When I left off last week I was scuttling around the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport hoping for a last-second reprieve from having to fly to Chicago. My wife was holding my hand a bit tighter than usual as we waited in the terminal to soothe my nerves. More and more frequently prior to boarding, my wife and I would break into a well-rehearsed question-and-answer routine: “People do this every day?” I would ask. She would respond in the affirmative: “People do this every day.”
Repeating that phrase helped me see that, on entering the aircraft, I would become part of a community of millions of people who would all, barring the rare accident, get where they were going and would return home again on a daily basis. Some nights before the trip I imagined an ongoing stream of airplanes sailing over my head, filled with people already doing what I was planning to do.
Yoga provided me with many benefits on this last trip besides the strength to carry heavy luggage up and down subway stairs or the calm to manage a phone interview with a potential employer on my last day in Chicago. In addition to the quote by Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn from Healing and the Mind that I posted last week, I found an explanation of yoga in the same interview that I hadn’t heard before. Read more »
