Today is Tuesday, June 16th, 2020 and the beginning of week four since the reopening of Native Yoga Center. It was quite the experience to go from being really busy and having big plans on the horizon to stopping dead in our tracks and putting everything on hold. As you know! Yet the process of moving back again into the mechanics of an operating yoga studio is proving to more interesting than I anticipated.

When we shut down we immediately implemented the use of Livestream classes. In the beginning I kept all of our classes on our personal calendar with the the thought that we would just open up right where we left off. As the weeks and months continued to go by it became obvious that that was not going to happen. I swiped my whole calendar clean. That was monumental. We have been operating for the past 14 years on a schedule that slowly grew from 10 classes a week to over 30 classes a week. The process of clearing all of that out was nerve wracking and liberating. We had switched back to two class times a day, one at 10am and another at 4pm. We went back to the gold old days of just my wife and I running the entire show and never taking a day off together. Bitter sweet. Humbling. Refreshing. Challenging. These are just a few words to sum up the experience of tightening the belt.

Well along comes the day that the restrictions are lifted and we are allowed to reopen. I had this grand vision in my mind that every one would be so excited to come back in and get right back to practicing. That is not really the way it is going. We are currently running public classes limited to 9 in number so that everyone has 6 feet between them as per the guidelines. We are also filming the classes on zoom so people can join at home. We also record the class so that it can be accessed on our online site. The majority of our students are sticking with practicing on zoom. Slowly people are trickling in but when I say slowly, I mean sloooooowly.

I am truly beginning to realize that this is really going to be an endurance event. I really believe that as a small business this is going to push all of us, yoga studios, restaurants, salons and pretty much all service industry related professionals into a place where we are going to have to keep our heads up and just dig in really deep. I do believe that those of us that are passionate about what we do and have committed our lives to our craft are going to get through this. I do think though that it is way bigger than I originally understood.

I found a bit of solace today. I texted a friend who I often confide in and mentioned my beleaguered outlook and she said, “we need to pull up our spiritual boot straps.” Not exactly sure why that was the catalyst I needed but sometimes it is a simple perspective shift that can make all the difference. I think my expectations weren’t matching up with reality and this equation always dishes out a good bit of humble pie. My solution today is to reevaluate my assumptions. Maybe I need to realign what I think should happen and just accept it as it is. Pretty much the recipe that always in necessary when things don’t go as planned. So there we have it. Who knows how this is all going to go? Instead of thinking I do I am going to resign myself to admitting that I don’t.

My last good endurance challenge was a triathlon and at the beginning during the swim I looked up and saw how much further I had to go. I had thought the swim was going to be easy which I quickly surmised was just the opposite. In the flash of a moment I came to a conclusion. It’s time to swim because we all know what the alternative is.