“How Do I Stay Accountable?”
By Theresa Shay
As we launched our spring yoga challenge, a student asked, “How do I stay accountable?” A simple question, with perhaps a familiar story behind it: “I want to take care of myself. I know I need to make that commitment. I’m so tired. Every time I do yoga I feel better, so why can’t I find time for it? Please help.”
Establishing a life anchored in yoga, well-steeped in rhythms that serve you, evolves step by step. Most people I know make a start, and soon the commitment falls away. Very few, as the student called it, “stay accountable”. They run out of energy.
In this externally motivated world, it can be hard to realize that the desire to stay accountable actually interferes with the journey of connecting to your Self.
To be accountable suggests there is an external counter: someone measuring whether you’ve risen to the occasion, done your part, met the expectations. This judge might grade your success and have the power to determine if you’ve failed. Developing a spiritual practice or a self-care routine is not performed in the arena where some outsider assesses your performance. However, the experience of being judged and graded looms so large in your psyche (and probably the memory as well), you’ve internalized the vibration, and that now influences the way you respond to your longing to meet your Self.
What if you drop the measuring, the striving, the buckling down, and relax into the way of being that your practice gives you?
1. Start where you are. In each moment, even right now reading this, you can press “pause”, and put your attention on Being Present. Notice the Ahhhhhhhh. Shoulders drop. There is a moment of relief. Grandiose ideas of a full regimen of practices are too much for now. Start with one moment of connecting and repeat as often as it comes to mind.
2. Turn toward yourself. Notice how it feels to touch down inside, relax, and set aside your burden for a moment. When you stop thinking about all you have to do, or what you need to figure out, the totality of the ease you seek is present. You do not need to go far to find it. You need to move closer to yourself to experience it.
3. Follow the longing. With the felt sense of the experience, it’s easy to be drawn toward wanting more of this. Can this feeling be respected and honored? What if you were eager for your practice, your self-care, your moment of quiet because it is the relief you seek, the feeling you long for, and the energy you need, rather than the task you committed to? Each step in this direction generates energy to keep going.
4. Discipline plays a part, as spiritual teachings acknowledge. In yoga, the word for this is “tapas”. My favorite translation of this Sanskrit word is “burning desire”. Can you allow yourself to have a moment of relaxation and calm because the burning desire for connection cannot be squelched? Discipline becomes your protection and holds you close when you are about to flail.
5. Recognize the obstacles. Know yourself well enough to see obstacles approach. Step out of their way. Yogis have codified nine obstacles to practice, so rest in the company of thousands of years of seekers who have had to work this out. You are clear about what derails you. Don’t follow that– you already know where the road will take you. Now you are exploring a different path.
Yoga is not meant to be an isolated practice of feeling good while you’re on your mat, then bearing down again on “real life” to get through. Yoga is a practice that brings you the energy you need to know yourself and live a life in harmony with that vibration. If you count the hours required to meet your responsibilities (stay accountable even), you may believe you only have 3 minutes of discretionary time a day. Then take those 3 minutes to remember what’s important. The minutes will quickly expand, if not in time, certainly with energy.
In this way, you begin (and continue) the journey of loving yourself back to the brilliance you were created to be: relaxed, calm, focused, energized, balanced, blissful and content in this life that is yours. That experience cannot be counted or measured, and thus the concern of how to “stay accountable” falls away. Fall instead, and with delight, into Being.
Theresa Shay is the founding director of TriYoga of Central Pennsylvania, where she teaches weekly yoga and meditation online and trains others to teach TriYoga®. Each week, she shares wisdom cultivated from decades of TriYoga study and practice.
Learn more about her here. Theresa can be reached at Theresa@PennsylvaniaYoga.com. Find her on Instagram @theresa_of_triyoga for more inspiration and light.