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: habits
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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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All the wrong reasons…
It is so very curious to me why I slip back into the sluggish life of no yoga, to allow my joints to become painful, my muscles slack, my hips to stiffen up so I waddle?
How is it that when I know what to do to keep my body feeling ache free, I don’t do it? Why do I have to wait until I hurt to do something good for me? Why can’t I serve this good portion of life to me each day and eagerly and selfishly take it?
The good things in life are not something I thirst for, instead I feel like it is ‘better’ to skip it, to just snuggle longer or not put my body through that routine. Like I am getting away with something, that I am being rewarded for Not doing it, when the opposite is true. I am hurting myself by not taking care of myself.
There is a long held belief that by not doing something I am cheating something or somebody, but not myself. How is this possible? Like I am getting away with something, but what?
All I am getting away with is a ouchy body…I am not stealing healthy or fitness, I am stealing lazy.
Just as with yoga I am the same with sugar or sweet treats. I think I am sneaking in this ‘goodness’ but what I am stealing is bad for me.
Isn’t it odd that I feel I am gaining something good, when in fact I am serving me poorly?
And when I was doing yoga daily, taking care of my self, it felt like I was going against the grain, swimming against the currents, pushing hard instead of going with the flow.
It is like I am programmed to swim in the wrong direction, that it is easier for me to not care.
To re-program myself, I will have to do what doesn’t come natural, until I forge a new natural.
It just seems so counter intuitive to want to treat your self poorly…that doesn’t make sense. To WANT what isn’t good and force yourself to do what is, like taking medicine swallowing it reluctantly.
You would think that we would crave that which makes us feel best, the greatest of natural foods and then movement that will make our bodies operate at their optimum…instead it seems we are hell bent on wrecking it.
Wrecking our bodies, our spirits, our minds, our relationships…like we have a wrecking gene we need to destroy before it destroys us.
I just get so befuddled by this, how unnatural us human beings are. We are living for all the wrong reasons.
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The soul that lies beneath.
Julia Cameron writes in The Artist’s Way…
”Conditioned as we are to accept other people’s definition of us, this emerging individuality can seem to us like a self-will run riot. It is not. The snowflake pattern of your soul is emerging. Each of us is a unique, creative individual. But we often blur that uniqueness with sugar, alcohol, drugs, overwork, underplay, bad relations, toxic sex, underexercise, over-TV, undersleep – many and varied forms of junk food for the soul…”
I have never thought of overeating or any of the above as being junk food for the soul. That most of the things that are bad for the body is also bad for our souls.
They blur our uniqueness, keep us living in with a fuzzy image of who we are, what we want, what we feel and where we heading, and above all, make it hard for the soul to shine through.
In fact all the bad habits keep the soul from shining through and yet we believe we need these habits, we literally crave them, and what they are is a black out curtain for the soul.
It is odd to me that we crave what keeps us from being our whole soulful self, and that we want the stuff that darkens who we are.
Perhaps we want to darken our reality.
We want to shut the shades on what is in order to survive…instead of taking actions to remove ourselves from situations in real life, we drape a curtain so we don’t have to see.
It is amazing to me that we become so accustomed to living a life with a darkened drape, that we have no idea how to live a life without them.
Julia Cameron is gently telling us what stands in the way from being you. What items we do to not be alive, aware and unique.
By removing the junk food from our lives we can see what they were covering up. The more we crave and hold on to things that are not good for our souls, the more chances there is big stuff we are not wanting to see, feel or respond to.
For me, my big mess was revealed first. I saw a whole life that I had no clue was going on underneath my dark curtain of denial, of self-numbing or fuzzy blurring of reality, and I then had to start eliminating things that contributed to the blanket of dysfunction.
This blanket of dysfunction lived my life for 46 years, a thick layer of stuff that my soul was unable to shine forth through.
It is surprising the difference between living as the dark curtain or the soul that lies beneath.
This is one of my first quilts after the revealation of my big mess….and you can see the sliver of gold, which is the soul trying to emerge. I called this the Soul Lost. I now have a better understanding of this quilt 6 years or more later!
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Familiar isn’t Good.
