I’m too busy for yoga.

I have said and done that too often not to notice that it’s a pattern, a stuck place in my life.

What do I know now that makes me sit and write my first blog?

I know one of the ways that yoga helps is by being a fixed star in the week. If you say, “I take yoga class Monday and Friday,” and you keep that appointment with yourself, you have stillness in this midst of all the frantic business. That stillness gives you peace and stability. On that stability you can build a good life. If you let it go enough times because everything else is more important than you, you’ll miss the happiness and personal mastery of taking what you need to live your life. So take it. Take that time.

Make your appointments around your yoga practice. See friends for lunch before or after. Shop for groceries, drop books at the library, check off the next thing on the list, but put yoga on that list. Holding that time makes you stronger and surer in your life.

I’m like all of us – pressed for time, stretched beyond the limit, getting through my life one checklist after another. I’m a yoga teacher. I’m a yogi. I’m supposed to know better – and do better.  But I couldn’t.  I got too busy to stop and think it through, too busy to let anything drop.

Practicing in a yoga class takes you out of the driver’s seat. By the end of class you feel so clear and light. The world takes care of itself for that hour.

Yoga works on us. We just have to show up willing – show up at all – and the unnecessary stuff in mind and body gets sorted, ordered, and cleared.

That reminds me of Mrs Darling, the mother in Peter Pan. “It is the nightly custom of every good mother after her children are asleep to rummage in their minds and put things straight for next morning, repacking into their proper places the many articles that have wandered during the day…When you wake in the morning, the naughtiness and evil passions with which you went to bed have been folded up small and placed at the bottom of your mind and on the top, beautifully aired, are spread out your prettier thoughts, ready for you to put on.”

Yoga does that. It’s our Mrs. Darling. When you practice, she does her loving sorting. Show up twice a week and see what happens in a month.

Mrs. Darling loves to make things beautiful.