Day 26: On and on

Sometimes it just takes a good night of sleep to put things into perspective.

Truly, I should have taken a good, long nap before I sat down to blog yesterday. Instead, I sat down with a beer and let my emotions run wild. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing - sometimes I think it feels simply delicious to cry and release. I just probably shouldn't blog at the same time. Lesson learned.

I'm feeling much more optimistic today about teaching and life and tight hips and all that. As I sat down with some cereal this morning, I opened Meditations for the Mat and read this: "Most of us have high hopes concerning our practice of yoga and our ability to live our yoga. We entertain lofty visions of newfound equanimity, of a harmonious balance between our inner lives and our outer reality." He goes on to say that often times, we fall short when real life gets in the way. Huh. How perfect is that for my morning's bit of inspiration?

So what to do when I feel like life is suffocating me? Keep trying. Keep acting great. Keep finding my sense of humor and the strength to laugh even the most serious of situations. In other words, we all need to keep our heads, our sense of ourselves, and our moral ground, rather than throwing it all away when things get rocky or you end up digging yourself into an emotional mud pit. What does Gates say about living our yoga through real life, even when we feel like it's three a.m. and we're squinting through the rain (or let's say, hypothetically, it's 6 p.m. and we're squinting through PMS- and alcohol-fueled tears)? He says that it's at these hard times that the world most needs us to live our yoga. "But can do it," Gates says. "And we will do it beautifully."