The other day, after our bicycle ride, I leaned on the car to take off my shoes.
"Stand on one foot and take off your shoe, you shouldn't lean on anything," John said. I realized John was right. There are so many opportunities for us to do our "yoga practice" throughout the day that we miss. This morning in the shower as I leaned against the wall to wash my feet, I realized that it never once dawned on me until now that I could do this on one foot.
One of the beauties of a daily yoga practice (twice daily for me) is you do find it spilling into the rest of your day in so many physical and mental ways. If I'm not completely focused when I practice, then I find that I'm not doing my poses correctly. In the morning I do 40 minutes of Rodney Yee's "Power Yoga" DvD. If I'm not 100% engaged, I miss poses or find myself doing the wrong poses, or find that I lose my timing and then have to rush to catch up. In the evening when I do my practice from my "Moving Towards Balance: 28 days of Yoga with Rodney Yee", if I'm not 100% focused on what I'm doing, I do the poses incorrectly. I find myself tensing up my muscles in the wrong places, lifting my shoulders out of their sockets, or tightening my waist instead of letting it elongate and be loose and elastic. Each pose requires me to check in on my body, scanning for anything out of place or ignored.
The need to be 100% engaged means that for those couple of hours a day that I'm doing my yoga practice I'm not thinking about the problems of the day or any of the other things in my life that would so love to be the most important thing for me to fixate on.
I think the impact of all this is that instead of my external stresses encroaching upon my yoga practice, my yoga practice is encroaching on the rest of my day. And that's a good thing. How wonderful it would be if, when my boss says "how are you doing on your schedule?" instead of everything in my body tightening up and my teeth clenching, my mind automatically says "take a deep breath, shoulders down, chest and back wide, forehead smooth, smile." :)
