Category: Meditation

Family, Marriage, Meditation, Parenting

A theme for the year?

Posted on by kosanford

Around the new year, there is always the discussion of resolutions and change. People set intentions and try, at least for a brief period of time, to be the best version of themselves possible.  I took a class recently with Nina Wise, a local meditation teacher, who said that she doesn’t bother with resolutions anymore because she felt like they had a built-in element of self loathing.  The idea that we need to change something doesn’t seem inherently like self loathing to me, but I understand how, for some people, making and breaking the same resolutions year after year might contribute to a lack of trust in themselves.

She suggested choosing a theme for the year, things like health, honesty, work or family.  Rather than setting goals that include specific elements, having a theme for the year just makes you more conscious of one aspect of your life.  For example, choosing family as a theme may mean that you are more inclined to arrange gatherings, are kinder to your relatives, or more mindful of the small gestures that matter like phone calls and notes to check in.  If your theme is health maybe it is more yoga and meditation, but also more time with friends who make you laugh, more massages and sleep.  Health doesn’t have to mean that you are in the gym three times a week for the month of January and never again.  Health as a theme means taking care of yourself as a whole person, and over a year that could be life changing.

She also spoke about honesty as a theme which I loved.  She suggested developing the habit of asking yourself whether or not your actions support your theme.  In the case of honesty, the questions look something like this:

Is this not true and not helpful? Don’t say it….

Is this not true but helpful? Don’t say it..

Is this true but not helpful? Don’t say it…

Is this true and helpful? Wait for the right time, and say it

The idea of being this mindful of speech is exciting to me. I know that I often speak out of habit, or boredom, or nervousness.  It is a discipline for me to hold a space in loving silence, a discipline that I have worked hard to develop.  My nature leans more toward giggly chattiness rather than thoughtful silence. I hope that this year I will learn how to wait for the right time to offer advice, or to collude with a friend.  I hope that my words will have more power if they are chosen with greater care. Mostly, I just hope that I am helpful.

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Family, Food, Meditation, Parenting, running, Yoga

What if we all tried hibernation?

Posted on by kosanford

It is almost the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year.  More and more I find I have to make deals with myself to get out of bed in the morning, to get out the door to exercise. I’m feeling tremendously lazy, and am unusually interested in carbs.

Thinking of my summer self bounding up into the hills and coming home for a farmers market salad is like listening to a story of someone I knew in grade school.  I can hardly remember who the girl was who had run, and meditated and done yoga all before 10 am.

My first instinct as the days have become shorter and darker, after the farmers market closed for the season, was to ignore those changes and continue on with my routines.  Getting out of bed in the pitch dark, sitting for meditation and a short yoga practice when every ounce of me longed for bed.  Forcing myself out the door and up the hill for a run, despite the grey sky and my heavy legs.  I have been buying expensive out of season produce; I will never forget how scandalized my mother was the first time she saw tangerines and cherries next to each other at the grocery store.  The literal definition of too much of a good thing.  After a few weeks of denying both the clear messages my body was sending and those outside I had a radical idea: what if I slowed down a bit? What if I actually stayed in bed? What if I did everything less…

For the last few weeks I have been doing less, much less.  I have been running barely at all, my yoga practice has been very slow and quiet.  I have extended my meditation practice because sitting feels good right now.  I am eating all the starchy foods that appear this time of year, the squashes, potatoes, and apples.  When it first dawned on me that my body was really telling me it wanted a bit of a break, I thought back on the last few winters when I have not adjusted my program at all.  I have gone at 110% regardless of what the weather suggested or my internal clock required.  Both this spring and last, I started the season nursing injuries of overuse…..It’s stunning to think I needed to learn this lesson twice. Actually more like 39 times.

