Confession: I have not been practicing yoga asana every day.
Not even close.
There’s been no routine in my life for a good 8 months now. Or chaos my new normal? I have been trying to hold on to the 5am wake up time I developed over the years and I’ve failed miserably. I’ve gone through spurts of practice. Meditating twice a day and sleeping twice as much as I usually did for a few months while healing from the most heart wrenching grief I’ve ever experienced. There was a month when I practiced Ashtanga for several hours a day at the studio when I learned my teachers were moving to Boulder.
Reflecting on the past year, I realized in the past 6 months, I have been out of state 11 times. Three trips to NY for a wedding, a bridal shower, and a family reunion, a wedding in Italy, a bachelorette party in the Bahamas, taught yoga at workshop in Seattle, a funeral in Florida, and 4 trips to Michigan for a yoga retreat, a camping trip, a wedding, and once just for the hell of it.
I know how fortunate I am to have these opportunities but thinking about all of that is exhausting!
Every time I travel, I get thrown off my routine and it takes me an entire week to readjust. Then a week or two later I go somewhere else and get thrown off again. I keep waiting for life to calm down but it seems that’s like waiting to be happy when ______ (fill in the blank). It doesn’t work that way. So I need to find it within myself. I need to be okay with the idea that sometimes what I need more than anything is rest. Ironically, resting is a challenge for me. I’ve had to learn how to do it. There have been times when I rest only because I’ve run myself so ragged that I am physically ill.
I have no more travel planned until February so maybe I’ll be able to get back to my 5am wake up time and practice every day. But in the mean time, if my routine gets shaken up, which it inevitably will because that’s life, I’ll recognize that it’s a new phase of life and I’ll be able to more easily go with the flow and learn how to live with the new normal. The only constant is change.