Late last summer, in a post called Emotional Nourishment, I wrote about a 150 day personal challenge I undertook which included daily meditation, yoga, and abstinence from alcohol. My hope was that the emotional nourishment challenge would help improve my awareness of and ability to handle stressful times. The 150 days ended on December, 31 2017 and now that it’s well into the next year, it’s time to discuss and reflect upon that experience.
During the first few weeks and months of the experiment, I kept a daily journal detailing my emotional and physical responses to the three lifestyle modifications. I focused on making the daily effort required to sit, breathe deeply, and release my thoughts. Practicing yoga was an enjoyable struggle and I found meditation to be a mini-mental retreat. Somewhat to my surprise avoiding alcohol wasn’t that hard. As the weeks progressed, instead of burying my stress and emotions, I slowly learned to better process and release them. My disposition got sunnier. I became calmer, more relaxed, and less easily agitated. The tension lines in my face diminished. My sleep improved. My skin had a subtle new glow. Most importantly, I felt my primary relationships with my four year-old daughter and my partner shifted positively. Instead of being swept up in the torrent of my little girl’s experience, my more grounded stance helped us connect and allowed me to see and guide her with more curiosity and compassion. Joshua and I started interacting on an even deeper level without the noise from my unresolved stress.
These new skills and perspectives were helpful when the chaos of late-fall arrived. The home Joshua and I had rented for the previous three months in L.A. was not a long-term option, so we were scrambling to find and move into a new place. Joshua was still on tour and we were all traveling a lot with work and the holidays. Both Ella and Joshua got very sick. During this time, I retreated into crisis-mode and didn’t maintain any part of my fledgling yoga or meditation practices. I was frustrated with myself for not practicing, but couldn’t muster the mental resolve to get back to either. Thankfully I did much better with alcohol. During those final two months of 2017, I partook in the occasional adult beverage in social or celebratory settings. Luckily, the challenge worked well in resetting my stress-response use of alcohol — after a couple of months of complete abstinence I realized I could reintroduce it in an intentional non-pacifying way.
The emotional nourishment challenge reminded me that I, like most people, don’t do very well when engaged with the all-or-nothing mindset. Although I never expected to meet my lifestyle targets every day for 150 days, I still set it up as a daily challenge because I wanted to get momentum quickly. But the structure of saying I was going to do the three things every day meant I wouldn’t succeed if I missed a day. Even though the intention was to develop the skills and habits to better handle my emotional and physical wellbeing, the path to get there was all-or-nothing. I failed to uncouple the challenge with the larger habit I was cultivating. So when I slipped for a few days with my yoga and meditation practice, the slip turned into a slide, and within a few weeks I was back to my baseline of almost never doing either. Of course, this was precisely the time when meditation and yoga would have helped me keep my shit together and prevent the mini-meltdown that occurred.
Hopefully I’ve learned my lesson in practicing what I preach. I never recommend clients try and develop big daily habits from a starting place of zero — the vast majority of us won’t stick to the daily habit long-term if it’s too far from our baseline. When we slip, the all-or-nothing approach results in feeling defeated and less likely to take the deliberate steps in the direction we want to travel.
Since the start of this year, I’ve made more of an effort to meditate and am doing 5-10 minutes several days per week. When I’m under increased stress, I try my best to learn from last fall’s lesson and I take care to meditate more. It helps. The author and news-anchor, Dan Harris jokingly says meditation makes him 10% less of an asshole. I say when things are going well, my amateur and intermittent meditation practice helps make me 2% better, during harder times it helps keep me from sliding too far backward.
Yoga has been another story. As much as I try I simply don’t feel drawn to yoga the way I do other physical pursuits. But I’ve realized now through trial and error that I do need some yoga to stretch my muscles and calm my mind. Perhaps not ironically, pain from immobility is what got me back into the studio. I’m currently including one or two yoga classes per week when I’m in Montana and I make time on the mat at home when I’m in LA.
It took me quite a while to bring back the habits of yoga and meditation in much more sustainable ways. Now instead of being tasks on a to-do list, they’re relatively small but important components of a lifestyle that help me be a better version of myself.