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WEEK 15: What Do You Wake Up To?

This week, I encourage you to notice how your yoga practice is influencing the focus of your mind for the day. One of the things that keeps us stuck in everyday life is the inability to clearly see and then break through how certain thoughts run through our minds, directing our attention and experience. There's a saying, "The quality of your experience is determined by the focus of your attention." All too often, we let the focus of our attention be determined by habit and conditioning.

We're all familiar with how our mind gets stuck on certain familiar tracks. There's the "what's wrong with me" track (nicely complemented by the "what's wrong with everyone else" track), the "the world is a scary place and how will I cope" track, the "I'll finally be happy when I get.....(fill in the blank)" track, the "oh !$@#, do I really have to do this?" track, the "I can't believe she did that!" track....and that's just the best of collection. Only you know what track you've been keeping at #1 on the charts in your own mind.

These tracks are deeply formed habits of the mind, and they serve to disconnect us from the present moment. You can spend your whole life in the imagined world of each track, recalling the past, projecting onto the present, and making up a future.

It takes a while for most people to even realize that these tracks are not responses to the present moment. They pop up and we naturally think they are a reaction to something real. But through awareness practices (like meditation and asana and self-reflection), we start to see how they show up independent of what we're doing. When we settle down our mind and create space, they just show up. Usually these tracks are how we start our day - they're like an internal alarm clock that says, "Wake up! And make sure you stay focused on this thing that will keep you suffering all day!" And then we do.

Regular yoga practice pierces through the conditioning that keeps us disconnected from the present moment and from peace. One thing I've noticed consistently is that the quality of my practice on one day influences how loud these tracks are the next day, especially when I wake up. If you have the awarneness to notice the first thought of your day, you will have a clear sense of how your mind will direct your attention and experience for the rest of the day. Following a day of deep practice, my first thought of the day is often a positive intention related to my practice from the day before. If my own practice takes a backseat for a few days, I'm more likely to find myself waking up with a sense of dread about my commute, or some other trivial distraction. 

The Practice

Your practice assignment this week is start to take a look at how the quality of your yoga practice influences your habitual tracks. If possible, make a commitment to noticing the first thought of each day. Keep a pen and paper by your bed, and write down your first thoughts each morning. At night, before you go to bed, bring back to mind the best part of your daily practice - the intention you set in the practice, or a feeling or insight you had in the practice. If you didn't practice formally that day, take a few deep breaths and reconnect to your highest intention for your practice, in general. You might think of a particular phrase, such as "May I know peace," or "thank you", or practice a specific mudra (gesture), like the namaste gesture or bandha mudra. This is in itself a wonderful practice and may be enough to pierce through conditioning of the mind.

I happen to think that a "first thought of the day" would make a wonderful, insightful, and probably humorous discussion thread - like last year's haiku challenge. I encourage you to start posting what you notice on our discussion board. Here is the link to the thread I started for this topic:

http://openmindbody.com/discuss/viewtopic.php?t=85

To access the boards, use the class login (yoga) and password (connect). To post, you can then login in using your account or post as a guest.

Take care,