"Annual" Day After Christmas Post

It appears that that I post the day after Christmas every year. Most likely because I am not going to work and I have some time, plus it is that time of year to reflect on the year, and think about goals and aspirations for the upcoming year.

2018 was an interesting year for me. In some ways very successful, in others not so much. But isn't that true every year?

I started out the year trying to get up earlier in the morning so that I could get in a consistent yoga, pranayama, meditation, and reading practice to start the day. The difficulty of that is that I need to be in bed earlier in order to get enough sleep. I found that it was too difficult for a variety of reasons. Regardless of those reasons the reality is that it was beyond me this year to go to bed early enough to make getting up at 4-4:30am feasible. When I say it was "beyond me" or "not feasible", I realize that for the most part that comes down to my own discipline. And that's okay, I'm okay for not being up to the challenge this year.

What it doesn't mean though is that I am giving up on increasing my personal practice to a more consistent basis. In fact, my intention to achieve that goal is the driving factor in Arisa and I deciding to move to the west side of Cleveland. To be frank, I would rather not move, I prefer the east side. I as born and raised in Shaker Heights and Cleveland Heights, and moved back here after living in Japan for 18 year and have been an east sider for the last 10 years. Arisa and I also really like our house too. We literally decided on it in about 5 - 10 minutes, it's a great house.

One of the realization I had in 2018 in pursuit of getting a more thorough yogic practice in is that I am losing a lot of time commuting. Assuming 90 minutes a day, in a rough estimate I spent over 4000 hours simply commuting back and forth from home to work over the last 10 years. Conversely, if we move to a location 15-20 minutes from work I get an additional 90 minutes back that I can use to deepen my practice. For example, instead of getting up by 4 I could get up at 5am, which is doable, get my 90 minutes of practice by 7am, and still have 45-60 minutes to get ready and arrive at work. That is a a much more sustainable routine. So even if I get back from teaching yoga late, its lot earlier than now but I can still get a good nights sleep in without overly impacting my ability to get a good 90 minute practice in.

Next week I'll be headed to Philly with Elly and I'll be there for a couple of days. I hope to spend some personal downtime to consider my plan for 2019. My intention is that I will develop the plan and post it while I'm in Philly. Here are some of the things I am considering for 2019;

Greatly Reduce or Eliminate Social Media use -particularly Facebook

Start/Continue Journaling

Continue daily meditation - increase length or # of times per day

More time for my own yoga practice

More regular exercise, cardio in particular

Spend more time studying Yoga ("book" learning)

Learn the Harmonium/Chanting

Continue morning reading practice

Get back to stricter wfpbno diet

Jivamukti Wild Woodstock two week immersion

Acquire eCornell PlantBased Nutrition certificate

Work related learning

Move

Each of those items has a background impetus to it which I hope to be able to articulate. By articulating them I hope to be able to 1) determine if I'm actually going to try to do it, and 2) hope that by articulating it motivate myself to actually achieve it.