30 Day Yoga Challenge

I’ve been thinking a lot of how to get the year started off in the right way, but I am very skeptical of New Year’s Resolutions, and that’s mostly because I make them and then forget or pretend like they didn’t matter because I only told a few people and they’d forget I said it, right? I feel like I’m genetically unable to let myself commit to things I think I might fail at, which makes one of those terrible circles: I beat myself up when I say I’m going to do something and then don’t follow through (this blog, for instance, is a great example of that) and that makes me not want to commit to anything because what if I’m not perfect at it?

Ok, now that’s out of the way, I want to do a 30 Day Yoga Challenge. I really, really want to do it. But not just say I want to do it and never start it in the end, but say I’m going to start on the first of February and then finish at the beginning of March and feel good because I’ve done something fully that I said I’d do and not make excuses for myself so that I wouldn’t have to do it properly.

I started to do P90X with Bear when we tried it last year, and he did the whole thing, the whole programme and I managed a few weeks, and even then I don’t think I did that in the way I was supposed it. Anyway I suppose this all started on Friday when I bought a yoga magazine (which I thought would be a more reasonable purchase than, say, a Vogue or Vanity Fair) and then yesterday when I tried to do the yoga DVD that comes with the P90X programme. I made it through a half hour. One lousy half hour and stopped. I used to do 90 minute power yoga classes, but that was the crazy summer I lived with the vegans, so it doesn’t count, right?

I’ve just spend the weekend on and off looking at lululemon (who I simultaneously cannot stand–their wild overpricing and weird bags with quotes that have fundamentally missed the point of the book they’re from–but love like crazy–you would have to be nuts not to want to wear only their clothes most of the time ) which I figured I could reward myself with when I finish, and search for other people’s 30 Day Yoga Challenge blogs, and my local yoga studios and their prices and researching whether Bikram will kill me faster than doing an Ashtanga DVD in my living room (I still don’t know the answer to that one).

So, here I am at the end of this post, not sure whether I’m going to do it or not. I’ll let you know, of course, but I can see it ending three ways: (i) me not thinking about it anymore after I publish this; (ii) me starting and quitting and pretending like it was absurd of me to even start it in the first place; or (iii) starting next week and finish in 30 days’ time and feeling great mentally (I did it!) and physically (I did it!).

Have you done anything like this before?

JMH xx