Not Linear

June 29th, 2012

I have often mentioned that I follow three Bikram yoga blogs – 3 women that practice daily, and post daily, too. It’s great to follow them. I feel like I know them. Lisa Jones, who writes The Here and Now, wrote about an absolutely awful class. She told how she was stomach sick and was down a lot. She just didn’t get it. She had her favorite teacher and the room was great, but she left in tears. She really wanted to blame someone or something. When she got home she cried to her husband and he said something I never considered before. He said, “This stuff isn’t linear. There isn’t always a clear cause and effect. Sometimes it just is what it is.”

Hmmm….he’s entirely right. No way is Bikram yoga linear. You might be inclined to think that doing the same 26 postures in the same order everyday might make you an expert or perfect at them. No way. 21 months and there’s days I’m a Rockstar and there’s days I can’t hold my body parts in position for one more minute. If the yoga is the same everyday, what does this say about our bodies? It says we’re like snowflakes – no two days are ever the same. When you think about all the intricate body systems working inside us all at once, it begins to make sense that each day we must be different. We also do to ourselves a million things each day that would cause change from one day to the next. Actually, the yoga is my main stabilizer. The things I go through there is just yoga tweaking and readjusting and healing and realigning and setting to right everything I’ve broken down by poor eating, sleeping, etc. Maybe that’s how it keeps you from aging.

Not linear. I like that concept. Life is not linear either. It’s not one step forward and two back. It’s not a march to a finish line. It’s not a process by which we get made more perfect everyday. Life is about being willing to take the opportunities we’re given and using the abilities we have. It’s a meandering path, we can’t see around every curve and we need to discover the beauty in that – giving it to God and just letting it happen.

And so, as another day goes by, I’m relieved to realize there’s no finish line, that sometimes it just is, and …I have written.