Nose, With Dog

Where: Eugene, OR
When: April 22, 2010

This is Rufus, our friends' adorable puppy. There will be more pictures of his adorableness posted later on, don't anybody worry.

I'm posting tonight because I won't have time tomorrow morning, because I'm doing a week where I spend the morning doing meditation/yoga, along with breakfast without distractions. It's an experiment in a particular planning method which involves making a very specific, time limited plan for a change you want to implement in your life. You have to write it ALL down, and there are rules about what you write down - for example, you have to be VERY SPECIFIC about the change, and about the time frame, and about the conditions under which you are allowed to deviate from the plan. And then you have to sign it. I think the signing is a little silly, but Dave assures me there are studies about human nature and our unnatural obsession with contracts. Ok fine.

The interesting thing about writing it all down was that it took dedicated thought about what normally happens in my mornings, and what precisely I would have time for, and what I would have to give up in order to implement this. It really drove home the reasoning behind the plan, and also why most "I'm going to do xyz from now on" type plans fail so reliably - making a change is hard, largely because we've already filled up our lives with other things we value but don't think about, and then when the moment comes to make a choice, if we haven't anticipated and made a decision about the moment in advance, then we go with the habit rather than with the new.

For me, I realized that it's incredibly important that I leave the house with the dog at the same time that Dave does, so we can walk him to the train. So I couldn't leave earlier with the dog to make more time, because then I'd come home and he'd be gone and I wouldn't get to say goodbye and that would make me sad. It also didn't seem to make sense to do the yoga while he's getting ready and leaving, since saying goodbye (the main thing I value) and his getting ready would interrupt the yoga (which seems counterproductive).

I also really value having coffee and breakfast in a relatively leisurely manner. So I had to be very strict/realistic about the number of yoga poses I was allowing myself, while also deciding that the email/blog surfing makes the coffee/breakfast time far more leisurely than it had to be, and therefore nixing it in favor of meditation/pranayama/yoga time pre-breakfast.

Finally, the 10-20 minutes of yoga isn't really all the practice I want, so I also included in the plan one day - on Saturday morning - where I would go through all the poses I learned over the last weekend. And then Sunday I take off. And then I reevaluate the plan, and make adjustments as necessary, write out a new plan for the next week, and sign it.

So that's the plan! We'll see how this goes. I'm excited. I might need to make a similar plan for all the studying, today was the first day back at school and while I am super excited about the personal training course I'm taking in addition to the massage therapy, it's going to be a LOT of work to stay on top of all this.