Continuing the them of hearing from the Two Words Community, this post is from Charlene King. She has private yoga lessons with me and I love working with her because of the way she gives feedback . Lots of feedback about how people learn and experience things, and lots of questions, help me to become a better teacher. The last time I saw her, she told me how she was going with her Two Words for 2012 in the context of her yoga and creativity practice. I was so blown away, I asked her to write those thoughts down as a guest post! And FYI, people have been so impressed by her post that it’s getting published in a Canadian Yoga Newsletter too – creativity everywhere!
This is how she is going with her Two Words Project – I’m still in much the same place as I was the last time I wrote about mine. How are you going with your intentions for 2012? Have you needed to reassess? Are you on track? I’d love to know!
Memories. Charlene’s beautiful art.
As it is now the close of the first quarter of 2012 (time really does fly!!) it seemed appropriate to revisit the two-word intention that I set myself at the beginning of the year. My two words for 2012 were “commitment” and “flexibility”.
In my yoga practice, I wanted to use these words to structure a practice that was more flexible, and I figured commitment is needed to both achieve that goal physically and also to go into poses that I am a little nervous off. Plough, is a good example of this. I probably am flexible enough-ish to do plough, but my fear of snapping my neck and my head subsequently falling off is prohibiting me from going that little be further into the posture.
I also wanted to re-establish a home yoga routine that had got a little interrupted towards the end of 2011. To work on yoga at home, when your teacher is not present (I couldn’t persuade Nadine to live with my husband and me, unfortunately!) is a challenging thing, beset by various hold-ups like ‘I don’t think I am doing this right’, ‘I don’t know what I should do today’ and, especially in my case, ‘Maybe I will do it later’.
To get it back on the right track was going to need commitment.
But alongside the perseverance and dedication associated with commitment, I also needed some flexibility. So one day you have a bunch of things on and you get really tired and don’t practice at home- that is ok. As long as you don’t do it everyday it is better to let the times when everything doesn’t work like clockwork go, rather than obsessing over them. Because then you will have another day where you don’t practice yoga because you were too busy stressing over not doing it the day before!
In my other, non-yoga, life another thing I wanted to reinstate into my routine was painting. I love, love, love art. It is a huge passion in my life. But towards the end of 2011, when I had started studying again, my studio practice took a back seat. Just like my home yoga practice, commitment and flexibility were needed to get this off the ground. I decided to take one day a week (believe me, I have much, much more time that I sometime think I do!) to make art, as it was and still is very important for me to have this creative output in my life.
So, three months in, how is it all going? Well, it is not going too bad really. But these two words take a lot more effort thinking about them and acting with them than the words I chose for last year, which just sort of ticked along by themselves in the background. I get to do home yoga most days in the week and on a Friday, I have expanded my view of creating to include not just painting but anything creative, like cooking or writing this blog post. Ultimately, what has been most interesting, is that at the beginning of the year, I thought commitment would have to be the strongest word of the two, in terms of requiring the most dedication and action, and flexibility would be its passive partner.
Actually it is completely the reverse.
Commitment is not about action at all- how much or how often you do something, but is all in the mind. It is a process of thought, of way of thinking that you either have or you don’t. Flexibility of the other hand challenges how you perceive something. I started wanting to spend every Friday painting, but by allowing flexibility into my life, I can happily acknowledge the writing, or even painting my nails a bright colour counts as well.
Flexibility, as is turns out, requires a lot of commitment to be fully embraced.
Related articles
- Graceful Inconsistencies: Two Words to Promote Your Path (yogawithnadine.com)
Moving from Stability: Understanding the Pelvis in Posture (Online workshop)
Light Up Your Life
too late to join the Two Words Project? I was triggered by something you pointed out in our private lesson, and the FB invite to the TW page just today. Realisation time!!
It’s never too late! That’s why I put all that stuff on FB today
I should send an email, hey?
I didn’t think it would be. I consider it a mid-year review!
It seems like these Two Words that surface for each of us.., they are really two sides of the same coin in a lot of cases. Just finished writing about where I’m at with Acceptance.
Ooh, GREAT! I’m off to read it now!