Reconnecting

Rereading last week's entry, I'm a little surprised I didn't add one more thing to my big ol' list of all the things I could have written about - especially because it's pretty significant to the topic of this whole blog.

I broke my 7 month streak of daily meditation.  I didn't even wait to get to Europe, either - it 100% slipped my mind the day of our departure and I just never got back to it until we were back home.  Even then, I wasn't consistent.

This wouldn't seem that unusual that on a vacation a meditation practice got interrupted, except for the fact that usually vacations or time spent out of town usually only serve to deepen my practice.  Whether it's having the absolute luxury of getting up early and going down to my grandma's beautiful dock, or just sitting on the floor of a little guest bedroom somewhere for 10 minutes, something about being somewhere else with the routine shaken up always does wonders for my meditation practice.  So what happened?

I won't pretend to know exactly, but I think I just lost a bit of my inspiration and a bit of why daily meditation has always been such a priority or goal or aspiration.  I also took it for granted a little bit - they say that if you do something daily for 21 days it becomes a habit, so I figured after 7 months I would just do it automatically.  But maybe it's that autopilot that became the problem.  I associated it with routine, and the absolute joy of this vacation was taking a break from all things New York and yoga teacher.  Unfortunately, the yogi got lost along with the teacher!

Lucky for me, there are at least two little beacons of hope for reigniting the fire of my practice.  One is that I took advantage of Integral Yoga Institute's free open meditation for the first time.  If you're ever in the area of 13th and Greenwich at 12:15 on Monday-Saturday, you should definitely stop by for 35 minutes of absolutely lovely meditation.  It was being led by my beloved Thai Yoga Massage teacher, Jyothi Watanabe, on Wednesday which made the experience all the more special.  This was also the first time in I have no idea how long that I sat for longer than 10 minutes - let alone 35!  It wasn't nearly as challenging as it would have been had I been attempting it alone.  There's something really special about meditating in a group of people, especially in such a place as IYI.

Second, I'm going to reread a book that I read months ago called The Joy of Living that Marc read and absolutely loved.  I enjoyed it tremendously but it can take me longer than him to really digest books on meditation (which is funny, considering which one of us is the yoga teacher).  I had intended to do a blog entry on it and never did, for whatever reason, so this is going to be a great opportunity to re-explore a great book and to get back in touch with my practice.

I'll be sure to keep you all posted.  In the meantime, I'm back to 7-10 minutes every morning before breakfast!

Have a fabulous weekend, everyone!