Slowly but surely my physical body has been pushed to the far reaches of my life, again. Well, I notice it when it creaks and aches and feels ouchy, when my neck and jaw are tense and in pain, when my middle is so expanded that I feel bundled up in a winter coat…and there is a faint feeble calling of the yoga mat.
I am not sure why I wait for physical discomfort, for loathing and self recriminations, but that seems to be the way. That when I am on a winning streak, like 340 plus days of yoga, I lose the 'desire' or whatever that is.
It seems like all kinds of things came rushing in or crowding over My Time…that while tended this or that, I forgot to leave time, space, energy, Or I forgot to say no more than yes and slowly 'other' things overwhelmed my space.
I have spent tons of hours on my inner awareness and self control, self freedom, etc. But I keep a healthy distance from the body's needs.
My mind and soul feel at peace in a very open liberal place….and yet my body still feels in prison at times.
Over-run by old habits.
Habits that seem not of mind or spirit, but just residual affects from my old life.
In fact my outside (body) where my spirit and mind live needs to catch up with the inner work.
Maybe it is time to put the same intensity and focus on flipping my body.
My body is the odd man out.
It is not free.
It is not at peace.
My body can't do a thing without me setting the intentions, putting IT on the list, at the top and finding ways to serve it and give it the same sacred intensity that I gave my inner landscape.
Time to clean up my outer body act…finding new alternate habits that will bring in energy instead of lowering it.
I un-naturally turn away from my body.
Somehow I can do this when forced, but it isn't natural for me to be kind and desire good things and wanting to serve my body energy lifters…but I am more natural at neglect.
It is like I am in control of neglect and out of control for goodness.
And my body still tries its best to deliver all that I ask of it, but with hurdles and speed bumps…. with me fighting it each step of the way.
I fight doing yoga and eating foods that deliver good energy and instead dump in sweets and foods that drain me.
Maybe it is time to switch the fight around.
To fight for energy and feeling good.
Tag: bad
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Energy and Feeling Good
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An Old Friend I outgrew.
I went and did yoga this morning, and it felt sooo good. My body yearns to be stretched, my neck and jaw are so tight, that I could stay much longer in the postures that are pulling on those muscles. My arms also are sorely in need of being put in awkward positions as to stretch the bunched up overworked muscles always going in one direction.
As I work sorting mail my left arm is bent to hold a pile of mail, this arm was painfully stretched out and that felt so good.
Towards the end of my hour and a half routine, it came to me that my programmed self needs a body that is sluggish and asleep, in order to pull a quick one on me time and time again.
So, there has been a struggle within me, as my awareness becomes more aware, the odd twist between my ‘treats’ and how they feel are coming to light, and their gig is up.
I believe that the more brainwashed you are and the more confused you are about what feels good and what is bad…the more you need to have a shut down body.
Perhaps a clear mind starts to crave foods that will help the body be a clear signal reader too.
I just feel that the mindset I had matched the shutdown foods that I ate. They swayed in harmony together, holding each other up.
Yoga is a health food in my day; and I don’t like the way my body feels when it misses this.
It also came to me while mowing the grass…We never ‘miss’ a sweet treat, or short ourselves on chocolate, or cheat and only eat a half a candy, but when doing yoga, I am tempted to stop early or doing anything that is truly good, we tend to slough off…but the old reliable bad stuff we are faithful to.
Just interesting to notice where we cut corners and when we take more than our fair share.
Perhaps soon I will be a yoga hog and glutton when it comes to fresh fruits and veggies and my old sweet treats will become an old friend I outgrew.
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Body, Mind and Soul
It is a man’s own mind, not his enemy or foe, that lures him to evil ways. ~Buddha
What I find so interesting about eating, is we don’t eat what the body needs, we put items into it that do not work with the body, but actually against it.
My backward eating habits reflect my old thoughts and beliefs and now I have to find new eating habits that match my new mindset.
It is interesting that I use sweet treats as something that makes me feel good, yet the outcome has very little goodness IF any. I feel tired, dragged out, lethargic and my body is oversized from the useless calories I consume.
There is a separation between how my tongue tastes the food and how it affects my body, like the two parts of me that don’t intersect.
My head says its good and my mouth likes the taste, but once I swallow all hell breaks loose, my sweet treats wreak havoc once beyond my taste buds.
The sweets are really saboteurs in disguise and I have programmed myself to discount the affects while enjoying the snack.
The separation is critical in not linking the culprit and the feelings together, it is keeping the mind and body separated.
Isn’t it incredible that the mind and body are not aware of each other, and instead of working together; they are fighting with each other, a civil war inside?
