A fellow yoga teacher and I were chatting the other day when a friend of ours walked up, mat rolled up under her arm, and said, "I just had a crappy yoga practice." The comment bounced around in my head, so I don't remember what was said after that, but it was something to the effect of, "They can't all be winners."
Ah, the good/bad conundrum. How many times have you stepped off your yoga mat, shaking your head, thinking, "I just didn't have it this morning/afternoon/evening?" Of course, this leads to the question of how do you define good/bad? Is something good if it meets your expectations? If so, where does that expectation even come from in the first place? Or does it receive the label of good if it inspires positive feelings as opposed to negative ones? One of my favorite questions to ask myself when I start labeling things good or bad is, "Says who?"
These past few months, I've had an interesting assortment of things happen in my life (notice I didn't say whether they were good or bad things). They've run the gamut from shocking synchronicities to the absolute opposite of what I had expected would happen. Frankly, I've laughed my way through it all and, more importantly, I've reserved judgment. I can't say whether these things are good or bad; they merely are.
Just the other day, I was on my yoga mat and I felt a muscle talking to me. My first thought was, "Well, that's not good." I smirked and did my best defiant two-year-old impression by asking "Says who?" After all, feeling that muscle clued me in to the fact that I had some tightness that was in need of stretching. If I hadn't felt the sensation of tightness, I wouldn't have stretched that particular muscle and it's possible that I would have eventually injured it. [Of course you can continue to extrapolate here and say that it would be bad to have injured a muscle -- or would it have been? Perhaps the injury would have provided me with some much-needed rest. See where I'm going with this?]
Do you reserve judgment when you have an experience on the yoga mat or in life, or do you immediately label it as good or bad?
Just a little food for thought...
Namaste!
