It’s New Year’s Day, so I and millions of other people around the world are making their Resolutions for 2010.

In the yogic tradition, folks often prefer to think of these things as “Intentions”. Back in August, I wrote a post about Intentions of mine for business and blogging.

But regardless of what you call them, they almost always boil down to a list that breaks down into two categories:

1. Things you want to do more of
2. Things you want to do less of

For example, people either want to 1) get more organized, or go to the gym more often or spend more time with family or even spend more time by themselves, OR 2) they want to spend less time at the office or quit smoking (smoke less) or watch less TV, or stop watching so much damn TV .

Often though, when we begin thinking about the list of things in the Do More Category, we don’t think about what that means we’ll have to Do Less Of in order to make room for More of that good stuff. Huh?

(Unless you’re this guy. I don’t know what you have to do Less of, or More of for that matter, in order to raise an Army of the Undead. Sheesh! That’s seriously ambitious, but right now, it feels like it might be easier to do than losing 20 lbs. What are your resolutions?)

So this year, among other things on my Do More List, I have

1. More Yoga
2. More Active
3. Write More.

To help motivate myself for the latter of those three, I joined NaBloPoMo (that name cracks me up!) to help me try to write 31 posts during the month of January. (I’ve got to hurry because I’ve only got 33 minutes left for my Jan 1 deadline!)

For number 1 to happen though, something’s gotta give, and I’m hoping something from my “Do Less List” will help.

We watch entirely too much TV in my house. It’s a regular tension point as a time suck and reason we don’t get things done that we should, but we love our shows, and movies, and yes, we do watch a lot of educational programming too.

But the operative word there is “SHOULD“. I think I should watch less TV because, among other things, it would give me more time to do yoga. But earlier this evening, as I realized that I “should“  both do some yoga and write this post if I were going to make it past day 1 of my list of intentions for the new year, I also had a whole lists of rules about how I “should” do yoga:

• I should do yoga when I’m alone in the house so I’m not interrupted
• I should do yoga without the TV on unless it’s a yoga DVD
• I should have calm yoga-ish music going on
• I should do yoga for 30 to 60 minutes…
• The list goes on.

SHOULD is the gateway to the backstory of why we do – or don’t do – many things in our lives.

So what if I broke all of those rules? What if said I could just do some damn yoga poses while the family continued to watch The Next Iron Chef marathon while I was there with them?

Guess what? I could. And I also got a great idea for another blog post while listening to some ancient Japanese cooking philosophy from The Chairman.

So if you find yourself stuck behind too many “shoulds,” try “could” in its place, and see what possibilites open up for you instead.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 1st, 2010 at 11:58 am and is filed under Blogging, Intentions, Yoga. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.