Bikram speaks of bringing the mind back to the body for 20 seconds during each yoga pose. What yoga is teaching me is to pay attention to my body.
When I eat I am not paying attention to my body, it is like my head is eating alone…until I swallow and then after my head has had its fun, my body then pays the price.
It is so odd that we can ‘believe’ we are enjoying food that literally isn’t good for us. How is it possible to enjoy something that will cause us harm?
What will it take to flip this around?
I can’t seem to care while eating and enjoying the flavors that the affects after are not enjoyable.
It seems like I am more addicted to the feelings afterward, that my natural state is to be sedative and unfeeling instead of feeling alive and alert and in touch with my feelings.
We don’t even seem to have the feelings of being full or near full or tasting and appreciating the scents, the taste, the texture, let alone the incredible journey some food has taken to get from plant to table or even seed to plant.
This is a new frontier for me to become more aware of what I eat, how I eat, when I eat and how I feel during and after eating and how it all impacts my body.
It is time to stop eating as a head alone and eat with my body, mind and soul.
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Turning Bad to Good.
On the sliding scale of normal, I lived on the high end up near the top. I was pushed up there by fear and fear stood between the middle ground and me.
My hyper responses seem normal, unless you compare them to another’s; they seemed natural in their unnaturalness.
It literally feels like I am being put in harms way to forge into the middle responses, like they are too weak for my security.
My security calls for over the top measures, I do not trust middle ground.
Middle ground appears as doing nothing, is standing still, is allowing, is not knowing what your playing with, it seems pointless and weak.
And perhaps what I call middle ground is the bottom rung called nothing, the very opposite of where I lived.
It seemed my scales of normal had two responses, hyper screaming or nothing. Middle was nowhere to be found.
I had to crawl through fear and let go of where I was in order to be introduced to reasonable.
What is reasonable?
Balancing on the razor edge of reason feels like a weak position to my hyper vigilant self.
The space that is needed is what Stephen Covy writes about in his book, The 8th Habit. The space between a life incident and your response. He says that the space is almost non-existent for an abused person; we have no space before we react.
What he calls space I will call reason. We are left without reason.
We enter into a life changing moment without reason.
We can’t be reasonable, for we don’t have reason.
We can’t find a reason and we don’t’ look for it. We react without reasons.
This may sound very peculiar to some, but what I felt was that the situation is what drove me up the tree, like a fearful raccoon; little did I know I lived there and beckoned it to come to me.
I reacted from there. I brought in the high hyper energy, it wasn’t the scene that spewed it forth, it came from me, I elevated the situation as high above middle as I was.
Instead of meeting the situation, I brought it up the tree with me.
In order to find reason, I had to lower myself down.
What an odd view I had of myself lowering my energy, letting go of my fear, and climbing slowly down towards middle and not dropping all the way to nothing, but to sit in a place of reason. To meet the situation where it is.
Reason. I had to look up the meaning.
n. The basis or motive for an action, decision, or conviction.
It is interesting to see that Reason is the basis or motive for how we act or the decisions we make.
I had reason, I had many reasons and all my reasons were fearful reasons.
It was reasonable for me to be so high up the scale of normal.
I read that Fear is False Events Appearing Real.
If Fear believed in what isn’t real, you would think we would naturally turn to what is real.
But what if what is real is horrifying?
What if you have to give up father for a pedophile?
Then what?My lessons letting go of false events was to grab on to much more scarier things.
Yet I believe this is why most hang on to fantasy, to what isn’t, to build up a wall of fear, a wall of false events, false ideas, a fairyland between them and reality.
What is so sad, is that you think by not dealing you are keeping the boogie man at bay, and what you are actually doing is creating a cage for you all to be together.
It was like I lived in the highest tree in the cage, for fear of what lay at my feet.
It is incredible the wall of fear we build out of false ideals…and we don’t want to drop the pretty curtain to reveal who really lives with us.
And imagine, we think fear is about something scary, when fear most often is putting pretty masks on scary things.
Fear is make up, a pretend mask on a bad behavior or person. Fear is making up a fantasy.
Who knew that fear was creating things that were not real?
Fear is to a make up story.
What I had thought, was that fear was about something scary, I failed to understand the application of fear.
Fear is building a false event or story and the unease I believe is the body knowing the truth that lay beneath.
The body trembles in the false events appearing real.
What also occurred to me, we rarely make up scary stories about good things. We make up wonderful, kind and loving stories about scary things.
Interesting fear is turning bad to good.
A friend passed on a quote she found on an Art Quilt made by Tina Koyama, “Beyond the four walls of fear is all of life’s energy waiting for me.”
I M Perfect lady 