May 2024 Week 2

My hope for our intention this month, “Everything Is As It Should Be” is that it gives us an opportunity to settle into our lives this spring and get ready for the fullness of summer. Last month there was a lot of reorganizing energy all around us with the solar eclipse and the full moon, now hopefully this month we can ground ourselves in the certainty that all is as it should be.
As I said in class today (definitely take class lol) each month we basically have the same solution to our sometimes hectic and possibly uncomfortable moments - trust, faith and acceptance. I don’t know about you, but me…..I need repetition and constant dedication to my spiritual practices if I want to have any level of faith, trust and acceptance.
I heard in a class this week what we often say, which is that we call our yoga a yoga practice. Further, the teacher added we do not say yoga perfect. I often mention in class that when we are in class we are practicing each day to place our physical bodies into certain poses as best we can and each day is different. I also say we should look at our entire time in a yoga class as practice for how we live when we leave the classroom. The hope is our yoga practice allows us to settle our nervous system, connect with our breath, develop resiliency and concentration, find strength and stability as well as an undistracted connection with ourselves - all great tools to take off the mat. Now lets say we came to class and the expectation was “yoga perfect”. In this class we would be riddled with self judgement, probably not breathe as we tried as hard as we could to be perfect in our poses, our nervous system would be revved up in fight or flight and we would be distracted looking around at everyone and what their poses looked like rather than looking in at ourselves. This sounds awful and can describe me going through life without the foundation of my spiritual practices. If I am living the “yoga perfect” way I have no shot at faith, trust and acceptance. Rather I am in fix, manage and control mode and Everything Is As It Should Be is only true if Everything Is Exactly As I want it to be!!! What an awful way to live and I will be honest, I lived that way for many years - its exhausting, miserable and isolating. Remember, how we do anything is how we do everything. What is your relationship to yoga? Is it yoga practice or yoga perfect? Are you leaving your practice on the mat or taking something off the mat with you to help you live a full life? I do hope this is helpful for you this month.