None of the things that I fear about letting up on my routines have happened.  My jeans all fit. My sleep is just as deep if not deeper.  I am calmer.  I have focused my yoga practice on forward bends and hip-openers. No jumping, nothing fancy. It is more a practice of hibernation than acceleration.  I am hoping that when spring comes that I will feel refreshed and renewed by this period of slowing down.  By actually paying attention to what my body wants, by curling up with a book in front of the fire, and sleeping in, I feel like I am taking care of myself. It’s easy to get confused, to think that going full speed all the time is actually what we need.  It isn’t. It is what we become used to, but that doesn’t mean it’s what we always need. Sometimes we need to pull back, to go inward and slow down. The world will continue to turn.  In fact we may find it turns with fewer creaks and compaints right into spring……

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Family, Marriage, Meditation, Parenting, Yoga

You can always change the station….

Posted on by kosanford

This weekend, after our new kitchen rose to the occasion in a huge way, churning out meals and snacks for our whole family, I felt so full (literally and figuratively) and happy.  Being all gathered together in our new house felt exactly as I had hoped it would.  The sweet spot that lies between abundance and excess. On Saturday after the festivities wound down, I headed to a daylong yoga and meditation retreat. The day itself was grey and rainy and it felt so good to know that I would spend it quietly on my mat with no greater task than to listen.

 

There is nothing I love more than gathering with family and friends but I have learned that to do it well, I need to build in some quiet time on the back end. I can be completely present to those I love if I can practice that silently on my own. Too much silence and I get a little wacky; not enough, and I get even wackier.  Like anything else, I need balance between external merriment and a quiet internal landscape.

 

The workshop was great, a duet between two smart teachers. They skillfully wove yoga, meditation and dharma talks in such a way that at the end of the day, I was ready to go home because I was satisfied, neither stuffed or restless. Like a well-made meal, a workshop should be a good blend of spices and portions; too much and it’s like drinking from a fire hose, too little and you are left feeling empty.

 

During one of the meditations, our teacher Wes Nisker suggested that we view self-criticism as a misguided form of self-care; the idea that the internal voice that releases a steady stream of worries, critique and doubts is actually trying to help you. I thought this was a brilliant shift in perspective on that particular characteristic we all share. My favorite writer, Annie Lamott, calls the self criticism station in her head “k-fucked” radio. It’s the voice that makes it hard to try new things, or is convinced that at any moment everyone is going to find out you are a fraud and it’s curtains. We all have it, and for some people it’s louder than others. Learning to see it as a form of self care seems to make it easier to reconcile it. Rather than resent it, or try and control it, I love the idea of seeing it as a misguided form of self preservation. By thinking of it this way, it seems easier to shake it off. When some familiar worry or self doubt pops up it seems easier to smile and ignore it rather than feel like, “seriously, you again? Get lost..” Instead it becomes a worried, well meaning friend who can’t help themselves. You smile at their efforts and don’t listen to their advice.


We do ourselves no favors worrying about what could go wrong. Instead, we should be focusing our energies and attention on what is actually happening. Like so many things, it’s way harder than it sounds. But, maybe learning to see “k-fucked radio” as just one of our many channels, we will see that we can always change the station.

Meditation, running, Special Needs

Synchronicity as a practice….

Posted on by kosanford

“Sanity comes from a sense of being synchronized within ourselves.”

Irini Rockwell

 

I came across this sentence and felt like it really captured everything that I have come to believe about finding balance in life.  I think everyone has had the experience of being out of sync with ourselves.  Sometimes it is as simple as agreeing to lunch with someone when you don’t really want to, or endorsing an idea you have misgivings about.  Other times it is more complicated: it can be time to change jobs, or end a relationship but inertia keeps you stuck in place.

 

There are millions of suggestions and avenues for creating synchronicity between our internal and external lives.  For me it is a combination of yoga, meditation, and running that provide the space to make sure I am not moving too far from the center.  For someone else, it may be swimming, walking their dog or writing.  We all need something, some sort of barometer of our own wellness.  Without a quiet center built into our lives we can find ourselves distracted by every shiny object or tragedy that life has to offer.

