Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Start Each Day With an Intention, Not an Expectation


           Sometimes a yoga teacher will have us start class with an intention for our practice.  It could be an intention to really push yourself to your limits during this class, or an intention to listen to your body and respect what it needs, or an intention to focus on your breath and on clearing your mind of outside thoughts.  In the same breath, yoga teachers often remind us to enter into the practice without any expectations for ourselves or for the outcome.  This can seem like a contradiction.  At first glance it is, but upon closer examination it makes a lot of sense.
There is a difference between having an intention and having an expectation.  An intention is a hope and a focus for your practice, kind of like a drishti (visual focal point used in various poses) but for the mind.  You have succeeded with your intention if you can honestly say that you worked on it by the end of the class.  It is not a specific goal that you should feel badly about not attaining if you do not succeed.  In fact, it is not even something that you can check off that you absolutely completed because the whole point is to work on living this intention, not to approach it like a work task.  It is something to be mindful of during your practice without allowing it to distract you from the practice itself.  It integrates into the flow of your poses and can be applied as broadly as you need it to be.  It is your ruling philosophy for the course of the class and you can form it based on how you are feeling mentally or physically to begin with, or based on how you anticipate you might feel during the particular sequences you will be practicing during that class.
An intention is not an expectation that today you will finally come up into headstand.  It is not an expectation that you will take the most advanced modifications of every pose offered, and conversely it is not an expectation that you will have to take the easiest modifications offered for the poses.  These are far too specific to be in keeping with the spirit of having an intention in the first place because at the end of the class you will definitively have either done or not done these things.  While this can be exciting if you do accomplish what you expect to, it can leave you feeling like you failed if you do not reach these expectations you have set of yourself and that is not the point of a yoga practice.  Yoga is meant to uplift you regardless of the outcome of the practice.
            If you apply the concept of starting with an intention to the start of your day, then each day can be uplifting regardless of the outcome.  You can base your intention for the day off of how you feel when you wake up, or you can base it off of the tasks you know you will be facing during your day.  If you wake up feeling sad, anxious, or just generally negative about the day then a helpful intention might be to acknowledge and honor your emotions.  You can use this intention to focus on allowing yourself to feel various emotions, even the negative ones, without allowing them to take over your day and prevent you from being productive and functional.  You can’t just delete or ignore negative emotions, but you choose how much you let them affect you.  Of course, you can be mindful of your emotions on any day but you can make it your intention if you feel that you will need to pay extra attention to them on this particular day.  If you know you have a jam-packed day of places to be and things to do, then a good intention might be to focus on being aware of your breath throughout the day.  Keeping your breath in mind will allow you to manage the amount of stress that a non-stop day can cause.
            An intention for your day can serve as a backdrop to everything that happens, as it does during a yoga class.  At the end of the day you can return to your intention, as you do at the end of a yoga class, to reflect on the role it played in your day.  It won’t be a matter of having completed something, but rather a matter of having actively worked on taking care of yourself.  An intention is an acknowledgement of what you will need mentally and physically during a practice or during your day, and you can always check in with yourself and come back to that place where you started.

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