I have not talked about my 2013 New Year's Resolutions, mainly because I closed down my Body, Mind and Spirit blog and this blog is more about animal rights/veganism. But I have received several emails from readers asking me if I am still active in my Resolutions, so I've decided to bring you up-to-date on it here. But first, for those of you who did not see that post from my previous blog, here it is below. I bring you up-to-date after this original blogpost:
My 2013 New Year's Resolution
My New Year's Resolution is to be more disciplined in doing these 3
things daily, which are important to me. I'll do them this way: If I'm
doing one of these practices below one day, I'll do the
others on other days, as long as I'm at least doing all of these on a
regular, daily basis:
WALKING MEDITATION
TAI CHI
YOGA
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Now to the Present
I had a rough start with much going on in my life that I stopped the Tai Chi and Yoga about a month into my daily New Year Resolution activities. The walking meditation is by far the easiest and most convenient to do so I have been faithfully doing that from the start.
But this week--I'm very happy to say--I've started back doing my Yoga and Tai Chi!
I have changed things a bit though. Now, I do both Yoga and Tai Chi on the same day, back-to-back with Yoga first. Plus, there were some Yoga poses that really didn't uplift me emotionally that I was doing on the DVD that I hated but had felt I was "supposed" to do. I didn't get any joy from those poses at all so now, I only do poses I really love. My Tai Chi poses are awesome! So no changes there--I do the whole Tai Chi DVD.
Now, I do only two of the posing exercises from the Yoga DVD; one exercise is about 65 minutes long and the other is about 40 minutes long. I alternate the two programs--doing one, 1 day, and the other, the next day. After that, I do the entire Tai Chi program which is about 45 minutes.
(*Note: There are MANY other Yoga exercises on my DVD specifically designed for problem body areas--like back issues, leg issues, etc. but I'll only go to those if I have a specific issue. I'm just talking about the exercises for the entire body.)
My walking meditation is the same--doing that when it's nice outside and when I have time to go out as well as when running errands.
I really love how I have organized things now! Above, is a photo I took today, showing all my materials I use for both Tai Chi and Yoga. With Tai Chi, I just use the DVD.
Why all the purple? The first thing I bought was the purple pillow (originally used for meditation but I no longer do "still meditation"; I do only active/walking meditation, except in Tai Chi, but I do it standing). After not finding a nice inexpensive round meditation pillow online, I went to Ross Dress for Less to find such pillow. Ross only had the one round pillow--purple; I wasn't looking for purple but shape, so I got it. I love the color purple anyway.
Then I bought the purple bag that's under the pillow (in the photo) to place my pillow in when storing. The bag is actually a baby laundry bag I got from Amazon. I got the purple one to match my pillow. Then later, when I got into Yoga, I decided to try and keep the same color purple so everything matches, so at Amazon, I was able to find matching purple Yoga mat, Yoga blocks, and Yoga strap!
I was going to ask when I saw the picture if you like purple! It's great that you are doing Tai Chi! I was supposed to be doing yoga for a New Year's Resolution, too, but then all the sciatica/scoliosis issues kind of stopped that. Now I have the physical therapy stretches to do, which really aren't much different from yoga but designed specifically for my problem areas. I have such a hard time doing it every day though!
ReplyDeleteYeah, I know what you mean about having a hard time doing it. That's why I changed my yoga poses, otherwise I would have stopped and never went back to yoga again.
DeleteI need to do poses I truly enjoy and look forward to doing to keep me dedicated to doing it regularly.
I'm nominating you for the Sunshine Award. Details in my blog post today.
ReplyDeleteThanks! I just saw it on your blog. I'm working on that now....
Delete