Work in Progress

            Your physical body and your self are always going to be a work in progress.  As someone who is not exactly thrilled by uncertainty, this is not an easy fact to accept.  Building muscle definition takes a lot of dedication and hard work and it is not something that will show up overnight.  But, if you actively work at it over an extended period of time you will be wonderfully rewarded with results.  Each goal, however, has to be another step on your fitness journey, and you can’t head down this path with any sort of end goal or picture in your mind.  I kept thinking there would be a point at which I would say, “Yes.  This is good.  I just want to stay exactly like this for the rest of my life and all I have to do now is maintain it.”  That point is never going to come, and I don’t think I want it to.  It’s not that I’m hypercritical of my body or that I am always looking for flaws and nitpicking at things I want to “fix”.  It’s not that at all. 

It’s that life is a work in progress and you have to keep moving.  I will set strength goals or target certain groups of muscles that I want to tone, or gradually work on a specific yoga pose.  All of these are gradual goals that I will have to build up to over time, and once I reach them I will find new goals.  I saw a great quote today that said, “It’s your life, your big yoga class.”  I started thinking about how I could apply that to my entire life.  How can I scale today’s vinyasa flow class, for example, to the timeline of my life?  Today’s class was full of layered poses, meaning that each step in the pose was a pose in itself and you could stop at any layer along the way.  The last layer was extremely difficult and everyone was encouraged to move as deep into the layers as possible, but you could stop wherever you needed to along the way.  I went as far as I could; I pushed myself, but it came from within and not from comparing myself to the person on the mat next to me.  I moved at my own pace and took pride in my own small victories.  I also surprised myself, going deeper than I thought I could in many of the poses.  The moment was right, the environment was right, and the teacher guided me further than I would have gotten on my own.

Many of the poses looked absolutely impossible when she demonstrated them, but there was no judgment and I just went for it, just to see how far I could go.  Most of the poses looked like I wouldn’t make it past the first or second layer, but I was able to go pretty far on all of them except the last one.  The last pose, I did indeed only get to the second layer, and I didn’t beat myself up over it.  I pushed as far as I could go without pushing myself over the edge into an injury or snapping something out of a socket.  I acknowledged my own personal boundary and respected that line and my own body.

Life can, indeed, be like one giant yoga class.  You can start your days with an intention just like a yoga class.  You can learn to compete only with yourself and to respect your limits, while challenging them at the same time.  You can surprise yourself.  You can always take life’s equivalent of savasana if you need it, be it a half hour break to watch a television show, having a scoop of ice cream for dessert, or just going to bed early one night because you need it.  And finally, if you dedicate yourself to working on something you really want, eventually you will be able to contort yourself into that final, impossible-looking layer of that pose.