Being present

Blog? What blog?

Hmmm…  It seems to me that, while I’ve been AWESOME at doing yoga for 30 minutes every day for 306 straight days now, my parallel goal to blog regularly and track my yoga minutes ever 10-14 days has totally gone down the toilet.  Oops.  I think I psyche myself out a bit with the blog.  See, I have all sorts of blog ideas, but I want them to be so dang good.  Like, really spectacular investigative yoga blogging.  That kind of thoughtful and thought-provoking work, it takes more than 30 minutes to write.  And I’ve been rather busy writing some earth-shattering copy about memory foam and weather stations and sewing machines during the last month or two.  Ah, excuses, excuses!

Besides, since the wrist injury in August, I’ve gotten out of the habit of writing down exactly how many minutes I’ve spent doing yoga every day on my calendar.  Believe me; I’ve done it every darn day.  I’ve just been lazy about documentation.  But I’m going to try to do some weekly guesstimates below, in the interest of being able to roughly estimate the total amount of time I spent doing yoga this year come New Years Day.

9/5-11: 230 minutes                         10/10-16: 275 minutes

9/12-18: 310 minutes                       10/17-23: 345 minutes

9/19-25: 220 minutes                       10/24-31: 275 minutes       

9/26-10/2: 340 minutes                    11/1-7: 230 minutes           

10/3-9: 340 minutes

Notable practices in the last two months:

• My first class post wrist injury on 9/12, taught by my lovely friend Megan, and captured on video tape to complete her yoga teacher training program.  Yay, Megan!
•  Yoga on the road, part one, September 22-27.  I did yoga in my lovely childhood friend Jamie’s yard in the Astoria hood of Queens, NY for three days.  Then I practiced for three days in Chappaqua, NY, at the home of my brother and sister-in-law, in the room that has since then become 26-days-old niece and nephew! 
• My first handstand post wrist injury, on September 29.  I love them so. 
• Yoga on the road, part two, October 16-17.  I did yoga at my old college pal Liz’s apartment in Portland, which rivals mine in tiny-ness.  There’s nothing like practicing with a hangover…

Cat and Cow--yoga cures for over-imbibing...

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Then there was my practice yesterday morning, my Daylight Savings Time “Fall Back” practice. 

Now, over the past ten months, my home practice has become very comfortable, very routine, and sometimes very boring.  I admit, since my injury in August, my daily practices at home rarely exceed 31-35 minutes.  When I couldn’t do any weight-bearing on my wrist, it was hard to drum up more than 30 minutes of poses and I’d check the clock constantly to find out how much more yoga I had to do.  I didn’t feel like doing yoga daily was a burden, but I definitely had negative feelings about my limitations and the amount of time I’d committed to practicing daily.  I could have embraced the injury as a golden opportunity to meditate more or to cultivate my pranayama practice.  But I have a tendency to let my restless energy dictate.  I’m not going to condemn myself for that—I am what I am.

However, as I healed and my home practice started filling up with downward dog, plank, handstand, and headstand and all those other weight-bearing hand/arm poses again, my clock-watching habit didn’t abate.  I’ve become a pro of the 31-minute yoga practice, barely lying dormant in Savasana for 30 seconds before jumping up off the mat with a quick “Namaste,” eager to go about my day.  In some ways, I feel like my home yoga practice in the last several months has more in common with my showers than my experiences in yoga classes: not a burden, but a necessary part of my day; sometimes luxurious, but generally not; routine.

So yesterday, with the help DST and that extra hour in the day, my morning felt so much more spacious than usual.  And that spacious feeling carried over to my yoga practice.  I was doing yoga “earlier” than I usually do on a Sunday morning, because I woke up “earlier” than usual.  I felt the freedom to linger in forward bends longer, to hold stretches and poses longer, to play with different poses than usual, to practice pranayama even.  I was engaging with my yoga with more intention and intimacy than I have in my home practice since before Labor Day.  It was an incredibly refreshing home practice—sublime.

