Shiva Nata Practice Day: Annual Review Edition
Intention: Just find some calm.
Working on: Fun level one transquarters! And fast horizontals! And slow verticals!
Things that came up for me during this practice: Lots of mirror giggling and making funny faces. Making sharper horizontal arm movements.
Things that came up for me after this practice (meditation, shavasana): Got an image of the space from yesterday. Now I know where I want to go, it is a library not too far away. Planned to go today but it is (uncharacteristically of California) raining.
Things that came up for me after this practice (48 hours): This morning I joined Chris Guillebeau (in spirit! I don’t know him but think he’s amazing) in beginning my own “annual review process.”
This was the, hmm how do I say it? safest-self-love-feeling goal setting I have ever participated in, and not one second of it felt like “yuck, goals.” or “yeah right I am never going to do this.” or “I have been screwing this stuff up for so long I will never get it right.” or “oh yeah I messed up on that again this year and got no closer to my goals.”
I wanted calm this morning but what I really wanted? To stop hating on myself for not finishing something yet. The self-criticism was non-stop from when my eyes popped open this morning. I just wanted some peace. One thing Chris suggests to help you target your goals is to think about the last year and write about what went well and what didn’t go well. I had so much love and compassion for what I have done and been through this last year, and was really surprised by how I approached this process. Writing what went well was really easy, and my list kept getting longer.
Then I moved onto the category of things that didn’t go well and you know what? By the end of each sentence, I had turned something that sucked into something that was awesome simply by observing exactly what happened. It wasn’t even intentional, the whole “making lemonade out of lemons” thing. I was just sort of, being nice to myself? But even that part wasn’t intentional! By writing a detailed account of the event in retrospect, I could see something in context. Like, “oh yeah, that was dreadful and uncomfortable, but I really bonded with ______ during that thing, and now we have a great relationship because of what happened.” or “Those people threw shoes at me, and I may have pitched back a flip flop myself, but that situation was the wake up call to start acknowledging that I needed _______ in my life and so I made better choices in the days that followed.” I couldn’t help it! It was amazing.
And all of this is on top of the fact that I repeated to myself several times last week, “2009 is the second worst year of my life.”
Like if not daily, then at least weekly, terrible things seemed to happen. So to perform this exercise and go line by line through those terrible things and realize that, hey, I actually have NO REGRETS about 2009, well that was pretty calming.
