Learning to Listen (and sleep when necessary)

Today I didn’t go to Yoga, I slept instead.

And technically…that counts as Yoga because I listened to my body when it said, “You can take me there if you want to, but you are going to regret it later”. This, for me is growth. I have always listened to my judgmental brain over my body.

I have long ago given up the idea that I could have that true, work-life balance. You know, the one where you can have it all, everyday, and still take fabulous vacations. I have always been a bit too obsessive (in both good and bad ways), to get that kind of balance.

Although I may not expect to always have that balance, I am noticing that it is becoming imperative that I do create balance just to be successful. Like sleep for instance. This is something that my body craved in large doses this weekend. The same weekend where I had planned to code so hard saturday, and do my downward facing dog all day sunday. Neither of which happened by the way.

But I did have a minor breakthrough. Since I did stay home, I used some of that time to go back over pre work, and ruby tutorials. And, there was a magic moment when some stuff just clicked.

It was awesome. I got in a few good hours of coding and understanding. And then I listened to my body again, which told me to take a break. So (begrudgingly) I got up, ran errands, had dinner, and now I feel that I am up to learning some more. So the moral of the story is, my body might actually be smarter than I am. This is a hard realization. That my workaholic philosophy may have actually been working against me all these years, is not what I expected.

I always thought that I need to work hard, harder, and hardest, no matter the consequences.

It seems, instead, that my job is not to just work myself to death, but to also listen to what I need. I can feel the yoga coming out of me on this point….. but how can you argue with the fact that it helped me learn code today.

Like any good scientist, I intend to continue observing this experiment. I haven’t completely healed from my brain break, but I can feel the new synapses forming. Lets just hope that tomorrow, when I am in class learning new topics, I feel the same peace about how my weekend went.