Week Nineteen: Overcoming inertia

Posted in CULTURE to The Yoga Experiment by gillian gabriel on Wednesday, June 2, 2010 at 4:00 pm

OK, people. I have been skipping yoga class. I'm not proud of it. I wish I didn't have to tell you, but at the beginning of this, I made a commitment to honesty. Something else I'd rather not admit: I haven't been treating my body like the temple it is, and therefore, I have gained (back) about five-ish pounds. Aside from all of that, though, I've been feeling fidgety and restless and GROSS. Yoga, I miss you!

It has been following an all-too-familiar pattern, the pattern that I get into with each healthy-lifestyle endeavor that I have adopted (and later abandoned) in my adulthood. The first few weeks are tough, but I have enough enthusiasm to power through the suckiness. Then, I realize how good I feel and how much progress I'm making, and I throw myself completely into whatever it is. This lasts a couple of months, tops. Then, I either plateau or get bored, or both. I decide to take a break for a day. A week later, I'll take another break, this time maybe I'll take a couple of days off. Then it all collapses. I'm skipping right and left, and gradually, I'll stop thinking in terms of what I'm not doing and life will basically go back to the way it was before I started.

I know I'm not the first person to flake out on an exercise program, or to waver, even; but this time it feels different. I am not a runner or someone who lifts weights, or a tennis player. I am a yogini. Cheesily, I feel as though I have stumbled across my destiny, here. I believe in yoga, I believe that everyone should do it. If everyone did, we'd all be a lot less stressed, and more connected to each other and the world around us. Spiritually, things were clicking. I was starting to feel like I understood something about the universe...

As a massage therapist, I need to hold myself to a higher standard, to lead by example. How can I give practical advice to others if I can't get my own shit together? Besides that, I need to have enough energy and peace of mind available to be able to do a good job. Blah blah blah... you've heard it all from me before.

I guess it all comes down to this: why is it so hard sometimes to do things that are good for you (even if they're kind of fun) and so easy to do things that are bad for you (even if they make you feel crappy afterward)? I think I somehow got the short end of the stick when it came time to dole out dosages of willpower. I know the answer to these questions, I just need to employ mindfulness. Doing something like washing dishes doesn't suck if you are fully there, feeling the water on your hands and scrubbing the plates gently. Right? Whatever. I can see how I get on other people's nerves when I'm all high on life and I have all of the answers.

Persistence! Time to get back to it, I suppose. All of my vacations are over for the forseeable future, and I have nothing that should impede my further progress save my lack of ambition. My mom is coming to visit next week, so maybe her presence will help me snap out of the funk that I have been in. She wants me to take her to yoga class.

Namaste.

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