Coming Down to the Wire

It's coming down to the wire - it is almost the new year and I haven't figured out my goals yet. I know it will be similar to the goals I have set year over year for the last couple of years. However, 2020 was such a failure that I may need to step back my goals a little bit. I'll still have a mix of yoga and whole food, plant-based goals but I think for 2021 I may be a little bit more specific about achieving certain milestones. For example, taking a 300Hr yoga teacher training, and/or getting a certificate in Plant Based Nutrition probably from eCornell.

So I can use the excuse of the pandemic, or the anxiety over the election as causes to my #fail in goals for 2020. An excuse is exactly what it would be though, I allowed those things to impact my mindset and wellbeing. I allowed them to get in the way of achieving my goals. I have lost my daily yoga practice, I have fallen into some of the old bad habits that I had prior to losing a lot of weight and getting healthy. And yes, the weight has come back on particularly in the last 6 months.I haven't completely abandoned any of it, and I still eat at least a vegan diet if not necessarily the healthiest diet. Compared to prior to seeing Forks Over Knives and trying the Engine 2 Twenty-Eight Day Challenge I still eat well with lots of vegetables, kale almost every day if not multiple times a day. In the end though, calories and calories out is the formula and I have it backwards so the weight gain has occured.

Luckily I know exactly how to take it off again.

Other than weight though, my numbers are still good, total cholesterol is under 150 but closer to 150 than I'd like. (It's good to know that Okinawa centarians have an average total cholesterol of 180 (with an amazing ratio of 3.5! Mine is a more pedistrian mid-level risk for heart disease of 4.7). My blood sugar is still higher than I want and I'd like to drop that cholesterol ratio to at least 4.5. So those are specific goals I can set with health goals outside of losing weight.

While still not perfect I still meditate and journal way more than I have had even though it was a struggle towards the end of the year. Starting today, I am going to try and go back to getting up really early, at least by 5am if not earlier. To kick that off, I have purchased some melatonin to try and help kickstart the process but achieving this goal. By getting up at 5 I hope to achieve the following before work:

Morning Sadhana

Blessings (*added post publish)

Kriya Practices

Asana Practice

Pranayama Practice

Meditation

Read spiritual text

Journal (more on this below: I ended up not writing about it)

Walk Debi

Eat Breakfast

That is a lot to achieve in a morning sadhana just from a time factor. I am assuming work starting at 8am more often than not. Which means I have three hours to get my practice in assuming I start right at 5am!! My walk with Debi will be an 40 minutes to an hour so that leaves 2 hours to get everything else in. I think that's doable but lets take a look at it. Assuming 180 total available minutes, 60 of those go to walking Debi. That leaves 120 minutes for the remaining 7 practices. That would be 17 minutes each if we split that time evenly. But in reality I want to meditate a minimum of 20 minutes and at least that for the Asana practice. The pranayama practice right now shouldn't be longer than 10 minutes but closer to 7 minutes I think. Ten minutes for journaling and reading each should be more than sufficient in general. The difficult one is Kriya practice because I do neti pot and it takes a while for the boiled water to cool enough that I can actually use it without burning myself. I may need to get creative with it like using the coffee machine to brew hot water at 4:15 or even 4am giving it more time to cool off. Overall though it should be doable as long as I don't waste time. I may have to shorten something or other along the way to make sure everything gets in, or to accomodate say the spiritual text to take longer than normal - some commentaries are short some are long.

So far so good but I also want to get in two additional types of reading in as well. The first is work related reading/studying. Much of this may end up watching videos and webinars. I account for this effort in the 8am to 4pm time block for work. In reality it will mean I won't get much of this done on Mon., Wed., or Thursdays. Tuesdays and Fridays have been traditionally light meeting days so I should be able achieve this goal here. I will define this more within the company's tools for this type of "career development".

That just leaves the Plant-based reading I want to do. However, I think I will make that a separate post and stick with Yoga for now

I am finishing up my continuing education class with Edwin Bryant. I have to catch up on the last class as well as taking the final quiz to complete it, then I can submit to Yoga Alliance for CE credit. More than that though, I have considering taking a couple of different yoga teacher trainings. The first would be my teach Marni's 300hr teacher training. The other is the Jivamukti Yoga 300hr teacher training. Due to the pandemic they both would have to be done remotely and I can't imagine that would be the same as in-person. It just won't be. The beauty of the Jivamukti training is that you then get a huge discount of an in-person training provided you take it within 5 years of graduating the online class. At least that way I get the experience of the in-person yoga teacher training.

I'll need to balance that out with the fact that I also want to do the eCornell plant-based education certificate. So we'll see. At a minimum, I need to email Jivamukti to see how the online training works.

To summarize this post, following through on the morning Sadhana consistently over the year is the goal. Let's say at least 60% of the mornings just for a target. We can adjust higher if that is too easy.