Busy Families Need Yoga to Live Joyfully
Busy family? Yea, of course! I have a secret, but first…….
Does this look familiar to you? I’m willing to bet it does…
5:00 wake up reluctantly and maybe even filled with a little bit of anger at the watch around your wrist.
6:00 get the kids up and ready for school, and to your dismay, see they too are not happy campers.
7:00 start the trek out of the house. Turn around at least five times for shoes, Tervis, homework, the cat and whatever else you probably should just go ahead and donate.
8:00 head to work…think to yourself, “I don’t believe I ate breakfast”…
9:00-5:00 do the work thing. Chat with co-workers about nothing. Fix the never-ending list of problems about more than nothing. Run around scrambling. Take 10 minutes of your lunch break setting up appointments and making sure your Shipt delivery is on-time.
5:00ish leave work and sit in rush hour traffic to make it home in time to start dinner, help the kids with their responsibilities, and worry about doing it all again tomorrow.
You might slink into the bed later that evening, exhausted, spent, and wondering where the hell your day went. Not once did you feel truly excited or content. Not for one minute did you allow yourself to run after that funny thought that could have turned into a hilarious story. And now your head hurts, your back is throbbing, and you just want to sleep but, as usual, it is just as loud in your mind as it is at a ball game. Sleep comes much later.
Did you even get a moment to ask your daughter what inspired her today? Were you able to cuddle with your son on the couch with no other pressing matters rattling at your heart and head forcing you to get up and start another “to-do” list? What was your partner even saying about their drive? How much time did you take to connect with the most precious part of your life? Your family?
Logically, you know that spending time with your family is critical but you are just so busy and tired that making the time is just another check mark on your ever-expanding list and it begins feeling like a chore, right? You guys enjoy movie night and dinners together, but you still have no real way of decompressing and having fun as a family. Your stress is simply too high to even think clearly sometimes, much less get creative.
Well, here’s the thing. 1.) everyone is busy and 2.) spending time with your family doesn’t have to be grand! It just needs to be something where everyone feels included and loved. Ideally, it helps you build resilience to stress and obligations as individuals and as a unit. And even more ideally, any activity you take up should work in favor of your busy, over-scheduled life. That’s where family yoga comes in! You learn skills to manage stress together. You free yourselves of tension, anger, and fear together. You laugh together. You exercise together. You practice self-care and relax together. You improve your quality of life together.
Why is this important?
Stress kills us. Constant “what’s next” mentality kills us. And we are just passing that onto our kids. We are giving them our worries. We are giving them all the responsibility of life and the unfairness that comes packaged with it. But we are not giving them (nor ourselves) time or skills to manage stress. We are not working on becoming content or happy. Our bodies and hearts are in a constant state of panic and it poisons everything we do. We are not allowing ourselves joy and we sure as heck are not sharing that joy with our children. Family yoga, or a yoga practice in general, teaches us about santosha, or contentment. It teaches us about aparigraha, or non-attachment. It teaches us to connect, to find happiness, and to LIVE.
And I know that deep down, that is all any of us wants.