Monday, November 29, 2010

It's not the time...

28Nov10, 11:30am Power Yoga with Michael Lau

I was in a state of bliss having seen my wife, Kim, for the first time in almost a month, as she finally arrived to Hong Kong Saturday evening about 8pm. It was like we'd never skipped a beat, like two puzzle pieces, different on our own but solidly linked when together, as always...

I left her at 7:30am Sunday morning, as she had to fly to mainland China for a few days, but I will be meeting her in Taiwan on Tuesday, for which I'm quite excited.

We had a big breakfast at the hotel, which I'm not used to unless it's a brunch/lunch on a weekend, but still... so I was quite happy to go back home and relax, go back to sleep another hour, until heading to yoga a bit later. I'm taking a lot of opportunities to sleep lately, which is interesting and a good sign I think. More on that later.

Yoga was good. I like this teacher a lot, but I don't think my body was at 100% this morning. The last few workouts I've had have been good ones, and I think collectively made my body sore. I love that soreness, but I need to realize that when I'm sore, I probably won't be able to do the full lotus or Padmāsana and the crow or Kākāsana with full extension would be difficult today. Remember Jodie, that's ok. I did look around and saw that everyone else was doing full Padmāsana except for me, and a tear welled in my eye. That leads me to touch back on the idea of "comparison" as it seems like a source of a lot of anxiety for me... my intellect, my body and weight, my athletic performance, my yoga... everything. We are taught to compare in life... this is big, that is small, this is white, that is black... and so it must be hard for us not to translate that to everything else in our lives. Especially for me, as a scientist, it is my career to make comparisons, sometimes I even employ sophisticated statistics in order to do so, as the naked eye isn't always enough to sense differences. Therefore, I'm trained to compare, I'm good at comparing, and it's instinctual for me to compare... I quickly acknowledged my feelings and moved on in my practice. Ultimately, I think it turned out really well.

My teacher today also touched on an idea that is important to me... the idea of time. He couched it within the context of his current favourite song by a French artist. The song, titled "It is not the time" touches on how time isn't the issue... it's priorities. I think about this often when I think that "I don't have time" for something. Before the words leave my mouth, I mentally rephrase that I had other priorities that were higher on my list that day, or something to that extent. I think this is a really good lesson for me and everyone else out there... next time we're feeling time-crunched, consider what priorities are occupying your time and which ones are getting excluded... we all have 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week, etc. We make our own choices, however.

Indeed, "it's not the time"... it's us...

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