Off The Mat & Into Life

In yoga, we start our practice by stilling our minds & bringing our breath into our awareness & control.  We connect our bodies with our minds and spirit.  We set an intention for our practice.  We do this to prepare ourselves for our time on the mat.  We go into our practice engaged & proactive - ready to accept the challenge from a place of best intention. 

I tell my yoga students that yoga is practice for life.  That our mats are an analogy for our day.  Each day affords us the opportunity to enter engaged, prepared, and aware or to simply show up, pants on fire 5 minutes late hoping for the best.  But to quote someone smarter than me, "Hope is not a strategy." 

Look at your day.  How often do you skid into the next meeting, still breathless from the last?  Arrive for a discussion in which there is no agenda & for which you have not prepared?  Enter into a conflict from a place of irritation versus connection?  How often do you launch into the morning with a loose plan and spend the day fighting the fires that show up at your door and inbox?

What would change if you spent 90 seconds before a meeting centering your mind by taking 3 deep, grounding breaths, and setting an intention?  What if you asked yourself before every task:  "What is the greatest result I want to achieve right now?"  This practice of setting an intention is powerful.

Our attention follows our intention.  And if we don't consciously set an intention, we will default to whatever whim our emotions are on.  We will repeat old patterns and thus, never breakthrough.  In our relationships, we will repeat the same disagreements, feel the same old emotions, and  rerun the same scripts.

Developing a habit of setting an intention from a place of belief & calm leads to transformation.  Big breakthroughs do not come from old ways of doing things.  They come from setting new expectations and creating clarity around what we know is possible.  Even if we haven't yet experienced it.