Standard Deviations

Despite my ongoing love affair with the east coast fall, I'm enjoying our current heatwave, with the mercury hovering around 70 degrees. This warm interlude, if only briefly, gives a foretaste of the rebirth and renewal that lie beyond winter and has been a lovely surprise.

This evening, as I enjoyed a bare-shouldered run through the dark streets of Ardmore, I came to the conclusion that I am a person for whom it can be said, "She thinks too much." I find I often spend so much time analyzing, deconstructing and conjuring up various situations, scenarios and scenes that I become bogged down and lost in my own mind. Indeed, I recurrently cannot see the forest for the trees, finding myself in a dense thicket of worried and tiresome thoughts.

So in the spirit of continued self-improvement, I am taking a page from the practice of yoga and applying it to daily life. In yoga, when the mind's attention wanders away from the movement of breath through the body, we are told to quiet the mind and gently bring it back, to refocus it on the rhythm of our breath and its relationship to various poses. For me, this seems to have great relevance not just at yoga class, but in the broader context of life. When the mind ambles off into the dark woodlands, instead of allowing it to roam free, patiently coax it back to center, focusing on something positive, or, perhaps, nothing at all. For me, exercise and hobbies like reading and craft projects seem like great tools to use in this process. 

Just like with the body, training the mind takes practice and it doesn't come overnight. I've done well in keeping up my home yoga practice, particularly first thing in the morning. I feel like the more consistent I am with this, the better equipped I'll be to implement the teachings of yoga off the mat as well.