Observe how your emotions play out in your body. Where do you physically feel your frustration? In your jaw? Your hands? Your hips? How do your shoulders fall when you are sad? And when you are happy? Notice if this practice of observation allows you to move through your emotions with more ease – or gives you tools to intentionally guide a shift in your emotions.
Surrendering to Support
Living Yoga Themes”Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses, who are only
waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage.
Perhaps everything terrible is, in its deepest sense, something helpless that needs our love.”
Rainer Maria Rilke
I’ve been exploring the concept of support in my classes this week.
First, by looking at the structural support of the postures – the foundation or building blocks. And secondly, by exploring that support as a source of ease. In Yoga Mind, Body & Spirit, Donna Farhi presents support as a key movement principle, and she writes:
Whatever part of the body touches the ground becomes the structural base of support. This base dictates what the rest of the body can or cannot do. When support is lacking in the base of a movement, the structures higher up compensate by supporting rather than being supported.
A lack of support leads to a unnecessary increase in effort, whereas a connection with support allows for a giving over of effort (or a receiving of ease). And, for me, the real beauty in this principle of movement lies in its application off the yoga mat.
Giving over to support – whether to ones hands or ones friend – requires a surrendering, a willingness to be vulnerable, and from this vulnerability stems possibility. The possibility of staying present with the ease that this support allows as we navigate through the challenges of life.
Sources of support in our lives can vary from a yoga practice, to a friend, to a pet, to a hobby, to a journal. And, sometimes support doesn’t look like support. It may come in the shape of a challenge or an obstacle that allows us to develop a quality like patience or forgiveness.
I invite you to consider sources of support in your own life, where you might be exerting unnecessary effort, and how you might allow yourself to surrender more fully to the support surrounding you.
What difference does a day make?
Living Yoga Meditation YogaWhen I was taking her class last October, Julie Peters mentioned that she was in the midst of a personal 40-Day Meditation Challenge. Her commitment was to practice meditating for 11 minutes every day for 40 days. I had been negotiating a daily meditation practice for a few years, but I hadn’t ever thought to approach it in such a structured and succinct way – and I was sold!
With the craziness of the holiday season looming, I decided to take on a 61-Day Meditation Challenge. Each day in November and December, I committed to 15 minutes of meditation practice. The challenge wasn’t always easy, but I made it through without missing a day. And, the noticeable impact of this committed practice inspired me to go bigger.
Starting January 1, 2011, as a New Years commitment, I took on a 365-Day Meditation Challenge. I set out to practice meditation for 15 minutes every day for the entire year. And, I stuck to this commitment, no matter how much I didn’t want to or didn’t feel like I had time to, until April 30.
I had followed through with my commit to practice meditation for 180 days in a row – and then, I missed a day. April 30 was an intense, emotional and draining day, and I completely forgot to sit for 15 minutes. I realized the next morning that I had missed a day for the first time since November 1.
Missing a day felt a lot less tragic than I imagined it would. I moved through it with compassion, and I stayed grounded in knowing that the significance of a 365-Day Challenge is not the perfect completion of it, but the day-to-day lessons of the journey. And, missing a day has turned into one of the most powerful lessons of the experience thus far.
Since missing a day, I have noticed a shift in my relationship with the practice. When I feel resistance towards fitting the 15 minute sit into my day, there is a new voice that joins in to support the resistance. This voice offers that missing a day isn’t really that big of a deal or that I’ve done some other sort of practice during the day that makes up for skipping 15 minutes of sitting. This voice was not present before April 30.
Since missing one day, I have found the commitment noticeably harder to keep, and I have missed two additional days since then.
I have learned that unfaltering commitment is unquestionably easier to maintain than faltering commitment. In other words, once a commitment has been broken it is infinitely harder to stay committed, and a common expression capturing this idea is “Once a cheater, always a cheater.”
While the expression is usually used within the context of a committed romantic relationship, it can be taken to a much more global level: once you cheat on a commitment that you have made (to yourself or someone else), it will become significantly more challenging not to cheat on that commitment again.
Whether it is one day of meditation, one kiss, one cookie or one day not going to the gym, I have learned the answer to the question: What difference does one make?
And the answer is all the difference in the world.
When you break a commitment, it is broken – and it takes a great deal more strength and will power to fully recommit.
So with this post begins my 210-Day Meditation Challenge!
