Archive for the ‘yoga’ tag
Powerful Daily Routines
One of the things that changed my life for the better during the last year was developing and sticking to so-called “daily routines”. These are simply a set of activities done in approximately same time of each day. I first came across the idea on Leo Babauta’s blog and became very interested in making this concept work for me.
Now that I have my daily routines up and running for more than six months I think it’s time to share my recipe of constant good mood and persistent feeling of accomplishment with the whole white world.
I’ll go through each part of a day one by one.
Morning
I begin my day getting up at about 6 a.m. Here I must confess that I always use “snooze” feature of my alarm clock. However this is not because I don’t have enough will to get up when I planned. What I do is set up alarm clock half an hour in advance of the time I actually need to wake up. I don’t know why but it gives me a huge pleasure to realize in my sleep that I have half an hour more to luxuriate in a warm bed. Anyway, after hitting “snooze” button for about 6-7 times I finally get up and run straight to the bathroom to wash up and brush my teeth.
Then goes yoga. As of today I spend about 30 minutes for doing 25 basic asanas. I know that it’s too fast of a tempo and I will definitely start doing it more slowly as soon as I teach myself to get up earlier. In the end I also do popular 8 minutes program for abdominals, the cheerful music from which is now the inseparable attribute of a morning for me.
The Last Spring Weekend
It’s the last Friday before summer and I think it’s a good time to look three months back and summarize what I’ve been doing and what I’ve accomplished during this spring. Indeed there’s been a lot of interesting first-time-ever kind of events for me.
The most remarkable experience, of course, would be traveling to the United States, unforgettable acquaintance with diverse and liberal New York, neat and cozy Philadelphia and Boston. Spending ten days there very much broadened my mindset and inspired for changes both in attitude towards life and everyday behavior. For one thing I brought from there quite a pack of great books which I’ve been reading through all these days.
Another inspiring trip I took was here in Ukraine. I finally visited probably the most European of all Ukrainian cities — Lviv. I can’t believe that all this time such a beautiful place to spend a weekend was right under my nose and I never went there. However, in some sense it’s a good thing to leave something pleasant for the later. I call this “dessert approach”. In that way I often don’t watch a movie or read a book that everyone I respect praises and finds brilliant until the very last moment. So that at the time I decide to do that I know for sure that I will definitely enjoy it.
Some positive changes took place on my personal development front. The most notable is that now I firmly stuck to getting up early (not later than 6:00AM) and doing morning daily routines. That, in the first place, includes 30 minutes of yoga exercise and 1 hour of swimming (or on some days jogging).
