Whew! It’s been months since I’ve sat down to write. I could list all of the reasons, tell all of the stories, and justify this lapse in eloquent language if that mattered.  But the fact is that it never does. 

 

Writing a blog is a practice, just like learning an instrument, playing a sport or mastering asana or pranayama.   If you want to move forward, it’s going to take some discipline.  If you don’t care, it doesn’t matter.  So, ultimately, like all things, it boils down to intention.  Why run every morning? Why practice asana three times (five times! six times!) a week? Why touch the keys of your piano for at least twenty minutes a day?

 

We recently started offering Ashtanga Yoga at Yogawood.  Zoe Mai is leading these classes in the traditional Mysore style: making us learn the sequence by body and heart, not offering the next posture until the ones before it are memorized and fully ingrained.  Some of these shapes are really hard to achieve, and for students who are used to responding to teachers’ instructions more than following an established pattern, this is a challenge. I’m so happy to be in these classes because this structure and rigor appeals to me.

 

Although I’m generally really efficient when it comes to getting things that I consider work done, I have always found ways around dedicating time for practice.  Like most people, I’ve gravitated toward things that come kind of easily to me, and through repetition, my skill in these things have increased. But steady practice of things solely for my personal development has always been just outside of my experience.

 

When Jill and I opened Yogawood, I thought, “I’m going to practice Yoga every single day!” That hasn’t happened. But my study of Yoga has helped me understand why and has helped me move closer to this aspiration. This new Ashtanga practice has me trolling the Internet, looking for information about what makes this system different from others I’ve encountered before. The Ashtanga Yoga Research Institute posted this little gem that has been helping me understand the challenge of practice:

 

  “In the yoga shastra it is said that God dwells in our heart in the form of light, but this light is covered by six poisons; kama, krodha, moha, lobha, matsarya, and mada. These are desire, anger, delusion, greed, envy and sloth. When yoga practice is sustained with great diligence and dedication over a long period of time, the heat generated from it burns away these poisons, and the light of our inner nature shines forth.”

 

This explanation goes a little further than the explanation of the Niyama of Tapas (there a whole blog posting, here, about this) and helps me recognize the delusion of not having enough time, the sloth in sleeping the extra 15 minutes that make a full practice impossible, and the greed in wanting a full practice or nothing at all. Each time the excuses bubble up, I can name them.  And then I can roll out my mat, or sit at the computer and write, or just do whatever it is that I’m trying to talk myself out of—which is usually something that is just for myself.   

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