40 Days to Personal Revolution: Here I Go! (Day 1)

I'm back again after a (too) long break from blogging, but I am super excited about the beginning of 2014 (I'm about to turn the big 3-0!!!) and to share with you my "40 Day Personal Revolution."  As many of you know, I started doing yoga a couple of years ago and have been ramping up my practice ever since. In 2013 I really picked up the pace and have been practicing regularly 2-4 times a week (occasionally 5 or 6 days in a week) for over a year now. 

Remember this pic of the day from April 2012?  I have to say my form is much improved these days!

and this one from November 2012?

Back in September, one of my favorite Yoga teachers, Katy Rowe, introduced me to The River Yoga studio and I have absolutely fallen in love with the space, so when the New Year came around and they had a '40 Days to Personal Revolution' workshop I knew right away I was going to sign up. 

The program goes through Baron Baptiste's book "40 Days to Personal Revolution: A Breakthrough Program to Radically Change Your Body and Awaken the Sacred Within Your Soul."  

(from amazon.com)

 

We will meet every Wednesday evening with Katy Rowe (who is leading the workshop) to go through the book, the intentions / goals for each week, and discuss the program. Tonight is our first meeting, but I've already started reading the book and I am so excited about it that I couldn't even wait until the meeting was over to get started writing about it. 

The theme for this week is presence - which I think is a WONDERFUL way to start the program. Particularly with our digital lives these days, I think that all of us could do with a little more presence in our daily routine (speaking of which, I saw this video today and I think it completely fits in with this week's theme)

(for some reason this video isn't showing in all browsers, here is a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OINa46HeWg8)

The book has twelve laws of transformation (you focus on two each week) and this week our two laws to focus on are:

Law #1 Seek the truth - mainly seeking the truth about yourself and accepting that truth just as it is
Law #2 Be willing to come apart - this is about being willing to give up control (or the illusion of control) that we try to maintain over everything in our lives. Stop trying to fight through life forcing everything and everyone to conform to your own idea of how things should be and just letting go.

On top of that, I will be committing to yoga 6 days / week for the entire program, plus meditation twice / day, and reevaluating and transforming my diet.  It is going to be a lot of work.

I already have plans to go to yoga this evening at The River, and this morning I did my first 5 minute meditation session, which I guess was relatively successful. I think the meditation is something where I might just have to show up, trust the process, and see where it takes me. I have never really meditated before so this is something completely new to me, but I am really going to try to follow through for 40 days without judging it and I will decide at the end whether or not meditation is something I want to continue.

Finally the last component of the program is to transform your diet.  I actually started working n my diet a couple of months ago, changing things little by little - removing hormone-laden dairy, eating more organic and non-GMO food, etc. and so I'm really excited for the challenge and inspiration to take it another step further. On the flip side, I'm under no illusion that this is going to be easy and I'm more than a little apprehensive about the whole thing.  I feel like I have a generally healthy diet (for the most part) and it just takes so much darn work to think about what I'm eating instead of just mindlessly eating the same thing every day (like my egg sandwich for breakfast EVERY DAY)...  so I'm facing this portion of the program with both excitement and apprehension.

The nice thing is that the book really isn't giving you a specific diet. Instead he is encouraging you to be mindful of what you eat, listen to your body, and make small changes that are intuitive for yourself, so that is going to be my goal. Thankfully the diet portion for the first week is really more focused on mindfulness - noticing what your current eating patterns are - than about change (although we are of course encouraged to start making some small changes to balance out our diet)... so that should (hopefully) help me to ease into the whole thing.  

Ok well I guess that is all for now, I'm so excited about tonight but I need to be present in the now (and get to work)! I will leave you with another video that I found today... very fitting.

(again here is the video link if you can't see it in your browser: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-8IPDR4Khc)