Taking Care of Yourself: Yoga Drash Based on Parshat Yithro

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Thoughts to begin and guide our yoga practice:

I sit in front of my laptop, encircled by a moat of paper, on my floor, on my desk. Stacks of unopened envelopes, to-do lists not done, sticky notes telling me I have to call/email/set up appointments with such and such person. And that’s before I even turn on my MacBook Pro to face an Inbox with 55,000 unread messages. Ok, many are Bed, Bath and Beyond ads but many are not. The sheer volume of my life makes my body slump in a most un-yogic way.

This next vignette isn’t mine but you’ll get the identical idea:

“I closed the bathroom door behind me–as if the bathroom, with its full complement of dirty diapers and small piles of unwashed clothes, was some kind of heaven from the rest of the house’s chaos. I was on the verge of tears and wondering, as I know many new parents do, just what the hell I had gotten myself into. A silent wail rose in my mind, “How am I ever going to manage?”

At that moment, the author of this last vignette, Rabbi Minna Bromberg, summons up a voice inside her that she calls her “inner Yitro,” which admonishes her that she won’t be able to lead in other parts of her life if she doesn’t first attend to her own needs.

Yes, Moses receives the Ten Commandments in this parsha. But perhaps as important, he receives advice from his father in law, Jethro, Yitro. Jethro visits his son-in-law, Moses, in the desert, finds him weary from the morning-to-night responsibilities of solo leadership, struggling with the problems that all the Israelites bring to him. He asks, why do you act alone? “The thing you are doing is not good.” For his self-preservation, Jethro tell Moses, he must learn to delegate. He must find a way to mentally and physically preserve himself if he wants to be an effective leader.

As one of my favorite Torah commentators, known as “The Velveteen Rabbi,” writes, “We’ve all been where Moses was: overworked and stretched too thin. Self-care matters. If we don’t nourish ourselves, then we can’t do the work we’re here to do in the world. Whether you think of that work as ‘caring for your family and community,’ or ‘saving the planet,’ or ‘serving God’ — we all have work we’re meant to do in this life, and if we don’t take care of ourselves, we can’t do that work.”

Never has this advice been more important than today, as we sit not only surrounded by our usual to-do lists, but by an almost suffocating need to repair the world.

Where does this fit in with our yoga practice today? There is a type of yoga called “intuitive flow,” where you listen to what your body wants to do and follow it, incorporating what you need for yourself into the traditional asanas or postures. Sure, try each posture, I suggest. But don’t hesitate to choose your variation. What feels best in your body? Challenge yourself but don’t overdo it. Tune into where you need to be working in your body. Take care of yourself in our practice today and in your life beyond.

Ending thought, after we finished our practice:

The first part of Hillel’s saying from Pirke Avot, Ethics of the Fathers, is most appropriate for the theme of our practice today: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” But after, let us not forget, “But if I am only for myself, who am I? If not now, when?”

Image: “Me” © Laura Harris used with permission via Creative Commons License.
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