To get healthy there are a ton of things to do.
There are lists and lists of exercise fads and fables, things that are supposed to work and things that will make you thinner skinnier etc. The goal is not to lose fat. The goal is to have a fit and active lifestyle.
To have energy for every part of my day and night, to have more than enough energy to do whatever it is that I want to do with my time. I am on board the idea that I can be a part of that life and that lifestyle. Parts of it I want no part of, but the benefits I see are really there, can really be true, can really be me. I want the energy back. I want to feel energized all the time. I want to wake up in the morning before my alarm goes off. I want to fall asleep at night as soon as my head hits the pillow, but not even feel a bit tired before then.
Or maybe I could take small naps. I have done that before, a small power nap on different days. They really did help. They got the juices realigned in a way that was beneficial for me.
What am I learning now? That being healthy is more than just working out. That being healthy comes back to the idea of what I am eating. I can put unhealthy food in my body. I can put unhealthy drinks in my system. I can breathe in harmful smoke and vapors. But I can also just decide to be a part of life and the life cycle and eat the good things that are there, the good things that are available to me. That is what is important. Being healthy is not a comparison chart.
What I want to learn is how to be my most healthy self. And to do that I need to get out of my own way, and start exercising. I know that my body is athletic under all this flab, and I just need to get in touch with it. I just need to experience it and become one with it, to understand it and work with it and be around it as much as I possibly can. That is the first portion of my healthy lifestyle. To become one with the movement and energy flow of my body. Allow it to rediscover itself. That is important. I once had amazing jumping abilities and could jump over picket fences in two steps. I lost that when I started eating Cheeze-Its by the box and watching Batman the Animated series instead of running track in high school. That was a tipping point for me to become more acquainted with my mind than my body. I was part of my mind more often than not.
By becoming identified with my mind I became self conscious. I became interested in myself as a human, what I could offer myself, family and the world, and I thought it was all cerebral. And so I lost touch with my body. I thought that the body didn’t matter, that it only mattered what was going on between my ears.
That is not the case. What goes on between my ears still matters, but what goes on in my body is important as well.
Spirit Mind Body - a full balance makes a wonderful human.
To align all three successfully takes trial and error and experimentation, but the stage can be set by others. I don’t have to learn alone. I can pick up where others left off and work to find my own balance. I can work to find a balance in my life like no other balance I have had before. Finally there are three pillars, and I can balance the stool of my life on the top equally and have a firm seat.
I will work to get back to that state with my physical body as well. Allow my physical body to be pummelled back into working order, then we can start looking into the idea that there is something beneficial in balancing the mind body and spirit. I thought last night that my spirit alone needed to be strong, but I finally realize that balance is the key to living a full human life. To balance my mind - the thoughts that I have, the problems it is able to solve, the work it is capable of - my spirit - the being that I am, my life force and energy - my body - my physical structure from which I operate my mind and spirit.
Getting all of those aligned will help me greatly on the journey of life. It is not something that happens overnight. I continually need to remind myself that. It is something that will happen by incremental improvement. Something that will not happen necessarily, but become. I will become more balanced among the three pillars of my life and through that balancing will find new ways to relate to all the people around me which will bring amazing experiences into my life.
Become balanced. My spirit needs a chance to stretch it’s muscles. Now that I see what it is capable of, I am happy. I was happy all along, but I had covered up my happiness with other things, so that I was searching for something that wasn’t really missing. It was happiness, and now I am all about it.
The experience of my life will be the reawakening of my body. The toning of my muscles. The elimination of fat from my body. My diet becoming better and more healthy. There being a desire to work my body and make it stronger and more flexible. A desire to push the limits of my physical body so that I can better know myself and the world.
A balance will be struck, but first I must really whip the body into shape. Maybe that is not the best idea. Perhaps if I whipped the body into shape, or at least started out trying to do that I really wouldn’t succeed but would only find myself giving up. Better not to set myself up for failure. I have set the stage, now I just need to baby step my way to success. To do that, it is important to just understand that I need to take baby steps all the time. It is okay if I only do two reps at the gym. It is okay if I only do one lap in the pool. Whatever. Do something. Do more than nothing.
But don’t let yourself fall back. Don’t fall off the starting block before the race has even begun. Get in there and start swimming as hard as you can for the other side, but don’t go so fast that you run out of steam. How will you know when you will run out of steam if you don’t push yourself as much as possible? How will you know what your limits are if you don’t test them? Push yourself to the limits of the finite and the possible and see what is there.
Hone your eating skills to a razor sharp edge. There is magic in there. Make it happen. There is magic in those eating skills make them be perfect and great.
