Regaining Practices

There are lots of sayings. Can’t see the forest for the trees, elephant in the room, wearing blinders… Lots of ways of saying it’s sometimes hard to see what’s right in front of you.

I taught yoga for years, and one of my most strongly held beliefs related to yoga is that your practice on the mat is literal practice for life. How you show up on the mat informs how you show up in life, and the resilience you build here can help you elsewhere. That’s not a unique opinion by any means, but it’s the one that really resonates with me and influenced how I taught. The ritual of practice, setting an intention, some pranayama, moving through postures, savasana, it brings balance and stability.

So when personal tragedies have hit me… for some reason those practices were the first to fall apart. Why? I don’t know, and it’s frustrating. How can you know what’s best for you and then choose not to do them? Is it self sabotage? Am I just an idiot? All that training and all those years of practice are nothing? It’s something that I’ve sat in meditation over to try to answer for myself.

Did I come to some sort of epiphany? Nope. Maybe it’s that watching a YouTube video or reading Reddit was less commitment, or I spent too much emotional energy and didn’t have enough physical energy left to practice? Maybe. Maybe I am an idiot and am sabotaging myself after all.

What did I do? I decided to take this as a life lesson, and an opportunity to rediscover some of those practices all over again, bringing the mindset of a beginner and rediscovering the strength and resilience that I find in my practices. And it’s not a complete reset, I have been practicing through those times, just not as much as I used to. And that’s okay.

Turns out the thing I couldn’t see was right in front of me the whole time: the mat was still there.