My Mindful Mornings

It's been about 9 months now that I have had a morning yoga practice, and I wouldn't give it up for the world. I don't do it every single morning - weekends are off and obviously if I oversleep I have to skip it and some mornings are just so rough that I do a hot tub instead and call it "hot tub yoga".

But most mornings, I do at least 10 minutes of yoga first thing. I'm never going to be a pretzel - the same inflexible body that made it so hard to do ballet when I was younger just won't allow that - but that isn't why I do it.

The main reason I do it is because for those minutes out of my day, I check in with myself. I try to banish all other thoughts from my mind, and just pay attention to the way my body is feeling. It doesn't matter what I look like or how long I do it, it just matters that I give myself that time to just Be before the Do list and tasks of the day hit me.

So I stagger from bed and I am faced with some basic truths each morning:

there are inherent limits in our physical abilities and our physical selves

it's about balancing surrender to what is with effort toward what might be

you have to be honest with yourself - you can't fake this

it's natural for the mind to wander, and relaxing is actually a skill to practice

just Being is scary, and that feeling of boredom is a prod to avoid the discomfort of all of it


And, just to keep it real, here is my partner from this morning's yoga. She woke up at 5am, and fussed and fumed about having to stay in her room until 7am, when I got up. I invited her to join me for my yoga, and this was the result: