Sharing Yoga

Keeping up a yoga practice while traveling is a challenge. Hotel-room yoga, while kind of un-inspiring, is a challenge I have some experience with. Sure you have to do all the poses that extend one leg to the side so that your extended leg fits between the beds, and it's a tight geometry to raise the arms in Sun Salutation so that they don't brush the hotel desk or TV cabinet, but it's worth leaving some conference workshop 15 minutes early and getting to dinner 15 minutes late in order to practice.

Visiting family is a little harder. I often feel kind of conspicuous and in-the-way, and it's a lot harder to feel okay about skipping out on family activities than to slip away from a conference of 400 people.

This past winter when I went to visit my sister's family, I got up early to get my practice in before everyone's day began. But of course my niece and nephew are of the age where getting up at 7:00 is sleeping in, and my son had joined them in their early morning revels, so my sister was caring for 3 children before her first cup of coffee. What kind of selfish aunt would I be to sneak off in a corner to practice yoga? So I just laid 2 mats out right in the middle of the living room, and asked who wanted to practice with me. My son demonstrated a couple of poses and went back to his video game, but my 4 year old niece was in for the long haul. She was crazy about yoga, and wanted more more more. We must have practiced for an hour before she started to lose focus, and my word if she couldn't do just about every pose I threw at her. It might be the most fun I've ever had doing yoga. Next morning I rolled out the mats again; I didn't fear being self-centered and in-the-way, because now yoga WAS a family activity. How happy I am to have a new yoga buddy. It makes yoga-while-traveling a joy.