The Big List

Make yourself a list for life.

This is the third essay of my December series Transformation.

Once in a while, in a sea of neverending emails, you’ll open one that sends an electric jolt through your body. It happened to me three years ago when my professional national association was looking for people willing to share their personal experience with mental illness. I had the acute sense that the email had been written for me, and I wrote an essay on the spot, applying for the job. A few months later, I was a keynote speaker at the annual conference.

Last year I received an email inviting me to go to a yoga retreat in Costa Rica with people I had never met. My gut reaction was yes, please—and it was one of the most tranformative and life-changing experiences I’ve ever had.

A few days ago, I opened another email that electrified me. It came at the end of two difficult weeks, with devastating heartbreak at work and some bad news in our personal lives. Not even walking through my beloved forest has been able to lift the heavy blanket of sadness and sorrow, meaning I’m spending most of my time off asleep. Ever since I quit drinking, sleeping has become my preferred escape of choice, especially during times when the middle-of-the-night callbacks happen several times a week and I’m always playing catch-up on sleep.

However, the walking and the sleeping are not enough to pull me back into balance. Something is missing, and that email was a powerful reminder of what that something is. It started with a question:
Are you interested in becoming a 200-hour registered yoga teacher?
And to my immense surprise, my immediate response was: hell yes, I am!

I was big into yoga for several years during my thirties. I practiced every day, gained an enormous amount of strength and flexibilty, and learnt to love my body like I never had before. It was also the first time that I managed to spend time with my own thoughts, something I had avoided like the plague since I was a teenager.
The mat was my home, and I thought I’d never leave that home.

But then I did. Slowly, I started to fall out of practice. The Instagram yoga challenges that had brought yoga into my life and that I’d enthusistically participated in started to feel show-offy and wrong. I became disillusioned with how commercial and inauthentic some parts of the yoga world were. There was some major drama between two well-known yoga teachers whom I idolized that made me think differently not only about them, but about yoga in general. And then my love of writing turned into a passion for writing books, and for a few years, there wasn’t much room in my life for anything else.

But I missed it. Life without yoga felt like I had lost a limb, and I tried to come back to it a thousand times. I downloaded yoga apps, saved dozens of YouTube videos, did stretches given to me by massage- and physio therapists. I enjoyed all of it, but did none of it regularly. Nothing seemed to stick. On top of it, our local yoga studio closed during the pandemic. So I thought: maybe yoga had just been a phase in my life, meant for a season, not a lifetime?

That’s were the Big List comes in. I came across the idea when I found Tobias van Schneider’s article about not planning. He says he doesn’t have plans for life, because to him, “planning your whole life means you’re not allowing that life can just happen to you. If you already know exactly what you are going to do the next 10 years, where is the fun in that?”
(He has a point!)

What Tobias has instead is a Big List: a list of things he wants to do in his life. It’s simple: you write yourself a list of things you’d like to see, experience, or have. It can be totally out there or something easy; there are no rules. It’s your chance to dream big and imagine what you would do if money, time, abilities, etc. wouldn’t be an issue. He recommends to keep the list to about ten items, and to update it when your goals or priorities change. It’s not set in stone; on the contrary, the list is fluid and should change with you.

It’s not a checklist where your goal is to complete tasks and cross them off; it’s more like a compass for your life. Whenever an opportunity presents itself, or you have a decision to make, you pull out your list and see if it aligns with your items on it. If it does, keep going; if not, change something.

I love that idea so much that I immediately made a list of my own. I won’t share every item on it, but guess what was in my top three?
Incorporate yoga into my life.

You would think I started rolling out my mat right then and there, wouldn’t you? After all, I have everything I need right here at home. But you would be wrong, I didn’t do that. I was still stuck, and even though I told myself daily that I would practice today, for some reason I didn’t.

And then the email arrived, and it ignited the fire in me again. And just like that, yoga is back in my life.

I’ve been asked a few times over the years if I would be interested in teaching, and my immediate answer was always no. I didn’t think I had anything to teach to anyone, being so lost myself. I only had questions, no answers.
But that is changing. My life’s purpose has been revealing itself since I’ve been on my healing journey, and it’s simple: I want people to feel better about themselves. That’s why I write stories that are deeply human and vulnerable, to remind people that they are not alone.

And over the last two weeks, when bad news and heartbreak were coming in fast and furiously, I was desperate for a little ray of light, to share with my co-workers and my loved ones.
That’s where yoga comes in. I have experienced its healing and transformative power myself, and I want to bring that power to my community. Share it with my beloved work family when they are hurting, teach my grandkids, learn more about its ancient traditions and wisdom and how best to use it for everybody and every body.

Nothing has been decided yet. Logistics need to be worked out, schedules changed, allowances made. I don’t know the how, but I know that this is right for me because of my Big List. Becoming a yoga teacher aligns with everything I want my life to be about. Hell, I even made one of the main characters in my novel a yoga teacher! My subconscious has been trying to lead me here all along, and I finally got there.

To create your own Big List, follow these simple steps:

1. Write yourself a list of each goal you would like to achieve in your life. Do it in bullet-form, short and sweet. Around ten items is a good amount to start with.

2. Keep the list private. There’s enough pressure in the world; you don’t need other people checking in to see if you’ve achieved your goal yet. That’s not what the Big List is about—it’s your personal reminder of where you want to go in life.

3. Keep the list close. I have mine in the Notes app on my phone. You could also write yours on a piece of paper that you keep on your desk or nightstand.

4. Refer to it regularly. Check your list periodically, or whenever you have a big decision to make. It’s such a great reminder to see if you’re still on track, to course-correct if you’re not, or to update your list if your goals have changed.

And that’s it! The Big List is an easy, yet powerful tool that will help you become crystal-clear about what you want in life.
Until next week!

💝 Miriam