My daughter’s smoothie-sipping pose:)
“Om, purnamadah purnamidam
Purnaat purnamudachyate
Purnasha purnamaadaaya
Purnamevaavashishyate”
“All this is full. All that is full.
From fullness, fullness comes.
When fullness is taken from fullness,
Fullness still remains.”
(from The Upanishads translated by Eknath Easwaran)
For those who have paid for a subscription to Yoga Mama, first of all, thank you. Second, you might wonder, “What does she mean by ‘Slow-ga’?” At the end of every post for paid subscribers, I add a section called Slow-ga. It’s just a silly name for slow yoga. I don’t mean slow yoga sequences, or even yoga postures per se. It is less about doing yoga and more about being yoga. I think of it as forming habits rather than setting goals.
I never imagined there was such a thing as speed yoga until I watched this Ted Talk. There is such a drive towards a fast lifestyle, that seems to have sparked an opposing trend towards slowing down. I guess that’s just bound to happen.
Don’t get me wrong, I love doing certain things quickly. Like doing the dishes and folding the laundry so that I have more time for fun stuff. But actually, as I began including the slow-ga section in my posts, I realized that sometimes doing simple everyday things slowly can be yoga. So now and then, I started doing dishes more slowly and thoughtfully, while bending my knees to make sure that I wasn’t hyperextending them. Oh yes, and making sure I’m breathing as I unload the dishwasher.
I know, it’s more of that mindfulness stuff you keep hearing about. Sometimes, less is more. Actually, the whole idea with slow-ga is to simplify so that the little things in life can be enjoyed and experienced more thoroughly. For me, that has often meant realizing that sometimes the things that seem boring can become so much more satisfying and interesting when done in a slow-gic way. There you go, I just made up another word!
It’s more than just mindfulness and appreciating simple things, though. It’s realizing that motherhood is often best experienced when we slow down. I constantly fall in that trap of feeling like there’s never enough time in the day. There really isn’t, and there never will be. That’s what we might call the fullness of life. We will never have enough time to do absolutely everything we want, but I hope that through these little slow-ga tidbits I share, we can make the most of the things we get around to doing.
The opening quote of this post says it all to me: life is fullness. Sometimes too full and we can’t get around to doing everything we set out to do. But the best yoga I’ve found is feeling that fullness during a slow, simple moment.
Om, shanti.