Smarty-pants

Dec 8, 2010 | The World at Large | 3 comments

Recently I’ve been in the throes of a new writing project. I was swept along in the early days by enthusiasm and euphoria. But today I noticed that I have a mountain of work ahead of me, and I started to procrastinate and figuratively shuffle papers.
A decade and a half ago, I wrote on the topic of developing the discipline to do regular yoga practice. I glibly said things like it’s not really that hard  to do; it’s just that your mind trips you up. The mind is in the business of generating reasons for not doing what you set out to do. As in: you don’t have time, you are too busy, you are feeling tired and perhaps you might have a headache.
I went on to write: It’s the mind’s job to be ‘reasonable’, but, unfortunately, our minds are not always our best friends, and it works well to turn off the mind chatter and ‘just do your practice”.
Finally I said: Since ‘too little time’ is one of the most common excuses for not practising, it should be noted that everyone has the same 24 hours in a day. If you can’t imagine where to find the time to give to yoga practice, it may be that you’re unaware of where your time goes. I suggest that, over a few days, you look at how you do spend your time, and write down what you do at 30-minute intervals from the time you wake up until the time you go to sleep. It is more than likely that you’ll discover a bracket of 15-30 minutes that you could commit to yoga.

3 Comments

  1. This post was written just for me. I spent far too much time tidying my house. Let the chaos grow around me while I’m in Tree pose.

    Reply
  2. Hm, I seem to remember a parable about putting pebbles and sand in a jar…
    Hope that’s on the agenda.

    Reply
  3. Oh, I love this Eve! No excuses, ever again, for anything really…

    Reply

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

The Archives