I've loved Yoga with Adriene ever since I first started practicing, more than 10 years ago now, and while I don't follow the channel much anymore, I took it as a sign when this video came up in my feed on January 1st.
It's a 7-day prana-themed yoga practice with a short 20-30 minute session for every day of the first week of 2025. I thought I'd try it. I always see these challenges months later and think it would've been nice to go with it in real time.
With so many resolutions for the new year still bustling fresh in our minds, this served as an interesting reminder that you don't need to map out the entire year. It's enough to take it day by day. While it wasn't my resolution to practice yoga each day of the new year, I could see how easily that could seem like a daunting task. And we do so often set out these impossible, daunting tasks for ourselves come New Year. As if, come January 1st, we'll no longer be just human beings trying to get on, make the most of it, give it our fragmented, faulty best.
I don't think we're ready for year-long resolutions, and if we find ourselves failing, then maybe that's a cue to scale it back to weekly, or even day-by-day resolutions. You're still better than you were yesterday if you stick to the task you've set, even if it's just for today, this week, and not the entire long, chaotic year.
There's a part of myself that favors discipline, that wants to see things neatly completed, and this 7-day journey was a challenge to that aspect of myself. On the one hand, I caught a virus on New Year's, probably some breed of flu, and while I managed well enough, I couldn't practice yesterday. I have a tendency to force things, especially myself. I can be tyrannical behind closed eyelids. But I'm working on it Yesterday, I let myself rest, and today, I was able to complete the journey. One day late, but then, isn't the entire year made of good days and less good days?
In yogic practice, prana is breath, but also infinitely more than breath. (but then, isn't breath more than we understand in our busy, modern world?) It's the life force that connects all elements of existence.
It was interesting for me because it came at this specific time, when I needed a reminder of how valuable and rich my world (and my presence in the world) is. It helped me understand that I'd placed my body on an altar of death, that I'd come to honor something dark and terrible buried deep inside my own psyche, a primordial fear for which I was willing to forsake my valuable, good self.
Sometimes death, too, can masquerade as life-affirming.
I started it as silly. I started it as a challenge. As nothing all that much. And yet, as the week unfurled, I saw it tie into so many unexpected aspects of my life, reminding me again that it is not all disjointed motion. All of it, part of the same life dance. The aches and anxieties, the tension and the loss, the efforts to do well, to be more for yourself and others, the others, the torn ligaments, the bones in the pot. It's all on the same tapestry, only you need really far-away eyes to be able to see it all.
You're getting there. And if you're not seeing it yet, maybe it just means you haven't reached it yet.
Can this be a reminder for the rest of next year to cherish and preserve my own aliveness, my own inner miracle? I don't know, but I hope so. I can only take it on a day by day basis. On foot. Sometimes at a snail's pace.
But I'm getting there.
