This morning — Christmas morning — I got up at 630 and took my yoga mat out to the hill at the edge of my hotel, overlooking a north-facing bay at Phillip Island, Victoria, Australia. As the sun grew warmer and the world around me started to wake up, I did 108 sun salutations.

I’d had the idea of 108 sun salutations in my head for a while. Last winter, Tracy inspired me by doing this on the edge of her sailboat. And just before I left Toronto, one of my yoga teachers invited us to come and do 108 sun salutations in candlelit silence for the solstice. I left for Australia before the solstice, but I carried the idea with me, to mark a moment.

While I was in Melbourne, I impulsively bought a lightweight yoga mat at lululemon. (As I said on IG, Melbourne is like Toronto and Vancouver smushed together, but sort of in a dream. There was a lulu 400 m from my hotel). I knew it was kind of an idiotic thing to do — for this part of my trip, I’m on my BIKE, carrying everything with me. The minimalist rule certainly doesn’t include a 3mm mat.

But once I get an idea in my head, it kind of lodges there. Even as I pulled other extraneous stuff out of my panniers and left them in a plastic bag at my hotel, the yoga mat stayed. For this exact moment.

See that pokey thing there? That’s my yoga mat. Also? That’s a heatwave.

The reasoning behind the 108 sun salutations is one of those slightly fuzzy “sacred” history things, one of those culturally questionable aspects of yoga that doesn’t bear too close scrutiny. To wit:

• There are said to be a total of 108 energy lines converging to and from Anahata, the heart chakra.

• There are 54 letters in the Sanskrit alphabet. Each has masculine and feminine, shiva and shakti. 54 times 2 is 108.

It’s also true that Buddhist prayers tend to be repeated 108 times — I did see that in Bhutan and Myanmar.

(In a related tangent, I read earlier on this trip in the excellent book 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret that essentially, what we think of as modern sun-sign astrology was invented in the 1930s to mark Princess Margaret’s birth, and then was copied by other newspapers. More “sacredness” with no real footing. But I digress).

All of that said, 108 repeats of suryanamaskar appealed to me. It’s a feat, and I like a good feat. It involves counting, which appeals to the completist in me. And it feels ritualistic enough to give me a long, meditative practice to mark the things that are important about this year, and the things I want to dwell in about myself.

So I took me and my painfully toted mat out to the hill, and practiced for about 75 minutes, while the smell of bacon crept out from the kitchen, a woman and a child came out to get Santa gifts from a car, another woman came out holding the hand of a child in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Pure blue sky, tranquil bay.

I did sets of ten, counting out loud and listening to a gently guided meditation from my own meditation teacher on my headset. After each set, I paused and had a drink of water, surveyed my body, wrote a little notch on a pad. After 55, I did a bit of child’s pose and contemplated my body. And my will.

It wasn’t a comfortable practice — the ground was a bit uneven, and I got a grass stain on my new mat. Flies came out with the sun and twitched at me, and a ladybug crawled on me and my mat. I had to move the mat as the sun got hotter. And most of all, it was HARD to stay focused. I alternated between step and hop out of downward, dog, noted that only about 5% of my upward dogs were in true flow. My hamstrings still ached at the end after all my riding. I really faltered through the 9th set, feeling it went on forever.

But from the inside out, I felt whole. The last part of the meditation was gratitude. I was fully present in the final 8 postures, and I got to be fully present to my gratitude for all of my people, for my body, for my work, for the life that lets me stand on top of this hill on the edge of the Indian Ocean on Christmas morning.

Fieldpoppy is Cate Creede, who is sending holiday light to everyone from the Southern Hemisphere.

I started 2018 with some great intentions, fitness-wise.

I was going to really firm up a daily exercise routine.

I was going to test for my 3rd degree black belt in June.

I was going to do a lot more exercise outside.

Instead, I ended up with a new writing contract (which was good news) which changed the way my days unfolded.

And I broke my wrist (which wasn’t good news) which took several months to get sorted. I knew that it would be over 6 weeks from the break until the cast came off but I didn’t know that it would be many more weeks after that before I could spar at Taekwondo.*

And that was just the first six months of 2018.

The whole year has been like that – I’d have something that seemed like a solid plan, well thought out, and then some metaphorical wrench would come out of nowhere and mess up the works.

It wasn’t all downside, though.

I had some success with short term challenges – a month of yoga, a few weeks of meditation, a week of specific patterns practice.

And I successfully kept up some practices – regular Taekwondo, some walks, some yoga, that sort of thing but I didn’t make much progress. I’m sure that, if I could go back in time, I would be able to tweak the way I went through my days so I could have fit in more exercise but I didn’t have the benefit of that overview while I was living them.

And, I had to recognize that having ADHD can mean that when I get thrown for a loop – in small or large ways – it can take me longer to get back to where I started.

I’m refusing to be hard on myself about the whole mess though. In fact, I’ve decided to do quite the opposite.

My Christmas gifts to myself this year are compassion and understanding, about my fitness and about everything else.

I did what I could with the resources I had available at the time and I am okay with that.

It didn’t work out like I had planned and that’s okay, too.

As for my fitness, I’m going to take the temporary lull in my routine over the next week or so and do a little extra yoga or take a few more walks.

And, for fitness and for everything else, I’m going to get a bit more specific in my plans (and my back-up plans) for the new year.

My focus is going to be on establishing routines so it is easier to get my work done and my workouts in.

And, no matter what the next year brings, I think that I will give myself the same gifts in 2019 – compassion and understanding never go out of style.

I have lots to spare if you need some.

*That and some other factors changed the timing of my belt test to February 2019.

The blog’s Cate Creede is riding her bike in Melbourne. She wrote about it on her blog and I’m reposting it here.

Yesterday, I ran 6 km along the Yarra river in Melbourne, had a quick shower, changed and then went to a noon time vinyasa class.

I’m on holiday, and I spent the first few days doing my favourite things: yoga, eating breakfast, running, wandering the city. I went for my first short run the first day I got here, and felt this new continent under my feet with great comfort and surety.

I was thinking as I was running yesterday that there are so many ways to think of this kind of run.

I’ve been running for 24 years, so it’s just what I do. I go to a new place, I run.

I’m doing the 218 workouts in 2018 thing, and this was workout #290. It was a symbol of successfully building an almost-every-day workout habit, an embodiment of my capacity to set and meet goals, with the support of a great little community.

I like to count things, and Australia is my 60th country. I thought it was #59, but my mother informed me last week that we camped in Monaco one night when I was 9, which I hadn’t known. For the past 20 years, I’ve run in most of the countries I’ve been to — I think this is country #28 I’ve been lucky and privileged enough to run in.

More than anything, this run was about the privilege of having a body that is capable of running at nearly 54. My knees are behaving oddly, and I’m menopausally fatigued and heavier and getting so much slower, and I can’t imagine running distances right now — my body is just more tired, thicker, more sluggish. But I can put one foot in front of the other and find flow, joy, presence, weave past the meandering walkers and find the unexpected bridges, the little historical plaques that tell me what the river was like before Europeans came here. My body takes me places — across the world and out the door — of full amazing discovery. I am joyful and so grateful for that.

Yesterday I also picked up my hire bike for a solo bike trip I am leaving on tomorrow. Today I rode it out for a fantastic breakfast and then fiddled about with panniers and seat height and all of the decisions about what to load onto it and what to stow. So satisfying to decide what I can minimally live with for a week.

I run, I bend, I ride, I move my body, I explore — I am unbelievably lucky, so grateful.

Fieldpoppy is Cate Creede, who writes for this blog two or three times a month and who is currently cycling a tiny pocket of Victoria, Australia