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Balancing our new routines
Dear Creatrix,
How are you feeling today?
I hope you enjoyed the last two days, thinking about how you want to integrate more activity for your whole body into your life, and that you actually decided on which changes you want to start creating for yourself.
Because now it’s time to make sure that you won’t forget about your new intentions in a few weeks from now, and that you make sure you will be able to establish a new routine, and eventually start to stick to it, no matter what.
And to help with that, I’ll start by sharing my experiences again.
Just like you do in the CREATRIX School I learned about all the ways in which I could use my mind to influence my life and live better, a few years ago, and then I came to understand that I also needed to change my diet and my exercise routine to accompany this, if I wanted to be healthy and age somewhat gracefully.
But it’s very difficult to do it all at once, without feeling overwhelmed, and eventually giving up because we can’t live up to our expectations, burn out, or because we don’t know how to keep it all up when other unforeseen events happen.
And we have to recognize that our body is primed to keep things as they are, and doesn’t necessarily want to change, so if we try to change too much at once, we run the risk of overdoing it, burning out, and then ending up at point zero again.
The answer to all of this, as always, is pretty easy: Slow and steady always wins the race. 🐛
So, we will start with integrating a fun and doable exercise practice today.
When I first started with my physical exercise routine, I was sceptical, to say the least.
As I mentioned before, I didn’t think I was very athletic, and never had any fun experiences exercising.
I had no trouble moving – I was fine to walk, hike, bike or swim – but challenging my body beyond what it was used to was difficult, and so I avoided it.
As I started to change things for myself, little by little, I noticed that the exercise routine that I had begun to integrate into my life, became even more significant, or at least just as significant as the mindset shifts I had gone through before.
Because my new physical strength allowed me to believe in myself and my body more, to trust myself more and to feel myself in new ways.
Strengthening my muscles and being able to move in new ways, also seemed to have an effect on my willpower, my desires and my hopes.
Seeing my physical body change, really allowed me to believe for the first time, that there is nothing I can’t change.
There is a very obvious mind-body correlation, that you start to see once you start exercising.
Again, this is something I would not have known or been able to fully comprehend, or even would have imagined, if I hadn’t tried it and experienced it for myself.
But I am quite certain that without the daily physical body strength training, my mind would not have been strong enough to bring up the belief I needed to change my life and to heal myself from epilepsy.
And I’m sharing this with you, so that you don’t skip this part, or think it is not as important as mentally shifting your perspective.
I find that with many of these changes you have no idea how much they can actually change you, on all levels of existence, until you’ve actually gone through them.
But I also have to say that it wasn’t always easy.
Initially, I literally had to sit down and cry, before I started my workout, because everything in me screamed that I couldn’t do it.
It was the story I had heard and had been telling myself all my life, and my body held on to it with all its power.
But my belief and understanding of what was right was stronger, and so I did it anyway, through the tears, until they stopped.
Eventually, I realized that what had been blocking me and what brought up all the tears, was the idea that I did not think I deserved to be happy and healthy and that my physical limitations served me quite well in that view.
Our body is the physical manifestation of who and what we allow ourselves to be.
My body was and is the physical manifestation of my thoughts and beliefs, and the same is true for you. So your level of fitness can also tell you something about your beliefs about yourself.
What we think and believe manifests in our bodies, even if we are not aware of what we are thinking or believing. We store our memories, our unprocessed feelings, in our body.
Health, sickness, beauty, charm, charisma – it all depends on what we believe about ourselves and then how we act because of our beliefs.
We’ve looked at this in previous lessons, too: whether we will experience something as difficult or hard, depends on one thing alone: whether we believe it will be difficult or easy.
For me, starting my workout routine was hard, because I believed it would be. But my want was still stronger than my resistance, so I was able to push through it, and do it any way.
Today, I wouldn’t recommend just pushing through when you experience a blockage like I did, even if it will eventually work.
Today, I would choose to hear my emotions and hold and heal my inner child, and then move on, fully aware that I’m practicing loving kindness for myself, gently doing as much as my body allows me each day and then celebrating for myself for every change I initiate, and every change that becomes a new normal.
So, do however much you can do now, and then choose kindness to level up and don’t just push through.
Feel your feelings as they come up. And when you experience blockages, heal what needs to heal and only move on after.
In the Family chapter and in the Relationships chapter, you can find a ritual and a practice to help with healing past wounds and feeling your emotions.
