For about a little over a week now, I haven’t been practicing as much. I found out that I have shingles and have to take a lot of medicine and due to this, I’ve obviously felt less like practicing and found that for whatever reason, I’m not finding it as easy to practice as much. However, I realize that I still need to push myself as much as possible and that even though I have let myself slide a little more than I possibly should, I need to start slowly pushing myself to pick up where I left off before I started letting my practice fall by the wayside.
Is it okay to take small breaks and step back from practicing as much? Sometimes, yes. Sometimes we need to take a break. However, what is not okay is to let ourselves think that it is alright to never return to working as hard as we previously were when we were making more progress. We need to make sure that we remember the progress we made when we were pushing ourselves and we need to try to return to achieving the levels of success that we were making before allowing ourselves to take that break.
I am continuing to remind myself that while I may feel like I cannot do as many stretches as I once did, this simply isn’t true. I’ve just taken a break and most likely due to the break, I don’t feel as confident. What does this tell me? This tells me that I have to resume practicing and stretching more and that exercising really is important. I need to get back to feeling more confident so that I can do more things that I know I can do.
It’s important that even if you don’t do as much exercising, that you still do some each day. We cannot allow ourselves to give up on getting through our anxiety. We can also not give up on exercising and practicing, for it is what helps us prove to ourselves that we can overcome our obstacles. So if you must take a break from practicing as much, you can, but you still need to practice a little each day.