My friend wrote this amazing blog, on exercise, my response to it on Facebook was just going to be too long, so of course I had to write a blog in response!
I have been practicing yoga for about 10 years now and teaching for about 5. Although yoga is very good for you that's not really why I practice it. I practice yoga because doing yoga feels like going to the playground, except all you need is your body. I am very athletic and always have been, but I was never flexible and I could not do anything that even resembled gymnastics. The first time I did natarajasana I felt free in a way I had never felt. Among the many sports I did soccer and track were my favorite. I stopped playing group sports after my freshman year of high school, but I continued to run for exercise so I was super tight, especially in the hips. After getting in a good workout it felt so good to open up my body the way natarajasana does. As I continued to practice yoga I became completely enthralled by some of the more acrobatic postures. The balance, strength and freedom that is required to succeed in these postures makes you feel like you are 10 again. I have seen it in the faces of so many students, the first time they try headstand or full wheel in 20 years. Usually their first response is to start laughing.
Often times I have students ask me how long it took me to do certain yoga postures, usually meaning how many years it took, which is most often how we define our time. However, in Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers he points out it is not years, but hours. "The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert-in anything." My response to my students when they ask me this is not how many years it took, but how many minutes. I have a yoga practice where I actually set aside an hour or so to do a more complete practice, however, I am always doing yoga. (note: the physical practice of yoga is only one small part of a very deep ocean, but because the discussion is on exercise , that's the part I am discussing.) You could ask anyone who knows me or spends time with me. I will start stretching anywhere, doesn't matter where I am if my body is calling for it I am going to move. My whole wardrobe is based on whether I can do the splits in what I am wearing and often if I could go upside down in it. This is how I think we need to start exercising. By minutes because minutes add up to hours and those hours eventually become years.
There are times in my life when I forget about all of this, when exercise almost becomes a form of punishment where I basically try to beat my body and mind into submission. It never works though, everything in me revolts from this sort of exercise. What ends up happening instead is I beat myself onto the couch where I can hide from my own unrelenting ego. I think this is what ends up happening to most of us. We don't think we can run a marathon or eat "that disgusting health food," we see images of unobtainable bodies that remind us how lacking our own is. It has become a shame based system, one that everyone is trying to cash in on, but this is not how exercising should make us feel. We were born to move, how that movement is expressed through each individual doesn't matter. My son cannot even watch TV sitting still. He has to get up and jump around and be apart of the show. This is how we are born, we want to be apart of the show. We want to engage in life. We do not want to watch it go by on a screen. As adults we have to get so serious about everything we do and honestly it is a bit ridiculous. People are starting to catch onto this, with things like the tough mudder, warrior dash, electric run and many others that are popping up all over the place. I hope that these things are not a trend, but a movement where we start to appreciate our bodies and their amazing capabilities, no matter the level of that capability.
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