Simple Gifts
Towards the end of Forrest teacher training, we were instructed to make a list of all the things yoga has given us. And encouraged to keep the list alive, updated & carry it along to reread on those days when we just couldn’t “get it up” to practice or teach. One of these days when I don’t feel like forming full sentences I may just post it directly, maybe in the hopes of inspiring others to make their own list.
I don’t practice to attain enlightenment. (Really, the world should be terrified of a redhead achieving enlightenment; we’re enough trouble as it is. 
Or because the clothes are comfortable. Though that totally helps. I practice to live a happy, relatively sane, functional life.
Without yoga I would have self-destructed myself right into the morgue. But forget the big drama stuff. I’ve just been feeling incredibly grateful for my life, my snug little family, & the quotidian off-the-mat victories that mean so much.
Yesterday was a lovely example. After practice, met a friend for lunch & talked the afternoon away. Without fortifying myself with drinks, or binging or purging or depriving or running away… ate yummy sushi, had ice cream, shared & listened. Met up with Beloved Husband later for a brilliantly, perfectly, delightfully, sublimely boring evening of random errands, stopping by a bookstore (got My Stroke of Insight!! Reading it soon; book report to follow!! 
, & dined on a fancy meal of burritos. Came home & had my first experience using a plunger & fixing a simple problem without fuss or fear. Watched West Wing on DVD on the couch til bedtime.
A happy, functional day. A day impossible without hours of practice.
That’s why I was back on the mat this morning. Really, exactly what poses I did on that mat is, in the bigger picture, incredibly important & also completely irrelevant. Suffice to say, it was good.
August 29th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
I’m with you all the way. Ultimately I love Yoga for how it enhances all the ordinary moments of my life, not for the big moments of “enlightenment”. This is exactly the point of all my writing!
Right now my Yogic challenge is to get totally comfortable doing ordinary catch-up desk work. I let everything that isn’t urgent pile up so that eventually I’m in real danger of missing things that DO become urgent. I want to get to the point where I just calmly deal with stuff as it comes up instead of letting it develop into intimidating piles to get through.
I hope you do publish your Forrest list.
Bob Weisenberg
http://www.yogademystified.com
@reweis
August 30th, 2009 at 5:43 pm
Sounds like an organizational challenge as well!! And you seem so on top of everything, honest to goodness.
Promise to publish the Forrest list on a day when my mind is otherwise blank, which I expect to come up any day now!! And just sent in a request to start a Forrest Yoga group on the YJ group forums. Your philosophy group inspired me to at least ask!