In the moment

One of my New Year’s resolutions was to get serious about yoga.

Yoga was something I discovered by accident. A Danish friend in Norway was training as a teacher and offered some free classes. I wanted to support her and thought I’d give it a try. I loved the way it made me feel – calmer, stronger and incidentally, slightly taller. I may have some hang ups about my height….

I attempted to get serious about it when we initially moved to Texas but then a job, a dog, school and a whole lot of other stuff happened and yoga did not. This year I promised myself that I’d change that and finally, I have.

I still love how it makes me feel. I find myself looking at my plans for the day and wondering if I can squeeze in another class.  A couple of classes a week is definitely having an impact on my physical appearance.

What I didn’t expect was the life lessons that getting back to the mat would help me focus on.

I’ve always been a planner, an organizer. I was the student with the color coded revision chart; the colleague with the ‘to-do’ list and the action plan. I am a classic ‘completer-finisher’, an imposer of order and someone who is always thinking ahead, anticipating, weighing up options, playing consequences. There’s not necessarily anything wrong with being like that.

But it’s not really an ideal approach to being an expat. Right now, we know when our US visa expires but that’s not to say that there won’t be a move before then. We have no idea where our next location will be, how long we will be there or where we might ‘end up’. We have a ‘bucket list’ of thing we want to do and places we want to go in the US but we don’t know what our timescale is for completing the list. In today’s economic climate, we are grateful that Himself still has a job and we have not faced the sudden and unexpected repatriation that many of our friends have had to deal with.

For a planner and a person who loves order and is perhaps inclined a bit to needing to be in control, all this uncertainty is a bit of a challenge. I have become better at dealing with it over the last six years but it can still be a struggle.

And I think that’s a big part of why I’m enjoying my adventures in yoga so much. Our teachers are constantly reminding us to leave it all on the mat and just be in the moment – to spend an hour just focusing on our breathing and where our limbs should be, listening to our bodies and clearing our minds. Some days, that’s really hard to do but when I manage to let go and just be, there’s a wonderful sense of peace.

So I’m trying to take this lesson from the mat into my ‘real’ life a little more, to just slow it down and enjoy it rather than always racing on to the next thing and the next item on the list. And that also means appreciating the ordinary and the mundane, knowing that the number of times I might have these experiences is finite, as well as trying new things, making sure that this chapter of our adventure is as full as possible.