Wrapped up with a Bow

Sometimes I'd like to be done with something. Like health. I'd like to be complete with health and just have it handled. I'd like to achieve fitness. I'd like to collect yoga poses and just keep them. Even a manicure. I'd like to pay for a manicure to be done professionally and just have it be done. Shaving, waxing, enlightenment, same thing. But all of these things require maintenance.

It's as though I'd like to just pause life. Just take a break over here. Have it wrapped up for a bit with no more todos and all my calls returned and bills paid and boxes checked off.

I'd like to earn the educated badge. Just know something and not have to relearn it all again next week. I'd like to know the software rules and have them not change. How about Facebook? Couldn't it just stay the way it was?

Everything's changing and growing and moving and sometimes I feel like I can't keep up. And we can't keep up with all of it, we really can't. This is where surrender lives. We have to make peace with where we are knowing that stuff, life, is flowing all around us. In addition to letting go, we also have to have effort to be focused and participate and know where we want to go, or just have the discipline to go where we've been told to go.

In yoga it's called, Abhyasa and Vairagya. Effort and focus, and on the other hand, non-attachment and letting go. It's a balance.

Sometimes I'd like it to be out of balance and just be done! I know it's not realistic and that I need to bring some tapas to my practice in that moment. I'm just sharing something that shows up in my awareness sometimes...and I have a feeling you know what I'm talking about!

Yoga "Makes Me" Tired

I could really get going about this topic so I'll try and keep it blog-short. I think people need to rest during the day.

So yesterday this little guy comes up to me after yoga during gym class. He's 11. He tells me, "yoga makes me tired and now I have to go to soccer and I'm too tired." "Dude, yoga does not make you tired. You're tired. Can you have a nap when you get home?" "No, I've got to walk the dog and then I'm at soccer practice." "Okay, try blocking your left nostril, breathe through your right one for a bit and off you go." The guy is scheduled from the time he gets up until 10 pm when he finally gets to lie down again.

People, if you lie down and you feel tired, it's not the lying down that makes you tired. You're freaking tired. Lying down and pausing for a moment reveals to you all sorts of things. Sometimes it can alert you to the fact that you're overworked, super-scheduled, and eventually you will be stressed out and just may get sick or punch somebody or whatever other stressed-out expression people come up with.

My daughter and some friends came up with a plan that would let them have a nap after lunch. It didn't get off the ground. No support from the school. It takes too much work to find a way to kids to lie down. I realize it would be a logistical nightmare if everyone got to lie down for a bit during the day. But we're living in the alternative.

I'm sure that the pendulum was once way over on the other side and we were a bunch of lazy-bums long, long ago. We're not anymore. We're hyper-productive. Or at least we're scheduled that way. We're armies of workers ready to go. Sending ourselves off into battle everyday. We've been brainwashed or "culturally supported" let's say, in the habit of disregarding the body and the spirit, for that matter. And it starts out really young. We're not even out of elementary school before we're stretched to the limit, and not in a good way. Stretch and release is yoga. I don't see the release, the rest, that allows the circulation to return to normal. I see stretch, stretch, stretch, and then collapse.