 

When I look at my daughter I am so aware that so many of her issues arise from the fact that it is almost impossible for her to be in sync with the world around her.  This morning she woke up and came running out to the kitchen table where I was sitting quietly, lights dimmed, listening to classical music and having coffee, she let out a growl of delight at the sight of me and jumped up on the bench where I was sitting and started clapping and laughing….it was 6 am. Mae is clinically not aware of the cues around her; being quiet in a library, joyous on her birthday, or patient in a long line, are all possible only if she is in the mood.  What the world wants, is not her concern, but for her that’s normal.  It also doesn’t bother her especially if she has bounded into my quiet morning like a freight train.  She doesn’t do guilt.  She is autistic.

 

For most of us though, we are aware when we are out of sync with ourselves or our world but not always sure how to fix it.  We can acknowledge it; we can say “I am working too much” or “I am working too little,” or “I am tired, sad or depressed.”  Being aware of it is an important step.  The next step is to  define what feeling in sync is for yourself.  We must be clear on what we think balance is, before we can head in that direction.  No matter what avenue you take this requires honest, and loving self reflection. I say honest because sometimes we get confused by what we think sanity looks like, and what it really looks like for each of us.  That serene woman in front of me in a yoga class may be sane, but I can’t be her, so I have to think about what serenity would look like in my life not my fantasy version of hers.


I am always interested in how to make things a practice, so I made a list of the areas in my life where I feel out of sync.  Some are big; am I professionally fulfilled and does it matter? And some are small: it bothers me that there is a cord hanging out of the family room ceiling.  Obviously, one of these things has an easy answer and the other doesn’t.  The point is not to have all the answers.  It is more to identify the questions, and then create some sort of framework to bring things back into alignment with each other.  The first part of the practice is creating the questions and the second part is moving to address them in practical ways.  Just engaging in the thinking process about balance seems to make me more balanced.  Almost always it is the effort not the outcome that has value.

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Family, Marriage, Meditation, Parenting, Special Needs, Yoga

Love is not a limited resource…..

Posted on by kosanford

One of my earliest memories is of  standing in the grocery store with my mother and looking at a total stranger, keeping my eyes on them until I felt like I loved them as much as my parents.  I remember playing this game in stores, restaurants, and on the highway, staring at strangers until I felt the sensations that I associated with love.  A feeling of warmth in my chest, a kind of tingling in my arms and hands, a sense of connection even though the person wasn’t someone I knew at all.  I guess from a very early age I was interested in how my mind could influence or create sensation in my body.

 

What I didn’t realize was that I was practicing my own form of a Loving Kindness meditation. Love is a virtually unlimited resource, it is what gets us up in the morning; it is what sustains us through our darkest hours and lifts us to our greatest joys.  In my own life I define love as a sense of connection and a generosity of spirit that makes me feel safe and expansive at the same time.  Sometimes when life is busy, or we are feeling run down, that sense of connection to others can feel out of reach.  Practicing a Loving Kindness meditation for just a few minutes a day can shift our whole sense of what interdependence feels like.  The formal practice of this meditation requires you to find a quiet place, and sit with eyes open or closed.  Start by visualizing someone who you love unconditionally.  Focus on the image of that person in your mind’s eye until you can feel the sensation in the body that you associate with love.  Often you will find that you are smiling.  You will send that person the message:

May you be happy

May you be healthy

May you be safe

May you be at ease

Repeat these phrases in your head a few times as you hold that image of your beloved person in your mind. Then the practice dictates replacing the image of that person with an image of yourself and sending yourself these very same messages.  From yourself you move to an acquaintance and eventually to someone with whom you have conflict.  Each time you repeat the same phrases, sending these messages of love and generosity out into the world.  The very last part of the practice is sending these messages universally in the hopes that they reach all who need them.

The formal practice of Loving Kindness meditation is intensely powerful, and I encourage everyone to explore it. Recently, I have found myself returning to my own made-up version of it from childhood. Practicing not in a quiet room away from the world but instead in the hardware store, or the library, focusing my attention on someone (usually their back, so it isn’t weird) until I can feel a sense of loving them.  There is something about this practice that makes me happy, that makes me feel like I have tapped into an amazing source of good feeling that exists all the time.  Whether it is practiced formally or informally, working to spread love and kindness in today’s busy, intensely complicated world seems like an awfully good use of one’s time

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Family, Marriage, Meditation

On any given day……..

