Wonderful Problems
There are problems...
... with doing yoga on the beach. You get sand on your clothes, of course. You might have more spectators than you would truly like to have while upside down with your bum in the air.
The sand keeps on shifting and moving beneath your feet and hands, unlike the firm steadiness of a nice wood yoga studio floor, so you have to keep moving left or right in your downward dog, away from the holes you’ve dug in the sand while you were doing sun salutations.
You can get a sunburn if you’re not careful, or even sunstroke, which is serious. Conversely, it could be too windy or start to rain, and make a mess of your schedule. As once happened to me in Costa Rica, the tide can come in and cover your nice sandy yoga spot.
And then, of course, as happened to me this morning, your pets can come and start getting in the way, meaning you can’t put your feet or your hands where you were intending to, because you have a cat underneath you.
And while you’re stepping around the cat you might put your foot down on a sharp piece of coral or a stone or a broken shell. The difficulties are just endless.
I contemplated these problems while I was upside down by the sea this morning, and I thought how wonderful it was to mull over them instead of the bigger problems. I mean, these yoga problems are trivial.
But then... creating a better life is about creating better problems, isn’t it?
If you have some large terrible problems hurting you at the moment, answer this: could you replace them in your brain with wonderful problems for a while? If you can do this mental trick, it will:
· reduce your stress levels
· make you healthier
· make you happier
And switching your thoughts to wonderful problems will probably help your mind solve the big terrible problems more than if you keep grinding away thinking about the big problem all the time anyway.
It really works, so you might as well try it.
Oh. Are you having trouble thinking of wonderful problems to think about?
No worries. Stop thinking, and go find a small space and try to do some yoga. If you have no idea whatsoever how to begin, find an article or a video on the internet and follow that. Before you know it, you’ll be having wonderful problems that will take up your brain. You will notice that your toes are dirty, or that your toenails need cutting. You will notice that your yoga mat scrunches up, or that you need a yoga mat because your kitchen floor is too slippery. Or, horror of horrors, you’ll get grassy bits or sand between your toes.
The magic of these wonderful kind of yoga problems is that you know how to solve them. Toes are dirty? You have the power to wash them. Muscle is tight? You have the power to stretch it a little every day until it starts to heal. Don’t know how to do a certain pose you want to do? There are endless resources available for you to figure that out. Cat is in the way? You have the power to change and adapt your poses (in my case this morning, I did a sort of silly rotating downward-dog-while-petting-cat, which I can really recommend for a thorough glutes stretch).
Before you know it, you’ll be in the groove with the successes of solving the tiny problems of yoga that this problem-solving mindset will leak over to other areas of your life. As you start to chip away at the small wonderful problems that are a part of the day and a day the part of a larger problem, that monster will get smaller and smaller.
Try it now. Let the magic happen.
Pro Tip: Invite pets or small children for added difficulty and laughs
... with doing yoga on the beach. You get sand on your clothes, of course. You might have more spectators than you would truly like to have while upside down with your bum in the air.
The sand keeps on shifting and moving beneath your feet and hands, unlike the firm steadiness of a nice wood yoga studio floor, so you have to keep moving left or right in your downward dog, away from the holes you’ve dug in the sand while you were doing sun salutations.
You can get a sunburn if you’re not careful, or even sunstroke, which is serious. Conversely, it could be too windy or start to rain, and make a mess of your schedule. As once happened to me in Costa Rica, the tide can come in and cover your nice sandy yoga spot.
And then, of course, as happened to me this morning, your pets can come and start getting in the way, meaning you can’t put your feet or your hands where you were intending to, because you have a cat underneath you.
And while you’re stepping around the cat you might put your foot down on a sharp piece of coral or a stone or a broken shell. The difficulties are just endless.
I contemplated these problems while I was upside down by the sea this morning, and I thought how wonderful it was to mull over them instead of the bigger problems. I mean, these yoga problems are trivial.
But then... creating a better life is about creating better problems, isn’t it?
If you have some large terrible problems hurting you at the moment, answer this: could you replace them in your brain with wonderful problems for a while? If you can do this mental trick, it will:
· reduce your stress levels
· make you healthier
· make you happier
And switching your thoughts to wonderful problems will probably help your mind solve the big terrible problems more than if you keep grinding away thinking about the big problem all the time anyway.
It really works, so you might as well try it.
Oh. Are you having trouble thinking of wonderful problems to think about?
No worries. Stop thinking, and go find a small space and try to do some yoga. If you have no idea whatsoever how to begin, find an article or a video on the internet and follow that. Before you know it, you’ll be having wonderful problems that will take up your brain. You will notice that your toes are dirty, or that your toenails need cutting. You will notice that your yoga mat scrunches up, or that you need a yoga mat because your kitchen floor is too slippery. Or, horror of horrors, you’ll get grassy bits or sand between your toes.
The magic of these wonderful kind of yoga problems is that you know how to solve them. Toes are dirty? You have the power to wash them. Muscle is tight? You have the power to stretch it a little every day until it starts to heal. Don’t know how to do a certain pose you want to do? There are endless resources available for you to figure that out. Cat is in the way? You have the power to change and adapt your poses (in my case this morning, I did a sort of silly rotating downward-dog-while-petting-cat, which I can really recommend for a thorough glutes stretch).
Before you know it, you’ll be in the groove with the successes of solving the tiny problems of yoga that this problem-solving mindset will leak over to other areas of your life. As you start to chip away at the small wonderful problems that are a part of the day and a day the part of a larger problem, that monster will get smaller and smaller.
Try it now. Let the magic happen.
Pro Tip: Invite pets or small children for added difficulty and laughs
Comments
Post a Comment