As the old saying goes: if you rest, you rust.

That’s true for yoga too.

Don’t maintain your muscles? They atrophy. Don’t maintain your flexibility? You stiffen.

I only have so much time in a day to take care of myself/my body with movement. So adding in cardio/conditioning/strengthening cut into the time I was doing yoga at home. And with that, I’ve lost some flexibility because I wasn’t intentional about maintaining it.

Most notably, I could see this in my seated wide folds. Where I’ve been able to kiss the ground for nearly 2 years, I was stuck on my forearms.

Now, this isn’t a problem of course, but it still jumped out at me as something I’d like to revisit and work on purpose to regain.

So after a few weeks of regular stretching and opening, it’s starting to look more like it used to. Maybe even better soon.

And I’s a happy little yogi for it.

All that being said, it’s got me thinking about how our growth requires a bit of vigilance on our part. Even once we’ve hit some sort of measured milestone in our journey (to anything, not just poses), we can just kick back and assume we’ve made it.

And on top of that, we must be willing to accept that sometimes, growing in one area may cause us to regress in others. Have grace with yourself, lovelies. We can’t give 100% to every single thing every moment of the day. Everything has its time, and balance isn’t always easily struck. When that happens, we can take stock of where we are and what’s most important to us now, and go from there.

And as always, just remember to breathe.