Posted on by kosanford

mae every dayI have a very dear friend who lost both her father and beloved uncle in a very short period of time.  For years afterwards, when she was talking about any situation that was disappointing or inspired any feelings of sadness, she would start the sentence by saying, “I know no one is dead but…”  It was as if after the immense pain and trauma of the initial loss she felt she was never entitled to feel sad again.  I understand this; in the years since Mae’s diagnosis, the tsunami of disappointment and sadness that we wrestled with made any daily disappointments seem trivial.  For a long time I would fail to even register irritation of any kind, even when I started to return to myself.  I would dismiss annoyances by reminding myself that I had a child with Autism, and therefore this broken car mirror, or internet that won’t work, or any number of other minor bothers weren’t worth my time.

In some ways, though, this is problematic. After my wedding, a very joyful day, I didn’t imagine that I would never feel equal happiness again.  Nor did I compare everyday moments of contentment to the major rush of happiness that accompanied our wedding.  Imagine if after a long, delightful day at the beach with our family I turned to Colin and said, “Well that was fun. I am happy —  I mean not like wedding happy — but happy.” I am not sure he would feel like it was a positive assessment.

We don’t wear our happy experiences like armor to protect us from future happiness, so why do we feel that our painful experiences should protect us from future discomfort?  There is no amount of perspective that will make you immune to the ups and downs of an ordinary life.  Every day is filled with opportunities to feel virtually every emotion available.  In any given hour, I can have my feelings hurt, I can laugh, I can be embarassed, I can be in love.  That can go on all the time every day. It’s exhausting just thinking about it.

I think that perspective is only valuable if it doesn’t prevent you from really feeling everything, both good and bad.  It is okay to be annoyed even if it is just because your pedicure was smudged.  I can also be inordinately happy when Mae’s very expensive almond milk yogurts are on sale.  Yesterday, I was practically giddy because while I was walking the dog she expertly pooped in a mouse hole of some sort, which meant I did not have to bag it and carry it home.  It was thrilling.  I decided the dog was a genius, and my days of picking up poop were over. By the time I got home I had forgotten about it completely because I noticed that the molding under the door was loose and I was immediately absorbed in how to fix it.

It is unfortunate that we can never be inoculated against sadness, embarrassment or irritation. There is no quota on disappointment in life, some have more, some have less.  By the same token we have endless opportunities for joy; there is no limit on what can bring a smile to your face even in the darkest of moments.  I am grateful for the perspective that being a special needs parent has given me, I am empowered by it.  I never wonder what I am made of and that is a very good feeling.  At the same time, I have to remember that just because I have perspective doesn’t mean I should deny or ignore the ordinary bumps that come up in a day.  Some days are great: you get married, you have babies, you see old friends. Some moments are great: you laugh hard, your daughter speaks, your children are swimming together, your dog poops in a hole.  Some days are awful: your daughter is sick, you have crazy medical bills, your car won’t start, you have hurt the feelings of someone you love…Sometimes it can all happen in the same day, because life is like that. Just the way we would never say that a balanced meal is made up entirely of desserts a balanced life is filled with every emotion.  The important thing is to allow yourself to really feel, to really connect to the life that you are having, because up or down, it is the one you have.

 

2
Meditation, running, Yoga

All the good advice you ignore…

Posted on by kosanford

I regularly ignore good advice.  We all do.  How many times have you flipped passed an article about how much we need regular sleep, or tuned out a news story on the benefits of stretching? When I make a choice that I know is not the healthiest one, it is usually because I am taking the path of least resistance, sticking with a habit rather than making a change.

