Can I divorce myself?

So, this vow of yoga is harder than I expected. 

I pictured every class with me energetic and motivated by the endeavor of personal betterment and enlightenment.

It wasn’t Monday night.

I spent most of my Bikram class scowling at my reflection in the mirror.

I kept thinking: “Ugh! I don’t want to be here.”

And then: “You made a commitment, remember?”

I retorted: “What’s the point of a commitment if it makes you miserable? What good will this 90 minutes I’m struggling through – hot, tired and with a headache – do me?”

And then I’d fall over – ’cause it’s hard to balance when you’re not focused.

Of course, I’d breathe, think for a few more minutes and then start wondering again whether this vow was such a good idea.

I told myself I was going to take this one second at a time - I wasn’t going to push myself. Each class - just like each day – is its own, and I’d ignore how good I was (and how I good I felt) last week.

There’s a part in the book “Eat, Pray, Love” where the author describes an intense yoga class where she’s twisted into triangle pose and holding it much longer than she’d like.

“Why do we practice yoga?” The teacher asked her class.

“Is it so we can become a little bendier than our neighbors or is there perhaps some higher purpose?”

Now I’m left pondering my purpose.

Emotions and feelings are fleeting, bouncing back and forth in one’s head. So while I ponder my why, I’ll just keep going and find out the answer from a more reasoned place.

In the meantime, I took a random, unscientific poll about what commitment means to other folks.

Here’s what I got:

From Beth, 34:

But commitment is about the emotional ties.  It’s about investing yourself, not your money.  The old-fashioned marriage vows sum it up best: “Do you promise to love, comfort, honor and keep (him/her) For better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health. And forsaking all others, be faithful only to (him/her) so long as you both shall live?”

That’s what commitment is all about.  And it applies not just to marriage, but to friendship as well.

From Briana, 25:

I think commitment begins when you look at the big picture and realize that there is something that you want to develop within yourself...what you are really seeing is that you want to develop the quality within yourself that leads you toward the person you see when thinking of that outcome, not so much the outcome itself.

Then, the essence of commitment is in taking that big picture, and applying it to all of the smaller snapshots of your life.  It means not losing sight of that big goal, even when it feels impossible to get there.  It’s like one of those pictures that you see sometimes that, from a distance looks like one big image, but up close it becomes apparent that it is really made of a thousand of tiny, independent images.  Commitment is the process of creating all of those little pictures.

From Crystal, 25:

Making commitments is essentially investing in stability, keeping them determines the rate of return. If you uphold your commitments to an employer, the return may be a raise or promotion - financial stability. If you uphold your commitments to a friend or significant other, perhaps they’ll be yours for life - emotional stability. And if you uphold commitments to yourself, I reckon the return will be spiritual stability. Commitment - It’s the stock market of life.

From Corrie, 29:

I think commitment, whether it be to a job or another person, is the personal decision to see something through. I think problems come in when two people have differing opinions on when something is “through.”

From Joe, 53:

A commitment carries the weight of a promise, because once you’ve made it clear you have “committed,” others develop expectations.

Then again, you could be talking Baker Act.