apples are tart and small and delicious if you have a lot of time to work with them. He peeled and chopped about 40 apples and we ate all the applesauce for dinner. I remember my grandmother having containers and containers of home-made applesauce. I wonder how my ancestors managed to preserve so much food. For the last couple of years, I have been working to try to put some food away. I am shocked by the volume of food that is required if I want to eat it during the winter. I buy what I consider large quantities of things–a bushel of tomatoes, a flat of strawberries, and they disappear as I make jam or sauce. That is kind of what happened with the apples. I have been judging myself by a tough standard, I realized. I am the first woman in my family to continue in a career after I married. The women I admire who were fantastic at putting food away were housewives. If it were my job to put food away, I imagine I would be a fair bit better at it. I picture them never really sitting down, but then I think of the handwork my grandmother did–always making something–and I realize she had to sit down for that. And she watched her soap operas. I am not sure her life was quite as full as I thought it was. She had some down time I think. I spend my time in front of a computer. It is ironic that I work and feel lazy because I can’t do all the tasks women from previous generations...
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