Yoga (and learning)

I've been MIA pretty much most of the summer from the gym. First it was because I was riding my bike to the university and I thought that an hour of biking a day constituted plenty of exercise. For the last month or so, I haven't gone simply because I am lazy, trying to save gas (the gym is between my job and home, so it is convenient during the school year, but a bit of a haul in the sumer) and trying to suck every last bit of enjoyment out of the summer. And that sometimes means sitting on my back patio and reading instead of sweating at the gym.

But I'm trying to get back into the habit, because it is OK to be MIA for a month or so, but with my body type and metabolism, I'll be at the gym for the rest of my life (AND I'll never be terribly buff or in great shape). When I've been gone for a long time or I'm feeling lazy, I try to get to a yoga class. I've been going to some form of yoga once a week for most of the last 6 years, so I've been to quite a few yoga classes. The music is good, the movements are usually slow and always deliberate and there's time to think about what my body is doing. Yoga is good. Yoga is a very peaceful-Sunday-morning kind of thing to do.

This is where the learning part comes in.

Yoga kicks my butt.

With the hundreds of yoga classes I've been to, you would think that I would have learned this somehow. You would think that I would remember that just because yoga is done in bare feet, it still isn't easy. It always dawns on me 20 minutes into the class, when I'm sweating and my heart is racing and my muscles are burning: "Oh, yeah, yoga is hard." Today, twenty minutes in, the same thought hit me and I realized that that's the way learning is: sometimes we practice something over and over, but we still forget it. That's a good thing for me to remember this first week back to school. Many times my job seems like it's more about forgetting than remembering. Forgetting has its place in life. It gets me to the gym on Sunday mornings.