Category: Life

The Yoga of Showing Up

Confession time: I have been busy lately. So busy, in fact, that I thought I was still posting this on a Monday when it is, in fact, Tuesday. Yes, I have officially lost track of time and missed my self-imposed deadline while thinking I was maintaining it.

In light of living in the kind of busyness that throws tracking what day of the week it is out of my brain’s window in favour of tracking where I should be next, you may not be surprised that I haven’t been keeping up with my yoga practice like I should be. Not even “should” – I haven’t been keeping up with my yoga practice like I want to be.

Just like it’s so easy for politicians to cut funding to the arts when the economy gets rough, it’s so easy to let your yoga practice be the first thing that slips when life gets busy. No matter how much we talk about how essential it is to a balanced life, at the end of the day it just seems a little expendable, doesn’t it? When you weigh and measure all the things demanding a piece of your 24 hour day, sometimes preparing for the board meeting, going to work on time, writing that paper, or going to back-to-back-to-back rehearsals take the priority.

While I’m not about to advocate skipping work to do your yoga practice, I am about to advocate for shifting your expectation of what your yoga practice really is so that you can fit it in. You know the saying “50% of life is just showing up”? Well, let’s bring that to our yoga mats – and then, of course, find ways to take it off our yoga mats.

My instructor in yoga teacher training once told us that if we feel like we don’t have time for our daily yoga practice, we should simply do the following: roll out our yoga mat, stand at the end of it in tadasana, and then roll that sucker right back up and put it away. There. We’ve done our yoga for the day.

The truth of the matter is that once you get into tadasana, you’re probably going to feel silly about just putting your mat away and maybe you’ll stretch forward into uttanasana. Then you might step back into a lunge and lift your arm into a twist. Then you’ll need to do the other side to be even, and so it will go until you’ve followed your body through whatever it needs for a yoga practice that day. Suddenly, you’ve found the time for yoga that you didn’t know you had!

The most difficult part, usually, is getting over that initial hump of forcing yourself to show up. Once you get there, you’ll find it’s easy (or easier than you think) to make the space you need for a quick practice. You may wind up finding a whole hour of time, or only 5-10 minutes for some invigorating flow. Even if you don’t find any extra time and you actually just stand in tadasana for 30 seconds, you have officially shown up and taken a moment out of your day that is 100% for you, and that’s what matters the most.

This afternoon on CBC they were discussing just this concept – the topic was willpower and the speaker was talking about how we imagine a lot of activities (especially the “shoulds” like working out or cleaning) to be a lot harder than they actually are. We psych ourselves up for inordinate amounts of time avoiding something and telling ourselves how much work it will be. However, once we actually get there and do it, research has shown again and again that the task usually isn’t really that hard. In fact, it’s often even enjoyable. The hardest part is showing up.

Speak Your Truth

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I just finished reading Eleanor Rigby by Douglas Coupland, and there was one quote that really stuck out for me:

“No one is boring who is willing to tell the truth about himself.”

What I love about this quote is how it speaks so directly to my two loves in life: yoga and theatre (surprised?).

In yoga, you can’t lie to yourself. Sure, you can try to push yourself farther than you’re actually able to, but that will only take you so far. In the end, if you’re going to have a successful practice, you have to be honest and accept your truth. Your hidden foibles, quirks, and talents will become obvious to you, and if anyone was watching you (like say, your instructor who should be keeping an eye on you), they’ll see it to. Not to make you self-conscious while you’re practicing – that’s really the beauty of it all! Everyone has foibles, quirks, and talents and most of the time we hide and control them with all our might. During yoga you’re free to be honest, to tell the truth about yourself, and to be incredibly interesting.

How about theatre? Theatre is the art of telling stories. No, they aren’t always true stories, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t truth in them. If you frequent the theatre, think back to the last show you saw that had that magical extra something. The show that grabbed your heart and didn’t let go until the lights came up. Why did it do that? Because it was speaking truth. Pure and simple. Whether it was speaking truth with lots of flashy costumes and effects, one person on a stage in a coffee shop, or accompanied by singing and dancing, the play grabbed your heart because it spoke a truth that connects with your truth. And you couldn’t look away.

So speak your truth! You can practice living your truth in yoga, you can experience it in the safety of a darkened theatre, but ultimately, it’s all about bringing your truth off the mat, out of the risers, and into your daily life.

How’s that for a little yoga \ theatre \ life?

Happiness in the Moment

There’s an ongoing study happening using the power of smart phones. Yep, finally someone’s using these things for good! (The only reason I say that is because I still don’t have one, otherwise I’m sure I would think that everything you do with them is for the good of humanity).

The study is an interesting one. It’s called Track Your Happiness, and they have an app that goes off periodically and asks people what they’re doing, if they enjoy that activity, what they’re thinking about, and how they’re feeling. Before anyone starts worrying about the validity of using an iPhone app for a psychological experiment, I’ll point out that before smart phones existed, researches have been giving people pagers or other devices that go off at random intervals and ask them to do something (usually, like this one, to record what they’re doing and their mood, or something along those lines). While there are some drawbacks to the technique, it is a great way to get in-the-moment data from the real lives of your participants, as opposed to asking them how they would theoretically feel in a hypothetical situation.

