I love lists. Really, I do. I have at least 8 things to say about how much I love lists, but I’ll try to keep it a little more brief than that.
Lists make me feel like I’m organized, even when I’m not. Lists break up what can feel like an unconquerable mass of tasks into reasonable parts that I can cope with. Lists help me allocate my time. Lists help me prioritize. Lists give me a visual sense of where I am in a day/week/month/job. Lists give me a sense of accomplishment when I can check items off.
Really, the only thing I don’t like about lists most of the time is that I haven’t figured out how to effectively use my iDevices voice recognition features to make and manage lists (maybe I need an app for that – got one?).
I’m also very goal oriented. I like to have clear goals and I like to meet them.
Sometimes, in my yoga life, these two things combine in a way that is not ideal. I have a general goal for how often I would like to do yoga in a week. And, sometimes, I can slip into the mindset that I need to “check off” yoga on my list of things to do. I start to want to get the yoga done just so that I can mark it off the mental list.
That’s a problem, in many ways. It causes me to be overly focused on the “get it done” aspect of yoga, so that I forget to pay attention to the “every moment” part of it. It pushes me to take yoga classes even on days when my body might not be willing or able to do so safely. It causes me to become anxious or angry when I have to miss a class. These aren’t very yogic outcomes.
Ultimately, doing yoga is a process. It is a doing, and not a done. The practice is ongoing, and not constrained to a particular class or a particular pose. It requires and helps us facilitate mindfulness and awareness to every moment and what is happening in body and mind in those moments (even the moments where one or the other cannot manage an asana class). Doing yoga can happen on days when absolutely no asana is done, and it’s certainly possible to do some of the physical postures without ever doing yoga.
So, I know that yoga is not a check box item. I struggle with it sometimes, but I believe it. And that belief, on most days, is enough to keep it off the to-do list and just in the to be.
We have a little joke in my house. Well, it’s not exactly a joke, because I’m usually pretty annoyed when I say it, but it has a joke history. You know how people tend to select the wrong word when there are two words that are spelled similarly (like “then” and “than,” “to” and “too”)? One of those mistakes, that I see often online, is loose instead of lose. “I hope I start loosing weight soon on this diet.” So, when I get really stressed out at home, I tend to announce, “If ____ doesn’t stop soon, I will LOOSE my mind!”
body could do. And then it was about calm and peace. And eventually, it was about yoga. I’m not saying that there aren’t still days when I get annoyed at myself because I can’t do a pose or feel envious that someone else can, but I don’t see those things as “me.” I just see them as the moment. Yoga does that for me, because on any one day, I’m a different me than I was the day before in a class, and I’ll be different again tomorrow. My mind has a different texture, a different process, a different sense of the world. In one class, I find it easy to be on my mat (mentally) and keep my focus in the present. In the next session, I can’t stop worrying about work, or the curtains I’m sewing for the family room. My breath will happily stay in ujjayi for a whole practice on Wednesday, and then on Friday I cannot maintain it for 2 breaths in a row. My body can do a pose one day and then refuse to do it completely the next day (in fact, last Friday, it did a move 3 times in one hour, and then the following hour couldn’t even approach it). It will shock me completely by going into a complicated arm balance on one side, and then refuse to even consider vasishtasana on the other side.