This Axis Yoga Teacher Training student found that less is more when it came to making lifestyle changes. Even if the changes are meant to improve overall health, they can have the opposite effect if taken on too aggressively. From this account, we can see the benefits of taking things slowly with a large dose of awareness.

For this project, I wanted to experiment with my daily routine and how I could make it more ayurvedic. I already had some semblance of a routine, but wasn’t sticking to it very well, and found that I didn’t have enough time in the mornings for the things I wanted to be doing (e.g. asana and meditation). Actually, the main change I wanted to make was to regulate my eating schedule. Between my job at the restaurant and everything else I do, I find I don’t have a lot of time to devote to meals, and I end up eating at really weird times of day—think lunch around 3 pm and dinner around 10 at night. Which is not so great considering that a) I’m eating lunch after my digestive fire is past its prime, and b) I’m having dinner within an hour before going to bed. This didn’t seem like it would be good for my digestion or my sleep. I noticed that I was waking up a lot of mornings not feeling rested, and I wondered if I could change that by modifying my eating habits.

My initial thought was that I’d need to start eating breakfast earlier—around 8 am—so I’d be hungry for lunch earlier in the day (hopefully around noon), which in turn would make me want to eat dinner at a more normal time (around 6 pm). Since I don’t get a break to eat at these times, the only way to do this was to start bringing food to work and eating it in the back when I wasn’t too busy. This meant allowing extra time in the mornings to prepare my meals for the day.

It all sounded good in theory—but the whole plan hinged on my being able to eat an early breakfast. If I didn’t eat early enough, it would throw off my eating schedule for the rest of the day, and it would also mean not having enough time to get lunch and dinner ready to take to work. Normally I wasn’t even waking up until 8 am, so if I wanted my plan to work, I realized I was going to have to start getting up earlier in the morning—an hour or two earlier, realistically, if I wanted to have enough time for asana and meditation before breakfast.

The thought of waking up at 6 am every morning was a little daunting. But it was also exciting, because the earlier start meant I would have time for lots of other things, too. In true form, I got a little overzealous and decided to try also incorporating some other aspects of the ayurvedic daily routine, like oil-swishing, tongue-scraping, and self-massage. Even before I started it seemed like a lot to me, especially considering I don’t normally function before 8 in the morning, but I was ready to dive in and try it.

Well, my plan failed miserably. The first day of trying all this new stuff, exciting as it was, was totally overwhelming. I underestimated how challenging it was going to be just to wake up earlier in the morning. I had always considered myself a morning person, but I just wasn’t used to getting up before 8 am. I really struggled with it. The other factor I didn’t consider was that waking up earlier would mean going to bed earlier. If I wanted to be up by 6 am, I needed to be in bed by 10—which, considering I sometimes don’t even get off of work until after 10, wasn’t realistic for me.

I hadn’t thought before about all these interconnections between the different pieces of my daily life. There is a delicate balance to it all, and making one change can tip the scales and require us to make a host of other changes in order to restore that balance. I believe that I can change my life if we want to, but I’ve realized that I need to approach these changes more gently in the future. I’m finding it strange to hear myself say that, because I have long considered change and movement to be driving forces in my life. I have never thought of myself as a “routine person”; I’m more the type to just fly by the seat of my pants and take life as it comes to me. But it seems that even I have a certain rhythm, and if that rhythm is disturbed, it can really throw me for a loop. When I tried my new routine, I found that it was messing with pretty much every aspect of my daily life, and that stressed me out. I didn’t like it at all. In the end I had to let go of trying to change my whole routine and focus exclusively on just waking up earlier. I am happy to say that I now wake up closer to 7 am and go to bed around 11 pm. This may not be exactly in line with what ayurveda recommends, but it is still a step in the right direction, and it is a more moderate change that I’ve been able to adapt to.

As I’ve been studying ayurveda and becoming more aware of my doshas, I’ve started to get a better feel for when I am going out of balance. In doing my experiment, I could feel my vata spiking and I quickly realized that I was doing something that was not good for me. I may have been going by the book as far as the ayurvedic recommendations were concerned, but I had to disrupt my whole natural rhythm in order to do that, and that didn’t feel right. It felt very much like I was going against the grain. I think there is a lot to be said for following our own intuition about what works and what doesn’t rather than trying to force change on ourselves. If the ultimate goal of what we do is to improve our health and quality of life, we can make changes, but we have to do it in a way that is kind to ourselves and in line with our natural wisdom.