New 40-Day Sadhana, Who Dis?

Recently, I finished my last 40 day sadhana.

What is a Sadhana?

For those that don't know, sadhana is considered your morning, spiritual practice. Technically, I don't follow sadhana by the book. In Kundalini yoga, the yogic lineage I was trained under, the sadhana is 2.5 hours in the morning before sunrise. Mine is a modified version where I do 11 minutes of meditation, 11 minutes of yoga, and 11 minutes of movement while listening to a mantra or uplifting book.

In my last 40 day cycle, I did Sun As for the yoga. I am admittedly not good at Sun Salutations, and I wanted to challenge myself.

Well... let me tell you, doing anything that you are not good at for 40 days in a row is sure to help you improve really fast. I got pretty good at it by the end, and had started to enjoy them.

Here is where it goes downhill fast. In TWO bookclubs I am in, they both read Atomic Habits for January. So it has been fresh on my mind the data about doing hard things in small, incremental chunks. After seeing my success with Sun As, I was ready to challenge myself in TWO areas this time. (Spoiler alert = this was a bad idea).

For the movement, I have been missing running and decided to run 1 mile a day while listening to a mantra or inspirational book. One mile a day doesn't sound like much, but it's been a lonnnggg time since I have run, and it is not pretty.

Then I decided my yoga part was going to be 11 minutes of Sun B. Which is definitely harder than Sun As. 

I committed, and then I started.

Then I immediately regretted all my life choices that led to that moment.

I got a little too far ahead of myself. I should have kept my challenge to one area!

But I committed, and here we are. If you see anyone huffing and puffing down Mt. Vernon, don't worry, you don't need to call the paramedics. It's just me. I will be fine.

This just means that I am savoring the meditation part of my morning practice because it is the only thing I am enjoying at the moment. Haha. I am doing a visualization meditation by Joe Dispenza (don't worry, I will eventually grow out of this JD phase and move on to another obsession). I am using my vision board that I created after January's vision board workshop and picturing each item and how each of those items make me feel. The feelings part is the key to a successful vision board. Your feelings are what change your electromagnetic field, and that is how you attract what you want in life.

There we have it! My morning practice pretty much through the end of March. Bless my heart.

- 11 Sun As

- A 1 mile run while listening to a mantra or inspirational book

- Joe Dispenza visualization meditation

What are you doing these days for your personal practice?