yoga diary - day eight

Last night I was up unexpectedly late. I don't have much of a problem sleeping, as a rule but the people with whom I am most deeply involved always seem to have, at best, a tortured relationship to sleep.

I don't understand insomnia. I know people suffer terribly and I try to be compassionate. The few times I've really had trouble sleeping it was an utterly miserable feeling. However, it must be said that my sleep problems, when they do arise, have invariably been self-inflicted and usually self-inflicted in the service of drama.

This results in There are times when I find other people's insomnia annoying and during those times, in the back of my head I admit, I sometimes find it difficult not to consider it attention seeking behavior. I am that way about physical processes. I believe your body will do what it needs to do when push really comes to shove and if you truly are sleep-starved, your body will knock you out where you sit, it won't wait for your permission to do it. (Actually, I've seen this happen on many occasions)

Anyway, it wasn't insomnia that tripped me up last night, rather it was the fact of someone else's insomniac habits catching up to them and their body ambushing them making them late and tipping the row of dominoes that made me late too.

The result of this was that I stayed up too late and then overslept. Physical things, it seems to me, are all math. Our bodies work to achieve a zero-sum game and we either notice and cooperate, making it easier to be more than just physical creatures, or we don't notice and refuse to cooperate, making us unwitting slaves to the physical process, slaves who are ironically irrational and convinced of our own sublimely unique and ineffable waves and patterns. I swing between these two extremes all the time. I assume everyone does. It's when I think I am the most special that I am really about as average and predictable as it is possible to be.

This morning I was late getting up. Yesterday left me with very little accomplished. The last thing I wanted to do was set myself back another hour to do yoga. The body may have a will to health but the mind is something else altogether.

Somehow I managed to override the desire not to get to my morning practice, tell myself that one hour spent in yoga buys me three hours of productivity in every other aspect of my life (which is true, always.) and got myself to the mat.

Parts of my practice were harder than I expected, parts were easier; the first half of it was practically unconscious. Starting out, I felt like it would take forever to finish. This despite the fact that I use a DVD and it always takes exactly the same amount of time.

I have modified one part of the routine, the lizard pose, which I find too demanding, always have. Now that I've modified it, it is one of the easiest poses in the series. I still dread it.

Observing all of this rolling around in my head something occurred to me; it is not only my practice that influences my life, my life, my thoughts, my resistance - those things influence my practice just as much as my practice influences those things.

When I do yoga daily and eat properly, or at least get five to seven servings of fruit and vegetables every day, my mind clears and I am better able to see the issues that need resolution in my life. I am a more efficient machine serving a mind and soul that are liberated to do their transcendent work.

Does that sound like the opposite of yesterday?

Isn't that interesting....

back to work.