After being home about a month (and procrastinating for much of that time), I finally marched out to my living room yesterday and did some yoga. It wasn’t much–really, it wasn’t–but it felt like a huge step in the right direction. Certainly, getting over the hump of starting something for the first time can be one of the hardest obstacles to overcome. (Maintaining it is similarly extremely difficult, but I’m hopeful.)
Today’s journal prompt is of my own creation, inspired by my blind optimism toward keeping up a yoga routine. How do everyday physical activities help you on your path?
I’ll start by saying that physical activities here don’t necessarily mean “exercise.” You don’t have to do Pilates to be doing good things for your body. Sleeping, for example, is a great activity–one that I still have to get better at, despite doing it (almost) every day for the last twenty-three years–and getting enough sleep, for me, is a really important aspect of my path and the life that I want. Not getting enough sleep is not healthy for me or my mind, and certainly not for my spirituality.
Yoga, of course, has to have a moment on this post. Yoga was my first introduction into a different spirituality than the one I was raised in. Before doing yoga, I had thought of it as just a dancer-like stretching activity. After all, acro-style dance and yoga look pretty similar in photographs. However, after one of my college friends introduced me to it and started taking me to a good studio in our college town, I realized that it was a lot more than what I had previously expected. I started liking the idea of meditation, and I did yoga probably four times a week, at least. Now I’m trying to get back into it, of course, because it fell off horribly while I was in my foreign country, but on the whole yoga still plays an important part in my life and my path. The transcendental spiritual side of yoga was my inspiration.
Because I need to make this a short post, the last thing I’m going to talk about is walking/bicycling. These are two things I try to do every day, especially in the summer. Walking is great because you can do it with friends, chat easily, play Pokemon GO even…. It’s a very social activity, if you want it to be. Or it can be entirely solitary, and you’re going slowly enough to enjoy every little thing that you see. Bicycling, on the other hand, is also amazing, because though you can kind of make it a social activity, it tends toward the side of self-focus and even reflection. You can’t really use a phone on a bike, and you’re going fast enough to cover a lot of ground, but you are small enough to go deep into nature. And nature is one of my big facilitators.
Sorry that this was such a short post, but some days the thoughts just have to get put out quickly. I also want to say that I was thrilled at my stats from last week–the Pagan Perspective video certainly gave me a big boost, and I’m grateful.
I hope that everyone has a spectacular day.
Blessed be!
)O(
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