Don’t Let Your Enemies Control You

I had to get up at 1:00 in the morning to take care of a little family issue Thursday night which tore a chunk out of my sleep cycle. Had a meeting Friday morning, and woke up perfectly alert, but as expected, after the meeting my energy crashed, and I needed a nap. This meant that I couldn’t do 5 sets of 11 reps of Sun Salutations — I could FEEL the degree the sleep loss had damaged by body-mind connection. Yuck. But I also know how to get back on the horse.

Today I’m back to 5 sets of 5, and if that goes well, I”ll probably increase tomorrow, possibly going as high as 10. We’ll see. What I’m looking at is reaching 5 sets of 20–22, which will take me to 108 a day for a month.

I do wonder what number is sustainable, and I suspect now that, say, five sets of five is a perfectly fine sustainable number. Russian research suggests that the number “five” is a sweet spot, as after five reps the attention starts to wander. We’ll see. What I noticed this morning is that I was definitely staying in the flow of the breath more fully. This is terrific for managing stress, both passively (simply by breathing and moving more efficiently and effectively) and actively (noticing a disruptive event or moment of focus, and deliberately shifting the focus to breathing for 60 seconds or so).

Just for the sake of fun, lets go through a sequence:

1. Irritation with someone behaving badly
2. Recognition of irritation
3. Beginning of re-integrative process