Yoga is really interesting because some days you have a really steady and strong practice where you walk away feeling like you are on top of the world. Other days, you are off balance and your negative self-talk creeps in. Both days are progress, though the off-balance days can feel off-putting, sometimes I feel there is more progress and more accomplishment in the shaky moments.
Today, I was so wobbly getting into half-moon, then transitioning into warrior III and I caught myself getting frustrated and angry with myself for not being able to hold the pose. It can be irritating when you know you can do something and then for some reason you don’t. In my anger, I reminded myself not to take myself so seriously. I was getting up tight and flustered over a pose on a mat after all. It’s really funny the things we get ourselves worked up over.
Cultivating awareness is really the key to life in so many ways. When we can become self-aware, we can begin to laugh at the things our mind wants to run away with. For example, I found myself exerting negative energy today because I couldn’t balance on one leg well enough. If not for awareness, I would have continued that downward spiral and left beating myself up over the less than perfect practice. If not for awareness, I wouldn’t have been able to see my perfectionist tendencies attempting to run away with me and beat me down. If not for awareness, I wouldn’t have seen the invisible bar of overachieving expectation I was holding for myself. If not for awareness, I would have lost the choice in the moment. Awareness is the key because it gives you the gift of choice. Without awareness, you miss the opportunity to begin again and choose differently.
How your mind speaks correlates to what happens on the mat. When I grew annoyed at not being able to hold the position, there was no chance in hell that I was going to do it. My heart started beating faster, I felt my face getting hotter, and it almost felt like tears were going to roll. Exerting all of that emotional energy doesn’t leave much for the physical efforting. When I became the witness and reset my self-talk by laughing inwardly at the anger and congratulating myself for showing up on the mat and giving it my all I was able to do this flow with more ease on the other side. In that moment, I chose not to be impatient and brutal with myself. I chose to lift myself up and tell myself it was ok rather than exude hostility about what I originally perceived as a “failure.”
In that moment, I decided to change my perception. After all, I’m setting the bar here. I’m the one who gets to determine the standards I set for myself in any given moment. In that moment I was able to adjust the bar because the bar I was holding wasn’t leading to good feelings. I was able to find comedy in the situation. Here I am setting the expectation of what my practice is going to look like and here I am kicking my own ass when I don’t meet that expectation. How often do most of us do this to ourselves?
I know I’m not alone in this because I had this very conversation with a friend of mine not too long ago. I was very easily able to point this out to her. She was setting expectations for herself in some of her personal situations and then whipping herself whenever she didn’t measure up. I’m not saying there is anything wrong with setting goals and reaching for the stars, but a lot of us are putting too much pressure on ourselves when it comes to things that don’t matter. For example, doing yoga fabulously is not life or death here. Getting all the chores done in the house by the weekend is not going to make or break our life. We need to take the whip out of our own hand and stop lashing ourselves anytime we fall a little short of our own self-imposed expectations.
We need to spend time building ourselves up and treating ourselves as though we were talking to a loved one instead of an enemy. The expectations we have are ours to set. The compassion we show ourselves is ours to choose. Love is always there begging for us to choose it, we just need to open our hearts and let it in.
How are you treating yourself? Would you consider your mind a friend, a critic, or an enemy with regard to your self-talk? Do you feel it may be time to choose differently?