“For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons…”
-T.S. Eliot, fromThe Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
I don’t measure my life with coffee spoons, but I think I know what T.S. Eliot meant in that famous poem. Like many moms - many human beings, for that matter - I fall into the habit of measuring my self worth on how much I have accomplished. And of course, how much I have accomplished partly depends on how much time I’ve spent on something.
Picture this: you used to do yoga for an hour at a time, maybe 3-5 times a week, and you felt pretty good. You thought that you’d always commit this much time to yoga because you felt and saw the benefits. Then you became a mom, and you started to look back wistfully at the freedom you used to have in your schedule. You now feel like you barely have any time for yoga anymore. If only you realized and appreciated how much free time you had back then. If you didn’t used to do yoga, insert another activity you did used to do and have time for before you became a mom.
That was me. My husband watches our daughter so I can go to a yoga class here and there, but I had to slowly accept over time that if I wanted to be a calm, healthy, loving mom, that I need yoga and because I need it, I have to find ways to fit it into my daily life.
Now more than ever, with the push to stay home and practice social distancing among the coronavirus pandemic, many of us must find ways to practice at home. That makes it easy if you find it difficult or impractical to drive somewhere and take a class, or if you don’t have childcare. But it might make it harder for those that feel they need that separate time and place to practice.
But let’s think first about what yoga is. In that clarification, we can figure out how to fit it into our home lives. Is yoga always a one-hour session of postures on a mat, ending with savasana? Can it also be a 3-5 minute meditation done while your kids play or watch a show? Maybe sometimes it takes the form of a 5-10 minute session of asana on the mat followed by 3 deep, attentive breaths? At times it might be about practicing the four locks and keys mentioned in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras.
Once you discover that yoga is more than sun salutations and postures, then comes the work of finding time to include it into your day. Sit down and think of how you spend your day. Get out a pen and paper, or sit at your laptop or computer and write or type:
-3-5 things that you do when you want to veg out or relax (for example, watch TV, scroll through your FaceBook or Instagram feed, chat with people that won’t let you get off the phone, read the news). Circle one or more that you are willing to do less of. To be clear, these are not necessarily harmful or unhealthy activities. But cutting down on one or more of these, even just a little bit, is a simple act of prioritizing our yoga practices.
-replace that thing or things with 3-10 minutes of yoga. Choose an amount of time you can achieve easily and slowly build up the amount of time if you can. Schedule it at a time of day that is realistic for you, for instance, when you won’t be too tired or too full (after a big meal, for instance).
Most of all, make it fun! Create ambience, make a special place for practice even if it’s just the corner of the living room, put on music, practice with your kids. Sometimes I get annoyed because when I do asanas, my 3-year-old daughter tends to think I am a playground that she is free to crawl on, under, and dance around. Which is sometimes disruptive. Do I set a hard boundary and say, “I’m doing this now and I will play with you afterwards?” Sometimes. But this can also be an opportunity to bring levity to practices that can sometimes seem sort of austere.
Be thankful for the time that you do have, even if it’s a few minutes to slow down and check in with your breath and release your shoulders away from your ears. There will be days when your practice is what you expect, and days when it seems like a flop. But consistency is key. The devotion to a brief daily practice is what gives us momentum to maintain a calm, mindful approach to life. Ditch the ‘coffee spoons’ and measure the worth of your time by how grounded and peaceful you feel rather than by how much you do. Let yoga be the new tea time.
Om, shanti.