Sorry for the long silence on this blog.

With the com­pli­ca­tions aris­ing my injury, my day­time job and a press­ing prob­lem of an issue with the IRS, I’ve had lit­tle time for blog­ging. I took my first yoga class on Mon­day, but didn’t get back to Thrive Yoga until this morn­ing. I had my evening prac­tice to calm my spirit, but I don’t approach it in a way that can sub­sti­tute my classes.

This year, I set my mind to main­tain­ing a clear bound­ary between my day­time job and the rest of my life. My strat­egy was to get into the office at least 15 min­utes before 9:00 so that I could get the most impor­tant tasks under­way before the cus­tom­ary inter­rup­tions and dis­trac­tions started. I also wanted to leave the office at 5:30, 5:45 at the lat­est, so that I could make it home early and fit in my yoga classes or the gym or run­ning (in good weather) or tackle the oblig­a­tions of mod­ern life and fam­ily. In any case, I did not want my work rou­tine to stretch into the evening.

At least, that was my inten­tion, but it’s been really hard to extri­cate myself from the office on time. Too many hard-​​and-​​fast dead­lines, and I don’t trust myself to do some catch-​​up work at home. On the other hand, I’ve also come to real­ize that as the day advances, my pro­duc­tiv­ity declines, focus dis­si­pates and energy flags. Part of that decline may be do to my lack of phys­i­cal sta­mina, but it’s also a nat­ural process unless some­thing hap­pens that gives me a spurt of adrenaline.

So I’ve had too many days in which I found a ready excuse for stay­ing after quit­ting time. Add that to the need to dig into my peren­ni­ally chaotic fil­ing sys­tem and spotty record keep­ing because I had to straighten out the fil­ings of two tax years.

40-​​day yoga challenge

As might be sus­pected, the 40-​​day chal­lenge turned into a 30-​​day sprint plus rain-​​check because the injury to my hip flex­ors cut short my atten­dance at the stu­dio, which removed a lot of the momen­tum for yogic dis­ci­pline. The ini­tial com­mit­ment to main­tain­ing a steady, intense prac­tice did allow me to taste the pay­off on the mat so as soon as pos­si­ble I am going to try to pick up the pace.

Les­son Learned

Look­ing back on the past three weeks, I can see that my phys­i­cal and men­tal well­be­ing began to slack off once I stopped doing my 40-​​day yoga chal­lenge and other exer­cise rou­tines and short­chang­ing my med­i­ta­tion. This just rein­forces the idea that I have to take care of my health, whether that means keep­ing a strict 8-​​hour work  day, get­ting exer­cise or find­ing the means to make sure that my head, mind and soul are firmly attached to my body.