New Year’s Resolutions, Month by Month: May

It’s been nearly a month since the end of May, and I have yet to assess my May resolution. Instead of eliminating something as in past months, I decided to add to my routine: 30 minutes of yoga every day.

When we lived at the Red House, I went to yoga classes twice per week at the Y, and it was great. Once we moved here and I started commuting to Brookline, though, it was very hard to motivate to go out again in the evening after spending so much time in the car already. I still stretch regularly in the evenings, but I hadn’t done a real yoga routine in years.

Getting back into it wasn’t hard, per se. I no longer have a yoga mat, having cut it up to make a cushy mat for the standing desk in my office, but it’s actually much nicer to have a real rug to spread out on, anyway:

There are plenty of videos on YouTube with yoga flows to follow, and it was nice to be guided to do poses I haven’t spent any time with in a while. (My downward dog is much better after doing it for a month)

The hard part was doing it every day. May was busy with taking Jonas to a movie set for almost a week, and I never really established a routine time to do it. I found myself skipping days and then doubling up on others, and at times it felt like a burden. It always felt good afterwards, but getting it done was harder than I thought. 

Since then, I think I’ve done a flow two or three times. It’s still on my list of things to do, but summer is very busy around here. Most of my exercise comes from digging in the dirt, planting, hauling water, and harvesting food. I think my yoga resolution would have been better timed in the late autumn or winter, when I could have really established a regular routine for several months of cold, staying-inside-all-day weather. I may have to try this jump-start resolution again once summer has passed.