You Made It! (I Always Knew You Would)

---

At the beginning of 2020, I was invited to teach a special class at Corepower Yoga. It was part of a slew of specialty classes that would be rolled out through the holiday week when the schedule got a bit weird. My class was taught on New Year’s Eve and I titled it 2020 Vision.

I handed out index cards and pens at the beginning of class and told students to keep them by their mat. We then opened with a guided meditation. I centered the attention to the third eye, the seed of intuition and the place where you can see your future most clearly. I asked them to really tap into that space and see what the next year had in store for them.

I didn’t want the ego to get in the way though, so I instructed the class to sit for quite some time with an open mind, allowing anything and everything to enter into the mind’s eye. When a sufficient time had passed, I asked them to write the intention of how they would like to approach the new year on their index card.

To be clear, this was not a goal for the new year.

We weren’t going to lose ten pounds, make a million dollars or find the love of our life. We were instead speaking of the manner in which we would live through the next twelve months.

Once that portion of the class was taken care of, I led them through a flow in which I repeatedly, and possibly annoyingly, brought them back to their intention. Could they bring that intention to the pose or transition that they were in at the very moment? I was sure that they could and wanted them to know it. So even if we didn’t do splits or get as twisted up as some of the fitness models did, we were still able to live out our intention through the entirety of our class, and hopefully bring it into the new year as well. 

And when I consider how 2020 wound up unraveling, I’m fairly pleased with the idea of intention-setting when stacked up against goal-setting. I don’t think I would have met many goals in this interesting and challenging year, but I do think I was able to keep true to my intentions.

There were times where 2020 seemed impossible.

The quarantine was supposed to be two months to get hospitals ready. The country seemed divided so deeply that there couldn’t possibly be a way for us to come together. There were murder hornets!

And yet, we are still here. While it’s true that we lost quite a few in the past year, if you’re reading this right now, then whatever challenges, obstacles and insurmountable odds you faced this year, you were able to overcome. Nothing knocked you down so hard that you couldn’t get up. You kept moving. That in itself seems like an accomplishment to me.

On the other side of the coin though, what other option did you have? When I was in high school I was captain of the football team. Football can be a bit of a weird sport because there can be such a difference in the type of person playing depending on the position they play. I was a wide receiver and arguably in the best shape of my life. I could run for miles. A friend of mine was a lineman and a pretty big dude. Running was not his forte. At the end of practice, we would have to run sprints as a team and as a captain, it was my job to make sure everybody finished. Every day at practice it would be the same thing for my friend. We would be a couple sprints in and he would keel over panting and say that he couldn’t do it. I’d run over to him and try to motivate him through it. I remember one specific time where between heavy panting and dry heaving he was gasping that he couldn’t do it and I just asked,

‘What else are you gonna do?’

I think it was a fair question. We as a team had to run a certain amount of sprints. He hadn’t completed the sprints and needed to if he was going to keep his starting spot. We both knew he wouldn’t let the team down like that, so what were we even talking about? I knew he was going to run the sprints. He knew he was going to run the sprints. Let’s just run the sprints and stop talking about how hard it is.

Some people I know refer to the spiritual practices we do as ‘warrior’s work.’ For me that is a tad excessive. Such a label puts much greater pressure on it than there truly needs to be. Parkinson’s Law suggests that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Maybe there is another law that suggests the work that you do is only as hard as you make it. 

In his self titled 2001 comedy, Joe Dirt reminded us of this when he was asked why he kept getting up in the morning with all that was wrong in his life.

“Ya gotta keep going. What am I gonna do? Quit? That’s not an option. You gotta keep on keepin’ on. Life’s a garden, dig it. You make it work for you. You never give up, that’s my philosophy.”

I like this approach a little bit better. There is work in front of me, sure. There are challenges and there are obstacles, some of which I will be defeated by. I’ll get knocked on my ass from time to time and that’s alright. Wins? Losses? I’m not really sure that those words matter in the same way that I used to think that they did.

They are two sides of the same coin.

When I look back to that class I taught twelve months ago, it all seems to ring a bit clearer. You see, there were students in that class who hadn’t done much yoga. The poses and transitions were new so just following along was a challenge in itself. There were also other teachers in that class. Students who had committed a large part of their life to the practice of yoga and were there to go deeper. For them, the challenge may have been staying focused on the breath, or perhaps keeping a new type of muscle engagement through the more difficult postures. I like to think that all of my students in that class were challenged in their own way.

So in the end, what does a win really do for you? It just levels you up to more challenging endeavors. And a loss? A loss just allows you to return to the drawing board in an attempt to succeed on the next try.

It’s like enlightenment. We tend to think that enlightenment is a state that you reach and from then on, you’re glowing and float a couple of inches above the ground. Maybe balance is a better example, though. The balance postures of yoga may be goals for some, but what does that really mean? How long must you remain in handstand, side crow or tree pose to claim that you can do it? The goal just doesn’t make sense. No, I think that enlightenment and balance are moments that we occasionally hit and do our best to maintain for as long as we can. It is an act, and not a state.

Maybe this year was difficult. Maybe you didn’t reach the goals that you set out for yourself. Maybe it completely blew the doors off of some of your deepest held beliefs about yourself and your life. That’s fine, but it doesn’t really feel like there is much worth in dwelling on it. If you had reached those goals, you’d be setting new ones right now.

The work will always be in front of you.

That’s life. I think that the best you can do is to do it with a smile.

2021 is fast approaching, but if I were you I wouldn’t worry about it too much. The universe tends to unfold as it should.

---

Did you enjoy this read?

Please leave a comment below and share the link!

---

RECENT ARTICLES

---