“Our own physical body possesses a wisdom which we who inhabit the body lack. We give it orders which make no sense.” ~Henry Miller
I seem to have an eating person and then a person who sees the affects, but the two haven’t met.
My eating person calls foods delicious and has cravings for sweets and she lives above my neck. She enjoys the tastes and eats as if the food will fall on the ground after she chews, paying no attention to the body underneath.
My eating is similar to smoking without inhaling, or so my mind has me believing, but the mirror tells a different tale.
What is so odd is the body that needs better eating is not in control of the eating and the eating mouth cares less about what happens after it tastes, chews and swallows.
While some diets look at the food and other people are telling the person to exercise, what I am thinking needs to be changed is the mind.
It is the town crier calling scrumptious bakery delicious, but who is it delicious for, A thought in the head?
My thoughts about food and what is the reality of food is a world apart, not even in the same room.
My awareness is never in both places at the same time, yet my head is attached to my body. My body is not welcome in the boardroom when decisions about it are made.
It shocking to know that my head lies or fails to acknowledge how the words and food don’t match, that there is a huge contradiction going on.
Yet my head is the first to complain as I stand in front of the mirror, Like it had nothing to do with the weight upon my thighs!
It is insane, the one that is craving and eating is now berating or feeling disappointed in the body…when the body is simply a dumping ground or garbage bag for the head.
I am right in the middle of calling its bluff, and trying to stop reacting to eating choices and instead bring the body to the table and eat for it and not for my head.
It is a fickle head…for it slurps up food, burps and then turns on its self when it sees the affects, like the traitor it is.
This lying eating head is the same head that wanted me to stay in bed and not do yoga; it is a part of myself that sucks the living out of me.
Within my food palate are vestiges of dysfunction, camouflaged in pretty cakes and candy, the pretty sounding names and tastes I have become accustomed to, my way with food.
My immature food palate will take time to adjust to eating food that the body can use for energy and nutrients instead of pleasing a childish mind set.
I am finding it odd that I have a iron grip on my sweets and feel less without them in my mail jeep. I like knowing they are there. It is odd to have this ‘value’ in no value items.
Like clinging to love that is really abuse.
I am holding on to the food that is keeping me overweight and out of shape, tired and lazy…and pushing away the good.
This is a repeating cycle in my wellness…holding on to what hurts me…fear of letting go of familiar even if familiar isn’t good.
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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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Resolve who I am.
It is New Year’s Eve, the day we all sit down and look at the balance sheets of life, pour over our faults and choose one or two that we feel must go, and then declare to everyone we will no longer do those things.
How many of us take the time to really sit with the affect, the trouble spot and see where it came from, why it was formed?
What we call bad habits are usually coverings over some pain.
They are the lids that keep us from feeling the feelings too severe to feel.
Usually what happens is we just exchange habits, we seldom delve deeply into what lays beneath, to dive below and feel the pain.
As I approach this New Year, instead of making resolutions to get rid of bad habits, I want to explore beneath the habits.
The definition of resolution is the process of resolving something.
The act of answering, solving…
Perhaps if we looked at the coming year as the year of the answers, we will look at each day differently; we look to be enlightened about our behaviors, instead of running from them.
Vowing that we will sit down in the middle of our habit and sort through it looking for answers.
It is my belief that beneath the habit lays our true self.
My resolution is to resolve who I am.
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Change will Happen!
If you are not trying to change, you do not have any choices to make, you just keep repeating what you have been doing, there will be no inner struggle, no wondering or thinking, no stressing about how you will handle each new moment that arrives, where you will again be asked to make a choice, differently.
If you don’t make a new choice you remain unchanged, and if you do make a new choice you will be changed, but grow further and further from your old familiar ways.
Not changing is easy; it is mindless and falls effortlessly within your life, like smoke seeping into each minute.
Change is like breathing new air into each choice we are asked to make daily, the small and the large, the complicated and the simple, each little decision has to be dealt with as a if you were a new arrival on earth, yet with the magnetic draw of a long held pattern.
To jump the track of an old pattern isn’t as easy as one suspects and you will not know until you are actually the one doing the heavy lifting.
Heavy lifting is doing the opposite of what you are used to, the complete and total opposite is required in order to change.
