The Life of a Householder

The Life of the Householder

With summer at its fullest, how is your garden growing? Thank you Angela for taking a personal experience and allowing your insights to guide us into our own deepening awareness. Angela’s thoughts lead perfectly into the focus of our next post.

Someone recently asked me to talk about the tenuous balance of being a serious yoga practitioner and a householder. On the one hand we talk about honoring the body, mind and soul by caring for it so we can remember our union, while the reality often is that we don’t have the time to do the sort of self care that helps us stay healthy and mindful. This is so true and it is sad to see people shame themselves or be shamed for getting sick because they “didn’t take care of themselves.” When a child (or another loved one) is sick, a partner is laid off requiring the other to work extra hours, or there are cut backs at work due to the economy and the job now has additional requirements, etc., there is a need to push through the situation and take care of the crisis.

What seems to have happened to many people, however, is that they end up staying in crisis mode. Following any push, there has to be a time for recovery. It may not be as much time as is “ideal” but it is essential to find time for that practice (perhaps a 20 minute nap or yoga nidra) that, to use Angela’s image, creates less space for the weeds to grow.
So yes, as householders, we will always be pushed, prodded and demanded to go outside of the “balanced” yogic lifestyle. Remember that imbalance is simply an opportunity to find a new balance that serves better in this moment, the only moment there is, the present.

How do you carve out that time for you? And can you treat that time with the same diligence and ferocity as you would a child under your care? You matter too.