3 Life Lessons I Learnt in 8 weeks
>> Thursday, March 04, 2010 –
Experiments,
Yoga
I have a list of life goals and one of them is to practice the 32 week Yoga Course. It has been almost 2 years since I thought of starting this but it kept on getting postponed. Then one day in December I wrote down this goal and other goals. Time passes by as usual, and suddenly today I am into the 9th week of my practice which means I have covered more than 25% of my goal. Now I am confident that I will be able to complete the goal of 32 week practice.
My Earlier Way of Practice
The practice I am doing is different from the way I used to practice. This is more goal oriented which make it more challenging and fun and at the same time more like to make me achieve greater results.
Earlier I used to practice in one of the two ways. I used to pick a set of poses and practice them and tried to analyze their effect. I used to make quite a bit of progress and then go on to another set of poses. That gave me chance to try out many poses and experiment with the effects but I was lacking the consistency and not practicing the sequence for long enough times. Another issue was once I moved to another set of poses I used to lose the efforts I made on the previous poses. Therefore when I used to come back to the previous poses again I had to start from almost the beginning stage.
I followed another route in which I joined a yoga class in 2008, which was following Bihar School of Yoga. In the class the sequences consisted of some set of beginning poses, followed by 8 to 10 rounds of Surya Namaskar and then Yoga Nidra and finally 10 minutes of Pranayama. I benefited a lot from that class due to the fact that I learned about Surya Namaskar and also Yoga Nidra (Yogic Sleep). in this case there were fixed set of poses and there was no scope of progressing to next level. These poses are good for a person who wants to practice yoga on a day to day basis for fitness and well being, where as my goal to explore Yoga at a more deeper level.
Later, late 2009, I decided to practice 42 rounds (21 sets) of Surya Namaskar every day for 30 days as an experiment and completed that in December 2009. I have already documented my experiences on that experiment in this blog. Success of the experiment led me to start this 32 week course.
In these last 8 weeks I have learned some valuable life lessons which I want to share. Though these lessons may already be known to you, it doesn't harm to reinforce them.
There are lessons to be learned in all spheres of life and it is up to them to learn from them make it part of our life.
Related Posts
My Yoga Goal For 2010
Surya Namaskar - Day 30 of 30 day Practice
My Earlier Way of Practice
The practice I am doing is different from the way I used to practice. This is more goal oriented which make it more challenging and fun and at the same time more like to make me achieve greater results.
Earlier I used to practice in one of the two ways. I used to pick a set of poses and practice them and tried to analyze their effect. I used to make quite a bit of progress and then go on to another set of poses. That gave me chance to try out many poses and experiment with the effects but I was lacking the consistency and not practicing the sequence for long enough times. Another issue was once I moved to another set of poses I used to lose the efforts I made on the previous poses. Therefore when I used to come back to the previous poses again I had to start from almost the beginning stage.
I followed another route in which I joined a yoga class in 2008, which was following Bihar School of Yoga. In the class the sequences consisted of some set of beginning poses, followed by 8 to 10 rounds of Surya Namaskar and then Yoga Nidra and finally 10 minutes of Pranayama. I benefited a lot from that class due to the fact that I learned about Surya Namaskar and also Yoga Nidra (Yogic Sleep). in this case there were fixed set of poses and there was no scope of progressing to next level. These poses are good for a person who wants to practice yoga on a day to day basis for fitness and well being, where as my goal to explore Yoga at a more deeper level.
Later, late 2009, I decided to practice 42 rounds (21 sets) of Surya Namaskar every day for 30 days as an experiment and completed that in December 2009. I have already documented my experiences on that experiment in this blog. Success of the experiment led me to start this 32 week course.
In these last 8 weeks I have learned some valuable life lessons which I want to share. Though these lessons may already be known to you, it doesn't harm to reinforce them.
- Take Challenging Goals to Achieve More
Take up challenging goals. They will excite you more though they may be daunting, but these are the goals which will give you the most satisfaction. Goals which appear challenging today will continue to remain challenging till we attempt to achieve them and once we do that we mostly find that those are possible. Till I started this practice I never attempted few of the poses in this course and kept on thinking that they are quite difficult. Of course I underestimated my ability to attempt them. Once I practiced those difficult poses and gained more control, though not total control, now I am more confident about going for other poses. - Practice Makes Any Task Easier
Another key thing I learned is that practicing any activity everyday will make it easier each time we do it. Gradually tough poses become easier. As we keep on practicing, we start gaining more knowledge and insight and that proves useful in other tasks and situations. This knowledge can be applied to other areas like work, or learning a new skill. - Concentrate on the Task, Results will Follow
When I started practicing few poses the first time, I knew that I was not doing them right. I had to adjust various muscles, stance or take support to gain the balance and to gradually gain control. I concentrated on making gradual progress and eventually got the pose right. Similarly when we concentrate on making small gains slowly we get on course to get the intended output. If we concentrate on the result instead of the process we will be discouraged and more likely to fail.
There are lessons to be learned in all spheres of life and it is up to them to learn from them make it part of our life.
Related Posts
My Yoga Goal For 2010
Surya Namaskar - Day 30 of 30 day Practice
