The Sum of the parts makes up the Whole

I started this morning and I felt awful. My leg felt a little tight but that wasn't it. My whole body felt heavy and slow. So, I started to add things up in my head: a really tough week at work; a really big cheeseburger for lunch yesterday ( I was craving protein), staying up late talking with friends at one of our favorite hangouts. Bingo! No wonder I felt like crap!

Sometimes after a class, I am approached by a yoga student who says he or she struggled with practice that day. I start to ask a few questions and pretty soon I'm hearing stories of injury recovery, sickness, personal loss, dietary issues.. all sorts of things. The best was the guy that came up to me after class and told me he'd had open heart surgery a month before! Oddly enough, he wasn't coming up to lament over a less than stellar practice- he was actually coming up to tell me that he'd walked by the studio for years and always seen students pouring out of the studio looking hot but refreshed and he always wondered what we did " in there." It took his open heart surgery and subsequent recovery to give him the final push he needed to take the first step.

But, back to the topic at hand. My story today is not unlike the story of so many of us. We tend to live the parts of our lives in isolation, not realizing that there is a sum of all the parts that make up our lives. We're not one person at work, then another at home or around friends and family. We can't make decisions in one part of our life and not think that it will have a ripple effect on the whole thing. So, if you don't feel great about some part of your life, look at the whole. Try to add up all the individual pieces that are effecting that one piece and shore up those parts.

The run today was a bit longer; around seven miles. Leg feels pretty much the same. My day off yesterday was nice and it was good for the leg to have a day off. I will take tomorrow off and go back to the beach!

Namaste.