What I learned from a 30-day yoga 'challenge'

Laz brings his yoga props and shares my mat

At the start of a new year, all kinds of opportunities exist for establishing new behaviors.

The more popular 'challenges' typically revolve around alcohol, nutrition, or some exercise habit. I have no interest in any of those. 

I don't necessarily love anything that resembles, even remotely, a 'resolution' - especially those perennial ones. (Seriously, if you're my age and you're still making the same annual resolutions around basic healthy habits, you aren't being honest with yourself.)

And yet I found myself drawn to the 30-day Yoga Journey, an annual (and free!) daily yoga session from the fabulous Adriene Mishler (and her mat-mate cattle dog, Benji), offered every January. 

Why yoga, and why this? I've been an on-and-off practitioner of yoga for many years. I almost always find it to be just the thing my body needs on any given day - whether it's a stretch, or a balance hold, or a functional movement that my rather uni-planar lifestyle isn't accustomed to doing.

The operative 'almost' is what makes my yoga practice so sporadic. Like the time I took a class and all we did was chair pose. Or the 'lunchtime break' class that exceeded its time limit and made me late for an afternoon commitment. I expect to leave yoga with more 'zen' than I came in with, but that's not reality. 

In any case, the Yoga Journey gave me something different and new to do, and I am a firm believer that novelty is what keeps us from going out of our minds. I  know that shaking up my daily routine gives me the opportunity to think differently about how I move about my day, and that simple change can be the difference in my perception of 'good day' vs. 'bad day'. 

So I started every morning in January with yoga, and there are some things I learned along the way:

• I like yoga that only lasts 20 minutes or so. The shorter, the better. 
• Shivasana is over-rated. We didn't really do it, and I certainly didn't miss it. 
• I have really bad balance, particularly on one side of my body.
• I really, really have lost a lot of flexibility over the years, but that is about to change.
• Knowing that after yoga I will be making a pot of French Press coffee makes the Yoga Journey that much sweeter.
• If I can get on my mat expediently, I can have coffee sooner. 
• If I truly feel the need to learn Crow Pose, I have to work at it daily. Or I can be honest with myself (see above) and just give up and move on.
• Adriene's calm voice thanking me for giving up my precious time and energy to 'meet her on the mat' every day made me realize that my time and energy are precious - and limited. This epiphany helped me cut through the clutter, so to speak, and gave me strength to say "no" to requests for my time and energy that didn't serve me. I hope to remember this lesson for a long time.
• I can focus my attention, albeit temporarily, to my yoga practice in spite of morning chaos (otherwise known as Laszlo, see photo)
• I truly hope to continue a daily morning practice for the way it makes me feel grounded.

Wish me luck in my commitment to this practice. Or better yet, join me!

If you took the Yoga Journey, I'd love to hear your thoughts.