You can’t change your life by doing nothing different, by not affecting your world and each relationship in it, the only way to change is to allow waves of new you flow into everything in your life.Since you are the common denominator in your world and with all whom you spend time with, if you change, all will feel the ripple affect.
If there is no ripple, you haven’t changed.
In the book, “Tattoos on the Heart” by Gregory Boyle, he is speaking to a gang member who is asking “How many homies have you buried…you know, killed because of gangbanging?
“Seventy-five, son,” (this was some years ago. If he asked today, it would be more than twice that number.)“Damn, G, seventy-five?” He shakes his head in disbelief, his voice a bare hush now. “I mean, damn…when’s it gonna end?”
I reach down to Omar and go to shake his hand. We connect and I pull him to his feet. I hold his hand with both of mine and zero in on his eyes.
“Mijo, it will end,” I say, “the minute…you decide.”
The moistening of his eyes surprises me. He grabs my hands in his.
“Well,” he says, “then, I decide.”
“Omar,” I tell him, “it has always been as simple as that.”
“How many things have to happen to you,” Robert Frost writes, “before something occurs to you?”
Change awaits us. What is decisive is our deciding.
Gregory BoyleWhen you decide, change will happen!
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Held On So Tightly…
I awoke at 4:00 am, with my right hand tightly clenched, my arm sore.
A dream flooded my awareness.
I was at a beach, and saw a young girl pour gasoline into the front seat of my car, I hollered, and she looked at me and continued to pour.
When I arrived at the car, she was still standing there smiling and pouring gas in my car, I caught her hand.
And held on.
We were connected for hours, while I tried to call the police, while we waited for them to arrive, while we waited for them to do something. For the whole long day, I had to hold on to this unruly defiant child, this young girl who did everything in her power to get a way.
I went from hanging on tightly with one hand to at times keeping her in a double arm hug/hold.
She had friends who came by and made snide comments to me, while they tried to get her free from my grasp, yet I held on tighter.
Her mother and family also happened by, and the mother said, go ahead see if you can do something…
All day long this longhaired, thin as a rail girl and I were joined, she wanting so desperately to get away and I as so determined to hold her.
When I awoke, I realized this is a great metaphor for holding on to wishing someone would change.
It took all my energy, attention, concentration, to hold on to this girl who wanted to no part of what I wanted, and I wouldn’t let go.
Neither of us allowed to be free.
All it takes is one person to change their direction of struggle, it only takes one and we are both free.
As I look upon the last few days, and me trying to get my sisters to see my point of view….this struggle depicts it perfectly.
I am trying to convince them against their will.
When I went to bed last night, I recalled how my mother always focused on who didn’t arrive; who didn’t send a card, who didn’t treat her well, and then wasn’t able to be aware of who did.
Her habit became my habit, I too lose many hours of precious time focusing on a segment of people who are in my mental mind’s opinion, not doing what they ‘need’ to do.
I felt a long line of misunderstanding unravel last night as I lay in bed, and then the dream filled my sleeping hours.
If you are so busy working with those struggling against you, you can’t play and enjoy those with you.
I am letting them go…
In my dream, as the long day ended, when we were both tired, I took her information down on how to reach her, and I let her go.
My last sight of her was her walking away free, adjusting her clothes and shrugging and correcting herself, like a dog shaking its self once free from a leash.
And I sat there rubbing my hand that had held on so tightly….
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All the Gifts Awareness Brings!
One hundred and four days into a new habit, the habit of being aware, of being responsible for my response to life, of knowing that I will always get the results I want depending upon my actions.
My actions in the past 104 days has been to do yoga daily, to make it a priority to take care of this body, by giving it my attention, by moving stretching bending and stretching it into becoming more and more flexible and strong.
I can’t get the results I want, without doing the action step.
The action step is to get out of bed, to carve out time and space in my day to work on my body, to begin sculpting it into a new design.
There seems to be only two habits in the world, the mindless effortless sleep habit or the action based awareness.
I am making it a new habit to be aware in all things.
It makes life alive and very responsive and I have the best seat in the house to experience and feel all the gifts awareness brings!
I M Perfect lady 