Today I woke up much later than anticipated and for some unknown reason, I was totally pissed off. I had planned to get up at 5:30 am and go to swim practice so that my imperfect commitment would be checked off for the day before I’m usually even out of bed. But a much later night than expected combined with 20 degree weather and a toasty down comforter meant that the chances of winning the Powerball this week were higher than me getting out of bed at that hour.
Bottom line: the last thing I felt like doing was my 20 minutes of whatever. Most days I’ve looked forward to it. But not today.
I was tempted to force myself to do it right off the bat–just do it. But I didn’t. Instead, I decided to do some journalling and explore the resistance (aka pissed off feeling). This in no way meant that I wouldn’t honor the commitment, but rather that I’d sort of honor the resistance before forcing myself. I won’t bore you with the details, and in exploring the resistance, I received a huge and powerful gift. A gift that I highly doubt would have resulted from using sheer force of will to push through the resistance.
Remember, at no point did I intend to not do the 20 minutes of whatever (that’s a lot of negatives!). The point of my imperfect commitment is to do it daily (six times a week, more specifically) as a sort of ritual to see what happens. Exploring the resistance was not an excuse to avoid the commitment, but rather an invitation to connect with myself.
I’d love to say that after I explored the resistance I was totally psyched to move my body, and this would be a flat out lie. But my resistance was markedly less, and with relative ease I made my way to the yoga mat and practiced pseudo mellow yoga for about 45 minutes. And it felt good. Really good.
At times the voice in my head started going off about the cellulite on my thighs yet again…telling me that mellow yoga was not going to fix that problem…and she had a few comments about how my yoga practice should be more advanced by now…but these thoughts were fairly distant (believe me, it used to be like someone was consistently screaming in my ear), and I gently reminded myself that 20 minutes of whatever is a whole lot better than 20 minutes of nothing.
