Sometimes the simple things are the most challenging.
Today marks Day 28 for me of a 40-day meditation practice, Grounding and Stabilizing Into 2024, led online by a wonderful yoga and meditation teacher, Sat Siri.
Grounding? Stabilizing?
Maybe.
Also challenging, confrontational, fiery, frustrating, and awesome.
In between twice-weekly live online sessions, we’re encouraged to continue the practice: a few minutes of warmup and three minutes of stretch pose, followed by 13 minutes of Kirtan Kriya, a meditation with recently surfaced health benefits.
More than halfway through the 40 days, I’ve developed a three-part mantra for myself.
Showing Up
An interesting thing happens when you do the same thing every day in a deliberate way. Because the daily actions remain the same, you start to observe the subtle shifts that occur within you from day to day. On Tuesday, you enjoy the practice. On Wednesday you’re determined. Thursday, exhausted. Friday, despairing. Saturday, elated.
Do I always feel like engaging in the practice? No. Have I done it every day? So far, yes. The daily doing is the showing up, part one of my three-part devotion.
Letting Go
The practice challenges my ability—or highlights my inability—to let go of expectation, of outcome, and even effort itself. I attack stretch pose as if it were an embodied enemy—and it vanquishes me. Humbled, I feel the softening of my grip, the shift toward a different relationship with force and ambition. Perhaps I can let go just a little.
Beginning Again
The last of these is no more complex and no easier than the others. Hypercompetitive me wants to make it through all three minutes of stretch pose without losing form and without resting. I can’t. When we meet live, Sat Siri encourages us to begin again, to regroup and gather strength. Practice with one leg up instead of both. Rest.
So I let my legs down, take a few breaths, summon my will, and return to the posture.
Taking It To the Page—and Beyond
“Taking it off the mat” is a popular yoga concept, meaning that our yoga (or meditation, or prayer, or contemplative practice) has much to teach beyond what we glean when engaging in it.
As I prepare for our January 31 workshop, Your Big Why: Writing Into Who You Want To Be in 2024, I’m thinking of how participants can take the workshop “off the mat” and into the hustle-bustle of daily life.
I’m excited to create a space where you can come to engage with yourself in a way that might either challenge or confirm long-held beliefs, just as the 40-day practice has done for me.
Signing up to attend is both simple and easy.
Use this registration link if you are not a member of the BYTS online community. Use this link if you are already a member.
The workshop may challenge you, but whatever the outcome, the intention is to emerge with a deeper connection to your larger purpose.
You could try Transcendental Meditation which is easy yet profound. In fact not trying is key to transcending. With the right technique, it works. I am a teacher of it actually and have been doing it for 50+ years (since I went to Simon’s Rock where Jennifer went also!) TM.org.
Thank you, Audrey, for sharing this journey of practice. So simple, yet profound. Show up, Let go and Begin again. These three tenets of the daily "do" list offers the elasticity it takes to be a gentle, engaged human. Ground on!