I would like to preface this with the statement that my daily asana practice has been going swimmingly. However…

Yesterday I behaved like a petulant child and refused to go bed, even though I was tired before 8:00, even though I knew my alarm would go off at 4:50. It was 10:00 before I finally turned the light out. I actually woke of my own accord around 4:30, and of course went back to sleep. When the alarm went off, I hit snooze repeatedly until it was 5:35 and my allotted 45 minutes for yoga were frittered away. But the yoga challenge cares not for such things! And so I got up guiltily at 5:35 and did my yoga. Except then it was time for 95 minutes of meditation, and it was already really late. But the meditation challenge cares not for such things! Since my meditation has been a complete disaster since Monday (including a wasp getting stuck in the window which freaked me out AND made noise!), I thought I’d try to get around it by playing some nice drone music and sitting in a butterfly chair instead of on the floor. No dice—I got this weird persistent itch on my lower back that kept twinging every time I settled into any position, and it was the sort that absolutely canNOT be ignored. So I abandoned the chair for the floor, but the twinging persisted, and I looked at the clock and I still had about an HOUR to go. I knew I could not possibly sit for another minute, let alone an hour, but I couldn’t abandon the challenge! I had sworn!

My solution was to go to my still-droning computer and dig around in my download folder until I found the first 4 chapters of this book in PDF form, which I had downloaded from mediaseva.com several years ago. If I couldn’t sit in meditation, I could at least sit at my computer and read about meditation! This had the interesting result of both alleviating and increasing my guilt. Perhaps guilt isn’t the right word—I felt good about having taken time out of my morning to read the first three chapters (and the timing was absolutely *perfect* which made me feel even better) instead of just eating breakfast, but the reading definitely made me worry that I was doing something wrong when all I wanted to do was something right. What does it mean that all my life has fallen gracefully into place except for the part that ostensibly means the most? In this case, I guess it means I’ll just keep trying.

I do have half a mind to walk aimlessly around the neighborhood in the wee morning hours instead of sitting, though, because I’m much better at doing simran while walking…