Do you always eat too many red vines? I do.

I've been here before... What makes a practice? What behaviors of mine have become a practice? How many times do I do something in a row for it to qualify as a practice? If I do something twice is it a practice? Ten times?

Since April, my hummingbird feeder has been empty. This hummingbird feeder is prominently placed at the front of my house in front of a window that spans the entirety of my living room. I have walked from my driveway right in front of the hummingbird feeder multiple times a day for the last five months. And every time I walked by that damn feeder, I said to myself, "Gotta fill that feeder." I can't say how many times I sat on my living room couch looking at the view, thinking, "God, I really need to fill that feeder." Sweet little hummingbirds, remembering the former bounty of the feeder, would hover, pausing to see if the feeder had been filled, and then leave quickly seeing that the damn feeder was still empty.

I have several regular habits that, at this point are definitely ingrained enough to be considered "practices." Since I was a kid, I've been a regular picker. It's not something I'm proud of, but it's true. I know I'm not alone in my compulsion to leave no scab unturned. It's routine now. Get a cut, let it scab, pick. You know you're in trouble when your six-year-old tries to physically restrain you from drawing blood on an almost-healed owie.

Another of my no-longer-secret, deeply entrenched habits is leaving the dirty coffee filter in overnight. It's not a huge deal, but imagine how great it would be to not have to clean the coffee filter in the morning. That'd be awesome.

This next practice, leaving my sock drawer slightly open ALL THE TIME, is a mystery. It would be so easy to close it, but, time and time again, I just walk by, like a sassy teenager, "screw you sock drawer, stay open."

There are others, like putting the salad spinner away crooked consistently, not dusting my base molding ever, eating red vines til my tummy hurts. These habits have become practices. I have created pathways in my brain that say, "Laura, you always do it this way", so I continue to do it that way, even if it is bad for me. Or just stupid.

Last week, I finally took the hummingbird feeder down. I don't know where the impulse came from, I just did it. I said to myself, "Laura, you keep walking by this empty hummingbird feeder. Either take it down and throw it out, or take it down and fill it up." And I did. I climbed onto the ledge of my brick planter box and grabbed the hummingbird feeder. While I boiled new hummingbird juice on the stove, I scrubbed the feeder clean. This was an exciting moment--I was breaking out of an old, dysfunctional practice. But when the time came to open the bottom of the feeder to pour in the juice, it was stuck. I tried everything. I soaked the entire feeder in hot water, ran the whole thing through the dishwasher, pried it with a knife, but I couldn't get it open.

So, yes, another lesson learned. I waited and waited and waited to change my pattern with the hummingbird feeder, and when I finally changed my ways, the damn thing was stuck. Two days later, after lots more scrubbing and soaking, I was able to open the feeder, pour in the nectar and rehang it for the birds. Change is always possible, but the longer you wait, the harder it is. You know what's coming.... What's your practice?

Is that the best you can do?

We've all heard it since we were kids. "Do your best." But what does this actually mean? When I teach yoga, I regularly emphasize this idea to my students. "Do your best. That's all you can do." Just like any overly used phrase, "Do your best" has lost meaning along the way for many of us. Oftentimes we hear it as "Just do something" or "Try not to slack."

"Do your best" means dig deep, try hard, push against your easiest-to-reach-limits. Your best is the unknown. Unidentifiable because it always changes, constantly evolves. In yoga practice, as we get stronger, more flexible, more focused, our best becomes better, deeper, harder. In other parts of life, as we practice different things, like cooking instead of eating out, not yelling at our kids, driving the speed limit, the more we actually commit to really doing our best, the better at it we become.

So how do you know if you are doing your best? You become present. You accept that you are not perfect and you d o y o u r b e s t to work hard always. And, within that commitment, you will notice time and time again that from wherever you are, there is always somewhere else to go. For example, when I weed my garden, I regularly leave the dandelion roots, opting for a quick handful of leaves and stem instead of walking to my garage to get the weeding tool that will surely capture the nagging root. I know in those weed-pulling moments that I am absolutely not doing my best.

On the flipside, though, there are times when it is clear as day to me that I am trying my hardest. The other day, I was talking to a friend about the fact that I have a really hard time accepting praise. I said that I was working on breaking that habit. She asked me if I am hard on myself when I falter, fall back into old patterns. I had to think for a moment, but ultimately realized that no, I am not hard on myself because I do my best. I really do. I recognize each time I shut down a praise-giver and I commit to do it differently the next time. I do this over and over and over.

I can tell the difference between this and blowing off serious weeding. There is a consciousness in both instances. In one, the weeding, I consciously decide that I don't really care if I have weeds. In the case of my inability to graciously accept praise, I am deeply aware of where and how I want to develop emotionally and I do my best to push against my bad habit every time it shows up.

