What It Actually Looks Like
This morning I did a brief, five to ten minute yoga flow in a cramped and cluttered corner of my bedroom while listening online to a worship service that I was too sleepy to attend and while my dog whined a few inches from my face. It was lovely.
How do our expectations of our practices line up with reality? All-or-nothing thinking tends to hold me back from doing something meaningful at all unless I can do it in the picture-perfect way that I imagine it ought to be done. Art supplies don’t come out unless I’m sure I have the energy and inspiration to make something beautiful, which is to say: they don’t come out. Tarot cards aren’t pulled unless I am tuned in already and have no anxious thoughts that maybe they won’t help me, which is to say: the cards aren’t pulled. I don’t meditate unless I feel ready to sit for at least twenty minutes, which is to say: I don’t meditate.
Lately, though, I have been leaning into the little moments and letting their gifts bring me joy. There is a hindering thought which keeps our resources and tools at arms length: a practice is only worth doing — only counts as a practice at all — if it is long, grand, and untouched by the messiness of real life. Where did this idea come from? Extended sessions can certainly be fulfilling, but we will never have them until we can first embrace the little moments of tuning in.
You likely already practice nourishing rhythms in your daily life without considering that they count as such. When birds fly overhead or trees sway with a breeze, do you linger for an extra second to watch them move? Do you draw simple doodles in the margins of your notebook during a class or meeting? In a random moment, when your body aches or longs to move, do you reach your arms out in a gentle stretch, perhaps enjoying — ever so slightly — the sensation inside your limbs? Have you offered the teeniest morsel of help, kindness, or simply a passing smile to someone this week? In moments of stress, do you sometimes pause to take one deep breath? These are all miniature examples of practices that we hear about all the time in wellness spaces. So what if they are brief? So what if they are accompanied by the honking of car horns, cries of children, chaos of an untidy room, or swirling of a busy mind?
Forget what the practice was “supposed” to look like. Forget the serious, drawn-out, clean and quiet, expensive, hard-to-enter version you were handed from who knows where; this is what it actually looks like. It can look however you want it to, however you can muster, however it actually is. Notice how you already practice wholeness and let it count. Lean into it. Tune in — ever so briefly — and let these moments bring you a little more ease, a little more joy, a little more compassion. If you can appreciate your natural instinct for wholeness, you will find access points scattered all throughout your wonderful, actual life.
Don’t Hesitate
by Mary Oliver
If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,
don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty
of lives and whole towns destroyed or about
to be. We are not wise, and not very often
kind. And much can never be redeemed.
Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this
is its way of fighting back, that sometimes
something happens better than all the riches
or power in the world. It could be anything,
but very likely you notice it in the instant
when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case.
Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid
of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.
