July Theme - Patience and Process
/Happy July! I hope you had a fantastic June, and thanks for being part of my first full official month as a yoga teacher and business. As I’ve written about, June’s theme was growing. We were getting into summer and growing our gardens. The days were growing longer. We were growing our connection with family and friends as we move into summer/vacation/outdoor gathering/etc mode. I was (and of course, still am) growing my website, my yoga business, and everything that goes along with it. I also focused on a lot of internal growth. In June, I began working a lot more with intentionality. I began focusing on being more conscious of what was going on around me, what I was doing in the moment. I began paying more attention to input from my senses - sights, sounds, the feel of the environment, smells (not always the best focus!), really consciously tasting food. I also have been working to focus on one task/activity/item at a time. It’s tough in this society of alerts and pings and texts and everything else, and I’m not great at it, but I’m getting better at it, I think.
For July, I decided to have a dual focus, because for me, they go together nicely: Patience and Process. I’ll be real - patience is a virtue…. That I don’t have a ton of. To be clear, I have patience with people. I don’t tend to have patience with myself, especially when it comes to process. I tend to want to teleport from starting line to end result, and I don’t give myself nearly enough credit for the steps in between. In yoga class, this could be the frustration of struggling to get my body to move a certain way. I’ll work and work at something, and it’s often tough for me to notice the small improvements, if I’m still struggling with range of motion or pain in a certain position and I have to get myself out of it. (Note: don’t stay in a pose that’s causing any pain that’s not a stretching kind of pain. Yoga should not be acutely pain-inducing!).
More often though, it’s the life process I’m not great with. For instance, in the past two months, I’ve graduated yoga teacher training, gotten my RYT-200 designation, secured a private client, gotten on a sub list at a studio, am scheduled to teach two donation based community classes for Charity at The Grant Building, and recently found out that I’ve been approved for a weekly benefit class for an organization, which I can’t yet share details of yet but am super excited about! And yet my brain is over here thinking that it’s not enough, because I haven’t miraculously in 1.5 months managed to start a full-fledged business that can pay the bills. Except that in reality, less than two months ago, I wasn’t even officially a yoga teacher!
For me, it stems from a combination of anxiety and my general personality - the J part of my INFJ is associated with always planning for the next stage, always looking for the next steps, the next experience, the next adventure. And we can only really change so much about our inherent personality, so I’ll probably always be someone that works better knowing the plan, the next steps, working towards the next stage. But I’m trying to also help myself realize that the smaller pieces of the process, the baby steps, are still steps. They’re still part of that plan, that moving towards the next stage, and they’re necessary. And so I’m working on celebrating process, and having patience with it. It fits well into my intentional living focus, to notice all that’s going on right now, instead of jumping ahead to next, next next.
I’ll be posting, blogging, sharing about patience and process throughout the month, both here and on my twitter and instagram. And if you’re up for sharing, I’d love to hear about the processes that you're working with and celebrating this month!
This pose is a process for me, as you can see by my back foot turning in, and my elbow not quite hooking over my knee. And that’s all OK. I keep working on it. Sometimes it’s a little easier. Sometimes, I look like I’m taking yoga selfies in my pajamas with less than perfect form.