Yoga is a great place to practice doing your best. For many of us, the fact that there is a physical component makes doing our best more tangible. Does camel pose make you feel like you are going to lose your breakfast? But you do it for one more second anyway? If you've been there, you know exactly what I mean. That's your best. Once we understand the physical expression of doing our best, doing it mentally and emotionally makes more sense. Like anything, it is a practice. We do our best to do our best, checking in to see if we have more to give, deeper to go. We ask ourselves, every time, "Is that the best you can do?"

What are you waiting for?

Waiting to exhale.
Waiting in line.
Waiting in vain.

I've always had a negative association with waiting. To me, the act of waiting seemed like the opposite of action, the antithesis of actualization. I remember when my father was dying, I was so frustrated with him. I felt like he was just waiting. I wanted him to do something, take charge, be enraged. He just waited. Somehow, the fact that he had terminal cancer didn't really matter to me.

Waiting means something else to me these days. A few months ago, my psychic told me that in my normal mode of functioning, I do as much in a half-day as some people do in a week. There is a reason why I have random bruises, cuts and burns on my body, stains on my clothes, two unchipped drinking glasses, and frosting on my ceiling. It is because I do 12 million things at a time. Lucia calls me "Clumsy Mommy."

Because I am so recklessly fast in getting my myriad of life tasks accomplished, I crave calm. A lot. To slow my frenetic pace down is not easy. The transition doesn't make sense. It's like driving sixty miles per hour and suddenly needing to be idling. This drastic action creates skid marks, sometimes car wrecks.

So, I've been practicing a new idea. In my speedy brain, when I notice that I need to slow down, I set that intention. Then I wait. Sometimes this works. Sometimes it doesn't. When it works, I get to a calm place. My heart rate slows, my brain quiets down, I get in touch with one thing I am doing (instead of twenty). When it doesn't work, I go back to my octopus-mode. What is different though, is that I've had the waiting moments, and even if I do go back to multi-tasking, I'm less crazy. The waiting takes me out of the chaos, even if I can't stay out.

In my Yoga practice, I've started waiting as well. Sometimes when I am in a posture and I feel tired, like I can't hold it for another second, instead of going right to my immediate response of falling out, I wait a second or two to see if something changes. Often, that little pause gives me a different perspective. New ideas occur to me, "Maybe I'm not that tired." "So what if my legs are shaking." "Maybe I can hold this bad boy a little bit longer."

Waiting has helped me most in Savasana. Savasana is the attempt to consciously relax, be still, open, receiving. This is hard for me; hard for most of us. At the end of my practice, I want to be there already. I want to be in that relaxed state because I've worked hard and now I am ready. I want to experience that amazing feeling where the floor holds me, my body is weightless, tingly, my mind somewhere just between waking up first thing in the morning and falling into a late afternoon nap. But it's a big change to move into Savasana from anywhere, even a yoga practice. So, I get physically into my Savasana, and then I wait. I just wait. Will it come? Will my mind slow down? Will my body be still? I'm waiting to see, and, while I'm waiting, doing nothing really, it usually comes.

Practice Sucks

No matter what kind of yoga you practice, whether you Om, use blocks, stretch naked in your bathtub, or sweat your brains out for 90 minutes, the constant of any yoga practice is that you are doing a practice. Practice, by definition is "to do or perform customarily or habitually." I know this because I just looked it up to win an argument with my 5-year-old. Lucia is taking guitar. I argued that playing Frere Jaques once is not a practice, that it had to be done at least twice, and then I looked up "practice" in the dictionary and won the argument.

"It's hard" Lucia says. "I know honey." I say, "But you still have to practice. It will get harder and easier and harder again and easier again." For me, guitar practice means sitting with Lucia while she lectures about the different parts of the guitar (the bridge, the neck, the frets, the sound hole, the strings....), comments about how my guitar looks different from her's, stops to have a sip of orange juice or just has to stop practicing a minute to tell me this funny story about Greta (her guitar teacher). A ten-minute guitar practice turns into 40 minutes. It takes ever fiber of self-restraint in my body to sit in my chair acting like I am enjoying myself, pretending to be interested in her philosophy of why you use the first or second finger for different strings, smiling through the up-down-up-down-up-up-down strumming exercise, grinding my teeth through the achingly halting rendition of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.

The act of practicing anything is a challenge. Try it- practice putting all of your clothes away exactly where they go every night. Practice not swearing. Practice fifteen minutes of morning mediation. Practice hanging up your phone while you drive. Practice anything that doesn't come easily for you. Whether you are adding something or eliminating something, it's like swimming against a current. It's hard. And in the end, satisfying. For me, nothing is less easy or more uncomfortable than my yoga practice. It is the thing in my life that I love and hate the most. It's hard for me. It makes me mad. And, it makes me so happy, so connected, so grounded. All of it.

For me, the hardness of the practice, the discomfort of it, brings me closer to who I think I am supposed to be. I never feel more like myself than when I am practicing yoga. The idea that something being hard is good is a difficult concept to explain to a five-year-old (I tried), but I think Lucia is subconsciously getting it. After our last grueling practice where Lucia whined and cried and tried to bribe me out of practicing, at the end of it she said, "Mommy, let's do the hard parts one more time."