In the Anusara yoga classes I attend, after we chant Om three times and the Anusara invocation in Sanskrit, the teacher always asks us to bow our heads towards our hearts and to set an intention for our practice before we release our hands, open our eyes, and start moving.  The intentions that I set in this pause are always attuned to my current physical, emotional, and spiritual status and needs.  If my heart is feeling tender, I set an intention to be gentle and patient with myself and to approach poses from a place of openness, without self criticism, and with no expectations except that I attempt poses to the best of my ability in that moment of that day.  If my heart is feeling joyous, my intention may be to express that feeling in my practice, to see how far my limbs can expand, to push the edge just a little bit further.

I googled "Be Present" and got Ernest Hemingway kicking a can.

I would like to set an intention for my home practice in the next 54 days.  Each time I step onto my mat, I will take the time to tune into where my body, mind, and heart are, how they are doing and what they need from yoga that day—set a daily intention, just like in class.  Then I will actively focus in my practice on meeting that intention and filling those needs, abandoning distracting thoughts about my schedule, work, food, and relationships until I am off the mat.  Lastly, I will move the clock so it is out of my line of sight on the mat.

I also hereby set an intention to blog more as I head into the last stretch of this journey!

Namaste!

The Six Month Post: Completionitis

"Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat."
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald

On the 4th of July, I hit the 180-day mark of my 360 days of yoga. That’s six months. I’m over half way there.

I gave my father this little update on the phone the other day. He said to me, “My God, you’re really doing this, aren’t you?” Yes, Dad, I really am. I really am going to see this project through, from start to finish.

In the past few years, I’ve had some issues with completion. Lots of unfinished business.  Some people get hung up on starting things. Not me. I start things left and right. I love starting things! The big finish is where I get stuck. Thus, I am a person who habitually:

• Cooks an elaborate dinner, leaves dishes piled up in the sink until the next night, or next week. 
• Mixes up ingredients for homemade ice cream, and passes off the hand-crank ice cream maker to someone else. 
• Folds laundry and leaves folded clothes in the laundry basket/on the sofa instead of putting them away. 
• Knits the sleeves, front, and back of a sweater, never sews the pieces together. 
• Starts writing a story, or a blog, leaves the piece at day’s end, and never returns to it.

I could go on.

FYI: There are an obscene amount of albums called "Unfinished Business." 

So when I decided to do 360 straight days of yoga practice, one of my goals was not “to complete something for once in my life.” Yes, my ultimate goal is to complete 360 straight days, but I didn’t think of it as a giant exercise in seeing a project through from start to finish. However, that’s exactly what it is.

With this goal of completion, there is a danger of looking at this year in terms of success and failure. This way of thinking doesn’t fit with yoga at all. When Patanjali uses the word “yoga” in his Yoga Sutras, it means “a state of wholeness” as well as the different practices (postures, pranayama, etc.) associated with this state. Should I step onto the mat everyday with the idea in my head that, “I have to do yoga today so I don’t fail,” I would be approaching my practice from a limited outlook. Yoga would become a chore (which I’ve discussed before), and I would be practicing with an ugly sense of obligation, with a fear of failure, and from a place of self-judgment. I would not be in a state of wholeness; I would not be open to whatever experiences might unfold while on the mat; and it wouldn’t be fun at all! As long as I upheld this outlook, even if I “succeeded” in practicing every single day, my yoga 360 would still be a failure. 

In her book, Living Your Yoga, Judith Lasater says, “The only real success in life is living with an open, loving heart.” I think that’s true. If I do miss a day of yoga, if I say to myself, “So you missed a day—it’s not worth beating yourself up over and discrediting all the yoga you did before today and all the yoga you’ll do after today,” then that, frankly, is a tremendous success.

Don’t get me wrong: I fully intend to keep doing yoga every single day until New Year’s. I intend to complete this thing. And it is a gigantic exercise in seeing a project through from start to finish. But it isn’t a gigantic exercise in NOT FAILING to see a project through from start to finish. It is a gigantic exercise in dedication and commitment. I am dedicated and committed to seeing this year through from start to finish, and more importantly, I am dedicated and committed to living with an open, loving heart—today, next month, come January 2011, come January 2021, and so on. 

 That's right, I'm the bacon.

Namaste!