I hate doing yoga or any other exercise at home. Just deplore it. I have tired all manner of activity – yoga, free weights, PT, aerobics, boot camp style workouts, stuff with that stupid exercise ball, DVDs, streaming video, worksheets, check lists, free flow workouts from my own imagination. Doesn’t matter what it is, I would rather eat glass than do it.

I have a litany of half hearted procrastinations  – I don’t have enough time. I don’t want to get cat hair on my yoga mat. I don’t want to change into the appropriate clothes (and I sure as shit ain’t gonna do a workout naked or in my pjs). My beau is home (I can’t stand being walked in on). You name it and I will make it an insurmountable excuse.  The good news is I normally convince myself there is housework to be done before I can begin, so most of the time, at least I am doing chores instead of exercising…

But OK, so lets say I have gotten passed all those hurdles and actually have willed myself to start – after 5 minutes I am feeling impatient, bored, frustrated, and discouraged. Not being a Buddhist nun, my natural state in life is to assiduously avoid these general feelings, so after 30 minutes (more often like 20 or 15 minutes) I stop. I have not enjoyed a single second of it and I never find a shred of inspiration to continue or try again. I really, truly hate it.

Why is that? What am I so upset about? Why on earth is this so threatening?

So far, the only thing I have come up with is that I eat, sleep, do my 40 hour a week job, and everthing else from my home. I mean, I really rarely leave. So maybe the last thing I want to do is a workout there too?  Could cabin fever account for all my protestations? Maybe, but that all seems too simplistic.  I brought it up in therapy the other day and found myself feeling a lot of the same unpleasant emotions. Just thinking about exercising at home made me feel impatient, frustrated, and discouraged. And I there too I met the same limited success. I did it – I talked about it – but I did not enjoy it and I certainly did not learn anything new.

There is some urgency here though. If I am ever going to heal my sciatica and move through this chronic pain, I am fairly certain that I need a home practice. I can’t go to most group classes and I can’t affords one-on-one instruction, so I really need to work this shit out on my own. It’s funny, as I sit here typing these words, I wonder to myself – will I practice the poses recently given to me to help me heal? Will I do it tonight? Nope. Seems 100% unlikely. Why? Seriously, why? I ask myself to answer truthfully and all I get is that I just don’t want to.

sigh.