There is inertia associated with change, even positive change.  Sometimes, if you have been doing something one way for a long time or developed a habit that doesn’t seem harmful in the short term, you even forget that change is possible.  I was reminded of this last week during a run.  These days I am running every morning on trails near our house that stretch in every direction for miles.  Rather than turning to head back home on the usual trail, I decided to head left on a trail I had never been on before.  I figured that it looped up at some point to a road I would recognize.  It was a beautiful morning, and as I ran farther and farther in this unknown direction I kept reminding myself that I wasn’t lost.  I could turn around and re-trace my steps at any moment.  I had no phone and no water with me.  I never take those things when I run, I like to be as unencumbered as possible during that brief period of my day.

After a long time I realized that if this trail did have an ending point it was not going to be near my house, so I turned around and retraced my steps.  It ended up being a five hour run.  I am not exaggerating when I say that by the end birds of prey were slowly circling the sky overhead.  I was so thirsty when I got home that I felt like I could have stood outside with the garden hose to my mouth for the rest of the day and still want more.

It is not as if carrying water when you run is hard to do, or that hydration being an important component of exercise is a carefully guarded secret.  Every running book and magazine expounds the benefits of proper hydration.  It’s just that I could run without it, and since I could manage fine it didn’t occur to me that hydrating during a run might improve the experience.

After my adventure on the trails I decided that I should run with water and was amazed at the number of devices they have created to make that as easy as possible.  I chose the one that was right for me, a nifty handheld situation which I barely notice at all.  The kicker is that running with water is way better.  I find that I am faster and much less beat up when I come home.  Again, this is not a newsflash; just a small change that vastly improves a good experience I was already having.

Our lives are filled with things like this, things as ordinary as a tree branch that hangs into the driveway or a purse strap that is slightly too long or bigger things like not getting regular exercise or not sleeping enough.  We become accustomed to ignoring changes that we could be making in our habits and simply adapt to the situation. Some adaptations are about survival but many are simply due to inertia.  I have been reminded by this experience that a small change in behavior can yield big rewards.  Instead of ignoring the tree in the driveway, go trim it and you will feel better every time you drive by; instead of staying up to hit “refresh” one more time on the computer at 11 pm, head to bed with a book at 10.  There is plenty of good advice we all ignore, sometimes it is as simple as deep breath or a softening of the jaw.  I think really the best advice is to pay attention to your habits: are they really serving you, and if they aren’t, can you make a small change? As simple and obvious as bringing water on a run. 

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Meditation, Parenting, Special Needs, Uncategorized, Yoga

It doesn’t just happen….

Posted on by kosanford
Buddha courtesy of www.lotussculpture.com
Buddha courtesy of http://www.lotussculpture.com

In her book A Heart as Wide as the World Sharon Salzberg describes “effort” as the “unconstrained willingness to persevere through difficulty.” She goes on to say, “Effort is the willingness to open where we have been closed, to come close to what we have avoided, to be patient with ourselves, to let go of preconceptions.”

I love the phrase “unconstrained willingness to persevere.”  I think for many of us in our lives we are many things to so many people and we have taken on many different kinds of tasks.  Sometimes a kind of automatic pilot can kick in.   We understand how to make our lives work and so we move forward, effortlessly. There is nothing wrong with being good at what you do, or having an established work or parenting pattern.  But when something is effortless, are you connected to it? In yoga when we teach the very first pose, Tadasana, people will almost always say “you mean I just stand here?”  The answer is “sort of.”  If you are really thinking, however, about your balance and engaging the muscles of your legs and the position of your spine and shoulders you will find that it takes effort.  You will even start to build some heat in your body, it is important to figure out the alignment in that first standing pose because it will be relevant to every other pose you do, including even the fanciest of arm balances.

The same is true in our lives.  If we construct our lives in such a way that they require very little focused effort, we start to feel disconnected from ourselves and the people and things we care about most. One of the reasons I believe that having a special needs child has been an incredible gift is that her unpredictability and the effort it takes to be her parent mean that I can never really slide towards autopilot.  She is the ultimate reminder to wake up and pay attention because life is happening, and of course if you take your eyes off her for a minute she is hanging from the rafters…..So that is motivation to stay present.

