I recently started back up in grad school and have been practicing yoga to help manage stress and to make my butt look nice. Since I am a sensible person, I figured if I was going to have my yoga neighbors look directly at me waving my butt around for extended periods of time, I should secretly do some research beforehand so I could look like a total baller on these imaginary exercise dates.
One of the blogs I read pled for new practitioners of yoga not be an annoying person that tells everyone they know that they "should" do yoga. Indulge me in some nerdy psychology speak for a moment: Wegner (1987) has a theory that suppressing thoughts only leads to thinking about them more and more obsessively. The only problem is that I actually really really do love yoga now and want to talk about it all the time. My solution has been to have regular morning conversations with my stuffed animals about how my yoga poses are going, so I can spare the rest of the world from being mildly annoyed at me. You're welcome world.
The secret to my reputation as a great listener
Around the same time I've been practicing meditation really frequently, and the two activities actually go hand in hand very well. The adult learning model poses that self-improvement is an inchworm approach; like an inchworm that makes incremental gains by plying it's back legs forward first, scrunching its torso together, and extending the front of its body forward, we improve by working on our weaknesses first which makes our strengths even stronger.
The cool part about all of this is that a pretty regular routine in yoga, sun salutations, perfectly mimic the movement of an inchworm. One of my favorite games that I like to play during yoga is to pretend I'm an actual inchworm inching my way towards mindfulness, enlightenment and all the skinny girls' butts in front of me. I have an unprovable theory that this is how the Buddha achieved enlightenment too, which I believe will someday make me rich and famous beyond my wildest dreams. Even though I've never directly studied Buddhism, it feels good knowing I'm definitely on the right track here. I guess some people are just naturals.
Inchworming my way out of here, until next time friends.
# posted by Stoops @ 11:56 AM
