Day 3: I Have Met the Enemy

Day 3 and every muscle is screaming in my body. Stairs have become instruments of torture but I'm fired up to go to yoga. I walk into the room, lay on the mat, put my forehead to the floor and ask the universe to help me truly do the best I can, not the best I can fake. Class begins. I hurt but not as badly as I'd thought by how I felt during the day. The poses come and go and although I have to sit out the second set of triangle and I fall out of Balancing Stick, I can already see progress from two nights ago. To all outward appearances I'm having a pretty decent, focused class.

But inside, there is a war raging. I am distracted by everything and everyone around me and the judgmental voice of my ego is at a fever pitch.

I have met the enemy and she is me.

Did I post last night that the hardest part of yoga was just getting myself to class?

Ha!

I pride myself on my focus in class. I hold my gaze and remain still. One of my earliest teachers was very strict and I learned, as Bikram says in his book, "The only right way is the hard way." And learning to focus in that way has helped my yoga and I hope it will help my life. But tonight I lost my focus to the voice of the ego and had a bad class.

The hardest part tonight was trying to silence that nitpicking, nonstop, rotten, judgmental voice.

I was desperate. I would plead with myself while in the poses. "It doesn't matter what anyone else is doing. That's their practice and you don't know anything about them or what they're dealing with today. Your job is just to look at yourself in the mirror and practice your yoga. Just listen to Sarah and do what Sarah says." In Savasana the mantra was "Breathe in. Breathe out."  I was trying to drown the voice with another voice, with the sane, wise voice, but that one is just a trick of the ego as well. "Oh, see, you're wise," that voice whispers, trying to inflate itself at the expense of everyone else in the room. And then I would be disgusted with myself all over again. Exhausting!

It wasn't until I was out of class, sitting with my head resting on my knees trying to get it together that I was calm enough to think "No big deal. You didn't sleep well last night and you lost your cool. It happens. You're just a flawed human being and that's okay. Go take a shower, go home and eat some sushi, get some sleep, come back in here tomorrow at 9:30 and just see how it goes. If it happens again, what do you do? You label it 'thinking' and let it go. Just the way you let your body go in Savasana. And it will take as much practice as the poses do because it's a much a part of the yoga as the poses are."

"No big deal." and "You label it 'thinking' and let it go." is from Start Where You Are by Pema Chodron and so it is both wise and true.

See you in the morning.