This is your moment. Claim it. Own it.

This is your moment, claim it

by Kara-Leah Grant, Musings from the Mat

I stopped for fifteen minutes to meditate. It’s 45 minutes later. This is why I’m finding it difficult to practice right now. Not because it’s a chore, or because it’s hard, or because I have to drag myself through it, but because I love it.

I absolutely adore my yoga practice.

Practice is, as Mark Whitwell says, coming into intimacy with life. Now, as I sit for a moment, I listen to the chorus of birds gossiping outside, pestering the moist lawn for worms. There is a hint of spring in the air, and the birds seem glad. I want to sit and listen for longer.

But work beckons.

Just one more hour before I have to go and pick my son up from childcare. After that, it’s about playing with him, lighting the fire, cooking dinner, cleaning up, and putting him to bed. I want to be fully present in that experience, I want to crank some music, I want to delight in spending time with him. This, I find difficult with work piling up.

I need to work. I need time to myself. I’m a single parent, 24/7.

It’s a delicate balance. And one I’m more able to do after I meditate, after I practice, after I stop and open up to life.

In the opening too, I sense this desire to just go moment by moment through the day. To drop all agendas and responsibilities and ideas of what I should be doing and instead just allow each moment to arise.

Perhaps this is something to ponder, a way of being that has always called to me, a way of being I was effortlessly able to embrace during my eight years of overseas travel.

There’s something liberating that comes in fleeing one’s home country. All the usual rules no longer apply and somehow it becomes easy to live. No need to stay on top of anything. Except maybe a mountain.

Now, I want to cultivate that ease of living again.

I want to live a spacious life where I can be intimate with each arising moment, offering what is needed, and accepting what is given.

As always, it’s not my life that needs to change. It never is. It’s me that needs to shift. And as always, the first step is awareness. A gentle reminder of what’s important and what matters and what’s most of value.

Like children, and family. Friends and loved ones. Music and dancing. Bird song and river tunes.

These things matter, and it is I who need to make space for them. It is I who have to let go of work when I’m not working, so I may enjoy my life, as it is, where it is. It is I that needs to let go other other stresses, not letting them weigh down my heart, when in this moment they don’t exist.

In this moment, there is only the song of the bird and the thrum of the river.

In this moment, this is my life.

This is my dance.

I claim it.

I own it.