I felt guilty about my parenting, and now I have a yoga practice

I am not a morning person. Really, that doesn't come close to capturing the situation. The English language doesn't contain appropriate words that describe my personal level of dysfunction with morning; I'd need to break into Farsi or something. Farsi, incidentally, is the Persian language used specifically for poetry. I love that they have a language just for speaking beautifully. I also love that it has an entire verb tense dedicated to nagging.

Okay, back to mornings, re: my hatred thereof. I used to work out in the mornings. In grad school I got up at 6:00am to get to the gym every day and pound my heart out on the elliptical trainer. I also went to bed at 9:00pm, because apparently even though I lived in Seattle I had no life. For a little while a few years ago, I would get up early to do yoga every morning.

All of these plans had a fatal flaw: they combined doing something I found distasteful (at the time) with getting up early, which I abhor. And naturally, because I believed in the "willpower + determination = success!" model of fitness, my inevitable slide off of my morning workout programs coded as me being a failure.

Nowadays, when I workout, I go in the evenings after work. Sure, I've had a long day, but that's just nothing compared to trying to get my sorry a** out of bed even two minutes prior to when it absolutely has to be out of bed. And since I now engage in training that I actually enjoy (crazy, right?) I really want to go work out! I suppose this falls under the broad banner of "Trickery" that I've written about elsewhere, but it's really more in the general category of not self-sabotaging. I think there are real, solid reasons to prefer weight training over cardio (or at least in addition to cardio), and there does seem to be a real, statistical difference between working out in the morning and the evening. But all of that pales in comparison to doing workouts that you enjoy and will keep doing versus ones you hate and will eventually stop doing. If cardio at 5am is your thing, you go and do your thing. I'll be asleep.

However, my mornings... got worse.

Slowly I started to sleep through when my oldest son had to leave to catch the bus, because I didn't really have to be up yet, my spouse is in charge of making lunches, etc. And then, I started sleeping through when my youngest had to leave for school, because again, I didn't really have to be up yet, and so on. Then I started pushing it to the last possible second, sometimes leaving myself as little as 10 minutes to get from in bed to out the door, not even leaving me time to see my spouse before taking off. And I started acclimating to my alarm, so that it would be much later than I'd realized because I hit snooze several times in my sleep.

After a couple of months of basically not seeing my family at all until around 6:30pm everyday, guilt started to creep up on me. Also, I got tired of feeling so damned ragged and pressured in the mornings. I knew that if I could just get up earlier, it didn't have to be this way. And I knew that if I wanted to start getting up earlier, it wasn't going to be willpower that got me there, because at 6am, I don't think I even have any willpower yet. I knew I would need to engage in more trickery.

So I installed the "Stay Focused" extension on Chrome. (Pretty sure this exists on Firefox too. Not sure about IE... oh wait! That's irrelevant now! *snicker*) I put all of my social media on the block list, and enabled the nuclear option for 10:45pm. My browser now locks me out of my most addictive sites at 10:45pm, functionally taking the whole thing out of my hands.

This is the best thing in the multiverse.

Then I moved my alarm clock across the bedroom, and changed the alarm to NPR in the mornings. Now I either have to get out of bed to turn the damned thing off, or start having nightmares about shelling in the Ukraine and children dying in Palestine (and the occasional StoryCorps, which is actually a really nice way to wake up, but that's just on Fridays).

And now I am actually out of bed at 6:20am (latest). I end up vaguely coherent by the time my oldest leaves at 7am, I've already had my coffee, I've made it through my social media feeds (and the associated roller coaster ride of losing and regaining all faith in humanity at least three times over). And I found myself in the oddest position: I was out of things to do. It doesn't take me long to actually get ready to leave (witness my 10 minutes to the door land-speed record). I take a breakfast smoothie with me to work everyday and have it at around 10am, so I didn't need to eat breakfast. I usually toss together some kind of somethingorother for lunch, 5 minutes tops. I don't have to leave until 8:10am. So now what?

Well.... someone had recommended this Youtube channel called "Yoga with Adriene" to me recently--hey look, it's still what's up on my iPad's Youtube channel. And she's got this "30 Days of Yoga" thing going on. Hell, I've got at least 30 minutes to kill, I'll give it a shot.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Except it was really weird history. So dig. Within one week, I'd gotten into the 30 Days thing, doing each video every morning. And then my boss finally completed her year-long arm-twist of me to go to yoga with her on campus on Monday afternoons. And there was this big "All classes are free!" thing that Saturday at our local yoga studio ("InYoga of Terre Haute") and another friend wanted us to come and then I see that they've actually got a class that will fit into my regular schedule and is *gasp* FREE. (It's called "I'm too ______ for yoga!" and it's genius). I literally went from never doing yoga to having done over nine individual sessions of yoga in one week.

And from there, as they say, it is history.

See that! That's me in full plow!
And I've done other crazy things,
although crow still eludes me...

I've been yogaing faithfully ever since. I even included my Lenten commitment into my regular savasana at the end of each morning routine. I completed the 30 Days, and went on to Adriene's "Reboot" (Adriene and I are now besties, fyi, even if she doesn't know it yet). I'm loving the regular public classes. I love that my body is finally in a place where, mostly, I have control over it. I know where it is. In fact, this is gonna be an entire separate post, but if you've never really been overweight, then you probably just can't understand what it's like to never really be "in" your body, because so much of your body feels like it's got its own agenda. But now I do. And in fact, I'm doing things I really never imagined I would be able to do, and loving every second of it!

You see, hate mornings though I do (and I do, I do, I do), I really like yoga. The problem was, when doing yoga got bound up with needing to get out of bed early in the morning, I started to dread yoga. In reality, it wasn't the yoga I dreaded, it was getting out of bed, but at 6am, things tend to run together in my head. But when I was able to restructure my life just a bit, and use the tools available to me to help, it opened up all sorts of possibilities for me.

Now I'm reading the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali and other random yoga books, I am helping to plan a yoga retreat at my work, and I won't say that taking teacher training someday hasn't crossed my mind. Sometimes it's just a matter of getting your life structurally sorted out to make space for something new. Sometimes that space will open up in very unexpected ways. And just like any good yoga teach will instruct--use whatever tools or props you need to support yourself. Don't make things more challenging than they need to be, especially if the challenge itself isn't the point. I didn't want a daily morning willpower test, I wanted to get up earlier, and to hell with how that happened! Now my mornings are vastly more enjoyable, and I have a yoga practice. Which is awesome.

Even if I'm still pretty much incoherent for the first 10 minutes or so.