I’ve been saying for the past few months that I think it would be a good idea to do one whole class with only modifications… no chaturanaga, no grabbing the toe in side plank, no binding, knee on the ground in lunge… etc. Just to sort of force me to drop my ego and stop pushing myself so hard. That said, I’ve yet to do it… maybe telling you all about it will hold me accountable to do it.

When I had my class in child’s pose yesterday I found myself saying something along the lines of:

“Take your child’s pose as seriously as you do your other poses because in yoga resting poses are just as important, if not more important, than the more physically demanding poses. It gives you a chance to reset and to recharge so that you can start fresh and move forward. Which, is also a lot like life. In life if you just keep pushing and pushing and pushing yourself you will inevitably burn out, and you will most likely be unhappy.”

It makes sense. In our society we are taught that in order to achieve you need to strive and to strive means no breaks. You need to go and go and go and this has translated much into the yoga mentality. Granted, hot power vinyasa yoga is a yoga based in intense movement. But it’s also a yoga based on listening to your body and taking the breaks you need to. In life we need to start doing that as well. You work hard for a semester and give yourself a week off. You work a lot of overtime and take that extra vacation day to get a massage. You do yoga 6 days in a row and give yourself a day of rest. And these days of rests are not us being weak, or lazy, or selfish. They are us taking care of ourselves so that we can recharge, reboot, and forge ahead once again.

The ideal direction of life I guess to most people is a straight line up. Unfortunately the ideal is very unrealistic. I’d like to say life is more like a staircase. You take steps up and then you level off for a little and then you start again. And sometimes, obviously, life jokes with you and makes you trip down, or worse, up, the stairs, but you stand back up, take a step up, and then level off.

One other thing I learned yesterday during class was that my ability to create metaphors also needs some work… the staircase makes sense to me. But so did the Jenga metaphor for triangle pose yesterday too.