I think that I have shared here before that one of the reasons that I often record my practice is so that I can’t fuck around with my phone. Sure, sometimes I will post a clip, but more often than not once I have reviewed it I’ll delete it. But it has been for me a mostly effective way of managing the chasm of distraction that my phone provides. Especially considering that the primary time that I am on my mat is while Wilfred is sleeping, so I am already feeling like are so many things that I should be tending: ie laundry, dishes, some semblance of cleaning my house, garden prep, working one of 3 businesses, or, oh yeah, hanging out with one of my big kids.
It is typical for me to arrive on my mat to find myself a murky soup of distraction, obligation, and guilt and my propensity to multi-task gets way too easily sucked into the shit storm of my phone. This is even more pronounced on the days in which my practice does not capture my attention, which, I am just going to be honest, is somewhere between 75-95% of the time. Making a recording is my strategy for psychically handcuffing myself to my mat while I tap into the faith that the poses will work on me as much as I work on them. Which, to be super clear, is a faith that has been grown and was never given. As Christina Sell said sometime recently: asana practice “is an exploration and an experiment, not a guarantee”. Sometimes it captivates my interest, sometimes it really doesn’t, and yet I find that the repetition of simply putting myself in the way of the opportunity of experiencing something deeply, already greatly improves the odds of it happening at all.
This still/clip is from Monday’s BBB in which I was completely distracted and full of half-ass interest through and through and thought about closing it up and walking away more than a dozen times. And even though my mind was mostly offline still my body and the actions in my body were able to find me well enough in time and space to elicit a response and an opening, and after a while even reach into some new to me sensation so that by the end the whole thing could perhaps be summed up as 95% disinterest for 5% revelation. Which actually seems to me like a profound story of success.
Anything can be a tool, until it is not. And my phone is no exception. Oddly enough I can just as easily use it to presence myself as I can to skyrocket my attention into the ethers. And so it goes. The choice is still mine, if I am willing to see it.