What they found in this study is that regardless of what people were doing – if it was something they enjoyed or not – they were the happiest when they were thinking about what they were doing in that moment. Happier even than if people were thinking about something else that was positive; distracting themselves from an unpleasant task by thinking about something they enjoyed.

So being in the moment, being present in whatever you’re doing at the time, will leave you happier than daydreaming about the future or mulling over the past.

To me this is one of these sort of magical scientific discoveries that uncovers some of the other-worldly power our minds truly have. The act of being present in your body, in your activity, and in the moment, is an act that will increase your happiness! It makes sense when you think about it – when you think about the past or daydream about the future, what you’re telling yourself is that the present isn’t good enough. That it’s not interesting or fun or challenging enough for you, which by extension means that to a degree you are not interesting or fun or challenging enough. On the other hand, focusing on the task at hand tells your brain that what you’re doing has some kind of value and therefore that you are valuable for doing it. It also makes you more likely to do a good job, another recipe for increased happiness.

So give it a shot! Next time you find yourself daydreaming about something other than what you’re doing, direct your mind back to the task at hand. A great place to try this out, of course, is your yoga practice. Holding an unpleasant pose is the perfect time to send your mind far, far away from yourself, but what happens if you stick with it? Where will you end up?

Election Day!

If you live in Canada, today is a big day. Election day!

Cue the lights, cue the music, cue the voter turnout!

Voter apathy is a huge problem here in Canada. The last election had incredibly low turnout at the polls, especially among young people.

I’m not going to go into all the reasons why people don’t vote and my views on how the electoral system could be made better because, well, there is a time and a place for that, and I’m pretty sure that time and place was the political science paper I wrote in first year.

There are a few points, however, that I would like to make about voting.

Point One: There are people around the world right now who are quite literally dying for the opportunity to do what we’re doing here for the third time in six years. Yes, that is an awful lot of elections to have, but isn’t it better than the alternative? Shouldn’t we be enjoying our democratic rights instead of wishing we didn’t have to fulfill them?

Point Two: One of the many reasons I practice yoga is to practice change. There are things in myself and things in the world I’m not all that fond of, and when I practice with dedication, both on and off the mat, I am working towards bettering those things. Voting is part of that. Yes, that’s right, I just made the yoga=voting connection, and I’m not turning back.

Point Three: Know what else is about change? Theatre. Art. We create to make our “what-ifs” a reality and see what they could become. We create to explore where we’re going, where we’ve been, and to envision a better world. (Side note that if you are interested in arts and culture in this election, there is a great post by Rebecca Coleman outlining the arts and culture platforms of the major parties here.)

So vote and speak for your vision of a better world.

Hope Right Now

There is a wonderful article in this weekend’s Vancouver Sun titled ‘Biology of hope’ bolsters Easter’s central message. A thoughtful look at hope and what it means within a religious, psychological, sociological, and even political context.

Some quotes that really stood out for me in this article:

“Hope reflects the capacity for one’s loving, lyrical limbic memory of the past to become attached to the memory of the future.”

“Hope is ‘a desire that is believed possible of realization.'”

“Hope is the ability to envision a future in which we wish to participate.”

“Wishing are words and left brain. In contrast, hope is made up of images and is rooted in the right brain. Wishing on a star takes no effort. Hope often requires enormous effort and shapes real lives.”

“In the end, perhaps the most important thing to remember about hope is that it is no walk in the park. It is not the same as optimism, which Larsen correctly says can be Pollyanish. It is not based on impossible dreams or magic wands. It is a virtue to be developed.”

The article goes on to discuss a balance between hope, which is future-based, and the importance of living in the moment. A balance that is beautifully represented in the practice of yoga.

Why do we practice yoga? For a strong and healthy physical body that will carry us through out lives. For enlightenment. For peace of mind and patience. For self-awareness. We practice for many reasons – most of which are rooted in the future. The practice of yoga is, in a sense, the practice of hope. As we work in a pose or practice pranayama, we have hope that it will bring us closer to a future in which we want to participate.

At the same time, yoga is a practice of living in the moment. We intentionally focus our mind inward on what we are experiencing every step of the way. The goal isn’t necessarily to get your body into whichever pretzel shape you’re aiming for, but to experience the journey of what it means to try to get there.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I find this to be one of the most challenging things I have ever attempted to do. My brain wants so badly to jump ahead to the next step every time – it is constantly writing and re-writing the story of my life. However, when I do manage to let go of that story and actually experience the moment I’m living in, there is a wonderful sense of peace and joy to be found, and one of the best places I’ve been able to do this is on my yoga mat.

So through the practice of yoga, we can simultaneously experience hope for the future and the joy of living in the moment.

Listen to Your Heart

Whenever I hear those words, the next ones that pop into my head are “when he’s calling for you…” Being a huge sucker for older pop music, this song holds a special place in my heart (there’s a pun there, I just can’t find it). This time the reference is different – a post that I came across on Trilby Jeeves’ lovely blog. She was reposting from Karl Staib’s Work Happy Now, and this quote jumped out at me:

“Your mind, heart, and cells want to do amazing work. They want work they can get lost in, be so consumed that time ceases to exist. The best way to do this is to find a deeper purpose behind your work. If you are working for the pay check the internal train will stall on a regular basis. There is never enough money to com­pensate you for your time away from things you truly love.”