When I was younger I liked to try to live by the mantra, ‘Do
what feels good.’ It gave me a liberated sense of how to go about being. Like a
free pass for everything: if it feels good, it must be good! This laissez-faire
attitude when it came to flirting, driving, shopping, eating—everything,
really—might have actually gotten me into more trouble than not.
That said, I’m not abandoning the mantra. Rather, what
defines my motto has needed to be motto-fied. I still believe in doing what
feels good, simply because it feels good, but my ideas about what exactly that
means have changed. The behaviors I allowed myself before, in hindsight, might
have felt good in the moment but weren’t that good for me, not really.
Now I do yoga. Every day, without fail, I commit to between
30-45 minutes of time spent sending my dog downward. Make no mistake; I am by
no means a placid-faced and lotus-loving zen master. I will never be mistaken
for a fitness buff. Some days it feels
like a chore and the thought of waking up just that much earlier seems damn
near impossible. But I do it anyway. I do it, because it feels good. It feels
good down in my bones and, more importantly, in my head. And if I miss a day
for whatever reason, I miss that goodness, in body and mind. I don’t want to
cost myself that goodness all day long because of a trifling extra half hour in
bed.
I started by getting a yoga DVD out of the local public
library. I think I kept the DVD in the player without using it for probably
five weeks or so (well over the strictly enforced weeklong check-out duration…those
50 cents a day DVD fines can be a killer!) before actually pressing the button
to turn the machine on. I was not exactly chomping at the bit, but I must have
had the intention, because hadn’t I trolled through the DVD bin and bothered to
find it, then check it out and neglect to return it for over a month? Often
times at the start of a yoga practice the yogi will suggest the ‘setting of an
intention.’ At first, I would clam up a bit mentally at this instruction. What
should my intention be? What was a good intention versus a bad one? Maybe I
should Google good yoga intentions…but then who
goes to Google to set a yoga intention?! But now I see, without having realized
it at the time, that I knew how to set an intention for my practice when I
checked out the DVD in the first place. Never-minding that it took me over a
month to let the intention manifest into action, my heart and mind must have
been in the right place.
From there, I started with just 20 minutes a day. Now that
doesn’t feel like enough, but much more than 30-45 minutes to myself in a day
is hard to come by, so that is the groove I’ve hit. I love best to do yoga
outside, bringing my mat with me and arching up under the overhang of magnolia
tree leaves through which the light filters down greenly and goldenly. But
temperatures aren’t all that much above zero these days, so for now I do the
yoga indoors.
YouTube has an impressively broad offering of all kinds of yoga
videos, of widely varying lengths, styles and disciplines. So I take my phone
with me to a quiet spot (the other great thing about yoga is that you need
hardly more than a mat’s worth of space to get in a really good practice), or a
tablet or a laptop and stream whatever video I’m in the mood for that day. A mat is the only kind of gadgetry (if you can
even call it that) required. No funny contraptions or doo-hickeys needed, no
assistance or club memberships or equipment. And if you’re reading this, you
have means to get on the line.
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So why not set an intention for yourself? An intention to do
what feels good, what truly feels good.
At the start of the New Year supermarket shelves began hawking every
low-fat, low-sodium, flavor-reduced version of real food that can be imagined.
Work out gear, special shakes, and scales cropped up everywhere. While I am not
one to connote all that consumerist zeal for what one should buy and when, I am on board with embracing the idea of
kicking off of a new mindset. And, now that its mid-March and many of us have
had enough time to make, then grow weary of, our New Year’s resolutions,
why not make today the day to revise that reboot and reconsider that sense of
renewal?
While the calendar dictates that our year begins anew in the
short and withering days of January, this time of year is when the world us
actually starts to feel new. Nature
and the elements are just beginning to stretch up and out from where they’ve
remained hunkered all the long winter, so why not take up your own expansion, start
your own skyward reaching? A lot of yoga is to do with the breath, with opening
up and finding or creating space within oneself, within one’s body. As everything
else gradually unfurls, so too can you. This past Friday, March 20th,
signified a rare cosmic triad purportedly allowing for all kinds of increased
karmic openness and potential. (Check out the article, here: http://www.pachamama.org/blog/new-moon-action-open-yourself-to-new-possibilities-during-rare-cosmic-triad?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=Facebook+Posts&utm_content=Blog+NMA+Cosmic+Triad).
Much as I love yoga, I don’t always fully go in for the more—ahem—‘granola’
aspect of it; I’m working on it. But this was
interesting reading and, while I realize that the rare and portentous cosmic
even has come and gone, as with the overdue library DVD, no reason why the
notion of its happening—that idea of cracked-open, newly-hatched potential for
broad-mindedness— can’t be carried with you…maybe it just needs a few weeks to
percolate. That, and a whopping library fine. Namaste!
Note: Some of my favorite YouTube
videos when I started (and now, still) can be found on the channel Yoga with
Adrienne. I adore her and everyone I know who does her videos will admit to
having a girl-crush on her. Her candor and personable approach to yoga and
acceptance is downright irresistible. I’m also beginning to really like Yoga
with Candace. Her narrative is a bit dryer, but the moves and transitions are a
bit more advanced and satisfying all the same. Leah Butler’s YouTube videos are
equally challenging and satisfying. And, when I crave something very twisty and
fluid with a really dialed up Savasana, I go to any of Sarah Ivanhoe’s Yogea
Artflow Yoga videos. Mmmm…
Allison Collins
Allison Collins
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