“The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war.”
― David Allen, Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life

Day 23 – Today’s life lesson is about forgetting one’s place in the world.  It makes you grumpy.  Like Rolf, “I felt I could spend a hundred lifetimes just refining my own ability to have a good day.”  After a short practice this morning, having gone to bed early with general discomfort and much irritability, I picked my favorite practice, grounding and welcoming myself to my space with pranam, followed by a short and sweet yoga practice on Datura Online.  These two small practices (15 minutes in total) give me a good feeling for how my body is responding to my everyday workouts, nutrition, and sleep.

After this, I encounter Rolf’s beautiful passages about traveling, introducing the extraordinary.  And, like mountain pose, traveling requires one “to find the same comfort and stability in the new pose as they experience in the simplest one.”  What is the simplest thing that gives me comfort and returns me to home?  Yes, sometimes it is a trip to the mountains, but other times it is just the 15 minutes spent on my mat, reminding me that I am not needing to do all the things my mind is telling me I need to do.  As such, David Allen, famous productivity guru and my newest “reading” discovery, offers some suggestions to me:  “Suffice it to say that something automatic and extraordinary happens in your mind when you create and focus on a clear picture of what you want.”

Today, I was amazed by giving myself over the simplest of practices, which entailed primarily mountain pose and forward bending, how grounded I felt.  Rolf describes mountain pose as “the ultimate in calm, abiding steadiness–is actually a dynamic tension arrived at effortlessly.” Practice. Practice. Practice.