Namaste

When my yoga instructor isn't making jokes about stealing the blocks to do ab exercises at home or telling us about her latest favorite movie -- "The penguins, people, you've got to see the penguins!" -- she talks with intensity about finding intention and following the breath. It took me a few years to take her seriously on this pursuit. Now, through the first five Surya Namaskar A's, I follow the breath to find my intention for each yoga session. The intentions vary from week to week: to lift my top foot during side plank, to kick my feet back after balancing my weight on my forearms, to hold my headstand without the support of the wall, to straighten my legs during that bastard V balance pose. Each week, I make it something different. Each week, I successfully match my intention while messing up every other pose. And I'm pretty proud of that.

I've known for a long time that Jonna, my yoga master, wants us to think about intention for more than the hour and fifteen that we are with her, and to think of breath as more than the energy we need to finish a class. This is the part of yoga that is most difficult for me. It is where my challenge begins. It's just so damned easy to let someone else determine your intentions, to live day-to-day meeting the deadlines that someone else has created. I want to pay more attention than that. So my first life intention is to pause. To think. To breathe. To live with intention. Maybe I'll mess up every other thing that I don't intend, but it's not the success or failure that matters so much as the intending. And that, after years of yoga, I finally get.