Everyday Alchemy

Yoga is one of the motherlodes. Great spiritual development and a great workout as well. Whoever said that yoga is gentle and easy clearly hasn’t done it! Luckily I was taught by the wonderfully warm Laura who brought a great sense of humour while we were bending this way and that.

Trying something new can be daunting…especially when you are trying to get to a good standard very quickly. Kinda like my exploits with blogging! Still, reflecting on this morning’s class, there are some great lessons for starting anything new in life.

• Keep it light and laugh a lot – when starting, stay light with yourself and the process. This class had many advanced students as well and my ego couldn’t help itself and try to get me to go harder. But when you have hamstrings as tight as mine and crap balance, you are not going to be uber-bendy right away. When you fall over, stay light, laugh a lot and keep giving it a go – allow the process to be magical for you (see Creating Magic).

• Keep your eye on the prize but stay flexible – I would love to do a headstand right away and sooner or later I will. I have always wanted to do one. For the time being, adapting to what I can do and flipping my legs up against the wall will get me there eventually.

• Consistency and focus are key – I can tell already that if I keep going to a couple of classes a week and just relax with the rest, I will make progress pretty quickly. Consistent and focused action is the key here. How true is this of EVERY new endeavour we try?

• Baby steps rule! – the key to being able to take consistent action is to break it down. I am not going to be a yogi tomorrow…but showing up, doing a little bit each time and staying light means I hopefully will do that headstand before too much longer!

• Use the experts – the sign of a good teacher is that they push you to try more than you believe you can do…just beyond your limits…and when you realise you can do that, you feel great…and then you want to do more. The full back arch felt like it was killing me at first, but some encouragement and adjustments from Laura and I was able to arch up.

• You always get more of what you focus on – being honest, getting out of bed for yoga was a struggle. Warm bed or stretchy pain. Put it that way and I would have stayed in bed. Warm bed or physical exercise that fuels my spirit…I was up and outta bed. Even though it was tough, I loved the class.

Now how about a little stretching with life?

Image credit Unrated. via Creative Commons on Flickr

As many of you may know, a tradition that I have taken on for the last few years as an antidote for all the resolution madness of new year is to choose a single word for the upcoming year. I first got the idea from my friend Reed in Rayleigh-Durham and then from the singer and creativity coach, Christine Kane (original article is at http://bit.ly/63JyV3) For me, choosing a word for the year is something that I have been doing instead of setting specific intentions or goals. At a time when I was simply not sure enough to be specific about what I wanted, having a single word as a point of focus has really helped.

For me, the word serves as a kind of meditation or theme for the year, something that informs me both consciously and subconsciously and seems to dance with my very essence. Sometimes it is a bit of a north star – guiding me when I get a bit lost – and sometimes it is something that adds depth and meaning to whatever I am considering. It can also act as some kind of acid test – is what I am doing serving my general intention and purpose. Just for reference, my word for 2008 was “Release” and for 2009 was “Create”. Both of these were purely intuitive and just came to me but served tremendously.

I also found this year that for me to really live “Create,” another word came in during the early part of the year and stayed for several months until around October. This word was “Excavate” and it seems to really fit. I indeed went through a period of intense internal digging to find a lot of my personal demons and bugbears. Having focused on them for those months and really excavating them i.e. digging them up from my unconscious to my conscious, I was able to deal with many things that have been there in the background for years but I have never really been aware of before.

This coming year, I am far more of a mind to set some specific intentions for 2010 – goals for the year rather than resolutions (really important point…we are far more likely to achieve outcomes than we are trying to maintain an input or new habit…remember, we get more of what we focus on…). Partly this year, I know much more about where I am going and what I want. Also though, I have realised for me that not setting goals has been a way to avoid disappointment in case I didn’t reach the goals! “Better to have no expectations than expectations that are dashed“ was the thinking. Well not the case this year. I will be setting intentions around my vocation, launching my business, getting my finances sorted out, improving my health etc.

All of these however are more about the strategy for the year. The word is still really the big picture and the vision/mission if you like. I had been reaching far and wide for a word for 2010 and nothing was really coming to me. Then, tonight after going to see Avatar (brilliant….go see it!), I saw a little sign on railings just outside of a church advertising classes to increase the power of your voice. It was one of those times when I know I was just meant to see that sign. The word had been dangling in front of my nose the whole time. For those of you that know me fairly well, you will have heard me talk about this a bit over the last couple of years and for those of you that really know me, this is a core piece for me.

So, my word for 2010 is VOICE. Finding mine, expressing it, knowing what my voice is on paper. Helping people find their voice and their true expression. Being a voice of Spirit/spirit. Who know’s precisely, and that is the point. This is a very specific and challenging word for me, full of growth, potential and exploration….exactly as it should be. VOICE is certainly going to cause me to grow as one thing I simply can not do is hide my voice. So…the perfect word just dropped in.

Over to you then! As in last year, as 2009 comes to a close and you begin to think about 2010, see if choosing a word for the year might be right for you. Try a few on and then settle on one and see where it leads you. Whichever way, it is bound to be quite exciting. If you would like to share your word, feel free to leave a comment. I certainly would be very interested to hear what you have chosen and why ☺.