The word “unconstrained” is perfect to describe the effort we should put into our lives and relationships.  It implies that unlimited potential is possible if we let ourselves live fully.  We all have lists of things in our heads that we would like to do. They don’t have to be lofty. They can be as mundane as cleaning the kitchen or as vast as enlightenment for all beings.  They both take effort, attention and mindfulness. It is tempting when we meet people we admire, such as great teachers, writers or artists, to imagine that they were born with skills we were not.  It is true that someone who is destined to be seven feet tall because of their genetics is more likely to play professional basketball than someone who never makes it to six feet.  However, there is enormous effort, and concentration that goes into being an athlete even if one is born with some of the cards stacked in your favor.  When I have met great meditation and yoga teachers, I am always amazed and maybe a little envious of what they know and how easily they seem to convey their knowledge.  What it is important to remember is that this wisdom took effort and discipline. It took focus and perseverance. Wishing for knowledge or clarity but not undertaking the learning is like wishing to be in the NBA and never picking up a basketball.

Right Effort is part of the Buddha’s Eightfold Noble Path.  It is the fundamental belief that it takes effort to wake up to the full awareness available to us all.  In my mind it is the difference between being able to drive a car so spaced out that I don’t even notice that I have been listening to commercials, and driving a car with full attention to what I hear, what I see and what I am doing.  From the outside both experiences are identical, but inside they are completely different  Yoga and meditation are two ways we can practice mindfulness and attention, but any activity can become a mindfulness exercise.  It just takes effort and perseverance and the unconstrained willingness to believe that every moment is an opportunity to practice being awake.  It is this practice, this effort of returning our attention repeatedly to where we are and what we are doing, that will help us realize that we have everything we need for real sustainable, wakeful joy.

3
Meditation, Parenting, Special Needs

Wrestling the Fearosaurus

Posted on by kosanford

Anxiety is an extremely unpleasant sensation.  It is the place where fear of the unknown meets fear of the future, and they throw a huge fear carnival that can affect your whole system.  There very specific physical responses we have to anxiety, a sense of elevated heart rate, a dry mouth, an inability to be still or think clearly.

These are real physiological responses to what your body perceives as a threat.  Even if that threat is manufactured in some internal fear factory that is busily creating scary scenarios, your body cannot tell the difference.  It responds to anxiety that is generated internally with the same enthusiasm as if it were an external attack.  The problem is that our sympathetic nervous systems were designed to quicken our heart rates and slow down all our functions so we could escape from animals that were going to eat us.  It was a system that was designed for short bursts of lifesaving action.  Instead, for many people they have found themselves living in a state where this system is always on.

There is no question that we live in stressful times.  Reading the headlines right now is enough to make anyone feel vulnerable and scared.  When you add into it the day to day headlines of our own lives, filled with the regular victories and tragedies that befall us all, it can be hard not to feel overwhelmed.  Our incredibly, amazingly well designed bodies, however, come equipped with a second system to counteract the effects of the sympathetic nervous system.  It is the parasympathetic nervous system.  It signals to our body that we are safe, that we are at ease, that we can digest our food and our heart can beat normally.

The thing to remember is that both these systems are triggered and controlled by our perception of danger. If I am sleeping peacefully and am attacked by a dinosaur before I ever saw it, then I never had the chance to perceive it and become afraid. My sympathetic nervous system never went to battle stations, accelerating my heart rate and making me strangely alert and focused on getting away from the attacker as my only goal.  The reverse is also true.  If I lie in bed thinking of terrible scenarios that I perceive to be real then my body will respond as if they are.

The key is to look honestly at what messages we are sending to our body.  Are we running around all the time, claiming we are incredibly busy and extremely stressed and then wondering why our body is in a strange nervous overdrive?  Perceiving that there is never enough time, or that everything is going to fall apart at any moment is a habit.  It is a habit of mind with serious ramifications in the body.

The only way to break the habit is to look at our thoughts, honestly, gently and with compassion for ourselves.  Can you identify thought patterns that don’t serve you? Do you have habits that feed your anxious state? If you find yourself in an endless cycle of stress then try introducing new habits as a way to break it.  Instead of waking up every day and immediately checking email and the news, maybe go for a walk or sit for meditation.  Stress is a habit we reinforce without meaning to.  Sometimes the most effective remedy is just to change our routines a little; maybe then we can see more clearly what is triggering our anxiety.


