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!

Note to self: yoga should not be a chore.

Well, it shouldn't, right?

This kind of outlook is one of the challenges I've bumped into thus far in my 360 days of yoga quest. There are days, like today, where I wake up, feel kinda of blech physically and blah mentally, and the prospect of doing yoga doesn't exactly make my heart sing. It feels like something I "have to do." So, when I was telling a friend about what my day looked like recently, I said something like: "I want to spend a little time working the office, and I need to spend some time cleaning at home, and I've have to do my yoga still." He remarked that the way I was talking about yoga made it sound like this dreaded chore, and that seemed kind of contrary to why I am trying to do yoga for 360 days in the first place.

And he's right. When devising this yoga challenge for myself, I did not seek to add a daily chore to my life. I sought to add daily joy and calm and movement. But I AM human. Of course, when I wake up with a migraine, I'm not going to skip to my yoga mat. And I've woken up with two migraines this week--which is usually the maximum amount of migraines I have in a month. With any luck, I won't have another one for four weeks. However, I still have to get through today. The headache is fading, but I feel a little weak overall, unfocused, and sort of nauseous. I have yet to do yoga today. When I do, I know to avoid a lot of Uttanasana and to skip the inversions all together: I want to minimize poses that send blood rushing to the head. And I'm probably not going to want to hold Utkatasana for very long today because of my nausea. Today is a day for a gentle yoga practice, a restorative yoga practice.

I know that I am the one who decides what qualifies as a day's yoga practice in my challenge. Some people would craft flexible rules for themselves, rules that bend all sorts of ways so that they don't fail. Now I don't want to fail, but I'm kind of a hard a** with myself. I am writing down how much time I spend doing yoga every day, and on days when I'm crafting my own pose sequence, I'm timing it and making sure I keep at it for over 30 minutes. Which is great! But I also have this idea in my head that I'm "cheating" if I spend a day's practice just doing gentle yoga stretches or restorative poses or doing more meditation or breath work. If I really want to practice yoga though, I absolutely have to let go of the idea that I have to break a sweat or feel my muscles burning in my daily practice. Burning calories is not yoga!!!

In fact, only one of the 8 limbs of yoga, as laid out in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, has anything to do with poses and "exercise" at all--the third limb, Asana, which regards body postures. The literal meaning of the word Asana is not "pose" however. It is "seat," often used in the context of a seated position one can comfortably maintain for meditation. As for the other 7 limbs of yoga, they cover morality, personal observances, control of breath, control of the senses, cultivating inner perceptual awareness, meditation on the Divine, and union with the divine. While I may discuss these more at a later date, I refer you to Wikipedia for now!

My point is: with so little importance given to the sweating buckets aspect of yoga, I really must give more attention to the other aspects of yoga. Especially on days like today: practicing Pranayama (breath exercises) and Dhyana (meditation) may actually help alleviate my migraine, and they definitely won't make me feel worse. Focusing on these other limbs of yoga aren't cheating. However, if I focused only on Asanas, I would be cheating myself.

"Meditate, you must. Yes, hmmm."

Namaste!