Day Forty: 2/9/11- Yoga With Little D

Day Forty: 2/9/11
New Thing: Yoga With Little D      
Inspiration: Delia
Cost: $0
Time: 10 minuets 
Bottom Line: Almost relaxing. So close.

Reflection: When I was growing up, we were not encourage to practice yoga by my father. He felt that by practicing yoga, I would be participating in a different religion's rituals. If fact,  when I told my Dad that I was thinking of taking a yoga class in high school, he told me to reread Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians where he discusses temple meat. That's right--temple meat. It seems that the Corinthian Christians were taking liberties with their new found freedom as followers of Jesus. Since Jesus said that, "All things are possible with God" (Matthew 19:26), the Christians of Corinth felt that they should be able to eat meat that was sacrificed in pagan temples (that was offered in the temples and then sold on the market for a reduced price) since their gods had no power over them. In short, temple meat was just like and other discounted meat. Tasty and powerless.

However, Paul showed them that they were just letting their hubris lead other people to think that going to pagan temples was fine, and that would lead to a slippery slope of debauchery. His point, and my father's point, was that when people look at Christians and see them doing something that was not in keeping with Christ's teaching, they would think that it was totally fine to do the same thing. Thus, even though Christians could technically eat the temple meat, they should not since it would lead others to sin. So, by going to yoga, Dad thought that I would be leading people to Hinduism and not Christianity. I told him that I would be able to pray while I was doing it and that I thought the bigger hubris would be in thinking that people cared about what exercise class I was going to, but that little bit of sass failed to win him over.

Flash forward to last week when he told me that he went to...wait for it...A YOGA CLASS! "Enjoy that sweet, sweet temple meat!" I cleverly rhymed at him as we laughed. I am proud of him for stretching both his body and his mind.

All that is to introduce today's new activity was actually suggested by Delia herself. Often when I workout at home, she will be playing in the room with me (or trying to crawl all over me), so she has seen me do yoga lots of times before. But today was the first day that she actually asked me to do yoga with her. So, we rolled out a little rug that I brought home about a year ago for her to play with while I exercise so she can feel like she has her own little exercise mat. Next, we put on a quick little 10 minuet yoga dvd that I use at times to wind down at the end of the day, or even during Compline/Evening Prayer. She ALMOST  settled down. However, I would like to start adding this to our night time ritual to help her wind down before bed. We often have an hour or so between dinner (where I not not serve temple meat) and bed-time and this will be a really good habit to add in that space. I am sure over time, it will help her to wind-down as well.