Seeing clearly can come from setting aside a quiet time every day, seated in meditation, going for a walk, riding the subway, when all we do is watch our own mind. I have come to think of my meditation practice as a kind of internal eavesdropping, listening to the conversation that goes on in my head all the time, even when I am unaware of it.  What are the topics I am returning to?  Are they serving me, or are they keeping me stuck?  I cannot learn to let go of them until I identify them.  

If you are feeling like you are in overdrive spend some time just listening to your thoughts.  Are you spending your days in a cycle of what ifs? If you find that you are trapped in a cycle of repetitive and anxiety-producing thoughts you need to work to break the cycle.  The first strategy is to notice the signs, the accelerated heart rate and quickening of breath.  Go for a walk, take 10 deep breaths, call a friend.  The key is to recognize that you are safe, that this feeling you are experiencing is a product of your own perception.  It is a thought that seems more real because it has a physical presentation, and fairies and unicorns don’t.

Listen to your own mind.  Listen carefully and without judgment.  Pay attention to your habits and start to see if you can change the ones that don’t serve you.  There is no magic to mindfulness. It just means learning to listen to our thoughts and know the difference between the real dinosaurs and the ones we breathe life into ourselves.

4
Meditation, Yoga

My not on purpose no yoga experiment

Posted on by kosanford

photo (1)You know when you read about scientists who set out to do an experiment where the outcome sounds obvious? I recently read about a study where scientists had one group of overweight sedentary men change nothing about their diet, and another add an apple a day.  The expectation was that the apple group’s cholesterol and overall health would be improved with the addition of the fruit.  Instead, the Granny Smith apples that the test group added to their diet had enough sugar to spike their insulin and create further mayhem in their bodies —  really the opposite of what you would imagine.

I have done a not-on-purpose experiment this summer on my body.  I have barely been doing yoga, I have made it to a handful of classes; instead I sat in the car for not one but two drives across the country and carried a gajillion boxes.  My shoulders have certainly suffered as I have used them to hold the tension of all the what-ifs of our move.  I would think to myself almost once a day that I really needed to get to my mat to relieve some of this tightness and tension that was building in my body.  But carving out an hour or an hour and a half to make it to a class just wasn’t happening.

So last week, I finally rolled my mat back out.  I actually was kind of afraid to get on it.  I thought my body would hurt and really resist.  I believed that no yoga for a whole summer was going to wreak havoc on my muscles, which would scream in agony at the first stretch, because that seemed logical, the same way an apple a day would improve health.

It didn’t hurt.  In fact it felt great.  It was my mind that was resistant not my body.  I was really hung up on the time it would take to practice.  I just didn’t feel like sacrificing an hour and a half of my day to go to a class with the result that I wasn’t doing any yoga.  I think we all do this in some form or another.  We create obstacles or resistance instead of scaling down our expectations. There is no reason to practice for an hour and a half.  I can practice for twenty minutes and that is way better than nothing.

I have been practicing consistently for the last week.  Sometimes it is a couple of poses and sometimes it is an hour.  I feel much better.  The hard part was getting back on the mat, not the yoga.  I think that so often I don’t take action because I am convinced that I don’t have time or bandwidth for the outcome.  I often put off reaching out to friends because I think that I will need to be on the phone for hours to catch up when often a simple note saying I am thinking of them will do, and is certainly better than nothing.  If you don’t have time to clean your room, make your bed.  If you don’t have time for yoga class that’s fine, do a pose, or two, or three.

I thought my not-on-purpose no-yoga experiment would leave me with an aching body.  It didn’t really.  It actually showed me that getting on my mat is not actually about my body at all. My body was fine.  It got right back on board.  What I learned from the experiment was that my resistance is all self created.   I don’t always have to do the whole task, project or class, but I can start somewhere and do something…..which is almost always better than nothing.

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