I have a hard time ending relationships even when I know its time. It isn't easy for me to admit when things are over. I tend to choose the path of least resistance in the hopes that if I just fade away, step back, go into hiding, the problems will resolve themselves. They don't! This strategy always fails miserably. A stalemate usually ensures until someone blinks; either the other person or myself has to muster up the courage to admit that it's done.
I haven't had to end personal relationships per se, though I have had to shift my relationships with a few people. The relationships I have been ending have been with aspects of my life that no longer work for me. It's been a hard thing for me to acknowledge that some beliefs I've held for a long time about this or that, are no longer true for me. A few commitments I use to hold as valuable have felt more constraining than affirming. Old passions have become tiring and blase. The person I am becoming no longer identifies with the person that I have been.
I am grateful that I have had some really supportive people show up in my life that get the changes I am making. I have unintentionally alientated a few that don't get it. It has never been my intention to hurt anyone, but I can't bare the responsibility of another's feelings around the choices I need to make for me. I tend to think of things in terms of vibration. People and situations tend to align as long as they are in vibration. When the vibration shits, either becoming more rapid or slower, some of those same people and situaitons tend to shift out of alignment. My sense is that ach of us eventually aligns with someone or something else. It may be that the journey itself is one long process of continual re-alignment. I don't know.
I have never been exactly an easy go lucky guy. I am a bit complicated, definitely moody, but at heart well meaning. Quite a few friends and family members say I'm weird, but I trust they mean that lovingly. There is a line from the Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson song, Mamas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys with which I resonate: "Them that don't know him won't like him, and them that do won't sometimes know how to take him. He aint wrong, he's just different, but his pride won't let him do things to make you think he's right." While not a cowboy by any stretch of the imagination, I am a wanderer of sorts. I am searching for something, i.e. a musical note only I can hear, a particular painting only I can see, but until it reveals itself, I have to keep going. Otherwise, I would feel like I am dying inside.
While uneasy and a little difficult I am in a good place. I am scared because the changes that I am making are leading me in a direction I never thought I would be going. I am grieving because I have given up certain things and backed away from other situations. These changes while not monumental were things with which I indentified. I've been thinking a lot about the archetype of the Hindu goddess, Kali. Out of her great compassion, she is uncompromising in slaying the ego. In spiritual circles, there is a sense where the ego is a bad thing. Closer to the truth, the ego may be those things with which we use to build an identity. I am this because I do or have or belong to that. When those certitudes give way, it can be potentially overwhelming.
Again, using the image of Kali, whatever she takes away, in its place she puts in its place what we really need. At this point, I am working without out net. I am trusting that I won't fall. And if I do, I am trusting that I will get back up. When it comes down to it, despite all the angst, I am rather optimstic about it all.
In other words, I am opting to stay breezy!
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
A Yogi Vegan Feeling Good
After years of bad eating habits, fluctuating weight gain, and indifference to exercise, I have decided to become a vegan. I have joined a yoga studio. I have begun losing weight. I am making the earnest effort for the first time in years to become healthy.
I didn't arrive at this decision lightly. I have been rather vigilant for the last several years in ignoring the "gloom and doom" forecasts of my personal physician if I didn't make serious changes to my life style. I allowed myself to turn a strident deaf ear to the oddly rude remarks people have made regarding my weight. I rationalized my lack of effort at improving my health to be a consequence of the advancing march toward my middle years. I thought it was silly for me to expect to hold onto that younger self that use to run six miles a day and lift weights.
In a nutshell, I have been a hot mess for a long time. I don't beat myself up over it; I am just being real. Rarely do people make long lasting positive change from negative criticisms. Perhaps, that needs to be emphasized: people do not make long lasting positive change from negative criticisms. Calling overweight people names or making obnoxious jokes is cruel. Telling an over weight person they eat too much or need to exercise is like pointing out that water is wet or snow is cold. That's obvious.
Yes, I am admitting that I have abused my relationship with food. I ate too much to deal with emotional stress. I used food to fill an emotional void with physical sensations. All the insight and talking in the world were not equipping me to handle certain emotions I did not want to feel or believe I could handle. Like most people, I knew my choices were self-defeating. I just didn't know if making better choices would equip me to handle the feelings I was avoiding.
Contrary to the popular advice that it takes a person to hit rock bottom to change, people can change if the experience of the new behaviors makes them feel better than the bad behaviors. When feeling better and learning to cope with the new behaviors outweigh (no pun intended) the destructive behaviors, people change.
What happened to me, what made me want to change, was what I presumed to be a rather incidental decision: I went through a 21 day physical cleanse. Joining with some friends that were going to do the program themselves (none of which I think have problems with food), we abstained from sugar, gluten, refined carbohydrates in favor of a strict healthy regiment of vegetables, fruits, simple carbohydrates and lean protein. We had plenty to eat though I personally had to struggle with learning to be satisfied over and against being full. In a few days, my body went through detox like a heroin addict going off the stuff. I was moody, irritable, and had strong physical cravings.
Within a week, the moodiness was gone, the cravings subsided, and I felt an abundance of energy. Along with a yoga class for weight loss I have joined, I literally felt better. Feeling better, I wanted to do better. I am in the process of learning how to make better choices with regard to food and exercise. I am choosing to become vegan because of a greater commitment to my health, and to the health of the planet.
Yet, it's my choice. I'm not advocating veganism, as a choice for others. What I am advocating is that with some loving support, a new outlook, and a plan with how to get there, I am losing weight, becoming more active, and I am feeling I can handle the emotions that I was using food to suppress.
I didn't arrive at this decision lightly. I have been rather vigilant for the last several years in ignoring the "gloom and doom" forecasts of my personal physician if I didn't make serious changes to my life style. I allowed myself to turn a strident deaf ear to the oddly rude remarks people have made regarding my weight. I rationalized my lack of effort at improving my health to be a consequence of the advancing march toward my middle years. I thought it was silly for me to expect to hold onto that younger self that use to run six miles a day and lift weights.
In a nutshell, I have been a hot mess for a long time. I don't beat myself up over it; I am just being real. Rarely do people make long lasting positive change from negative criticisms. Perhaps, that needs to be emphasized: people do not make long lasting positive change from negative criticisms. Calling overweight people names or making obnoxious jokes is cruel. Telling an over weight person they eat too much or need to exercise is like pointing out that water is wet or snow is cold. That's obvious.
Yes, I am admitting that I have abused my relationship with food. I ate too much to deal with emotional stress. I used food to fill an emotional void with physical sensations. All the insight and talking in the world were not equipping me to handle certain emotions I did not want to feel or believe I could handle. Like most people, I knew my choices were self-defeating. I just didn't know if making better choices would equip me to handle the feelings I was avoiding.
Contrary to the popular advice that it takes a person to hit rock bottom to change, people can change if the experience of the new behaviors makes them feel better than the bad behaviors. When feeling better and learning to cope with the new behaviors outweigh (no pun intended) the destructive behaviors, people change.
What happened to me, what made me want to change, was what I presumed to be a rather incidental decision: I went through a 21 day physical cleanse. Joining with some friends that were going to do the program themselves (none of which I think have problems with food), we abstained from sugar, gluten, refined carbohydrates in favor of a strict healthy regiment of vegetables, fruits, simple carbohydrates and lean protein. We had plenty to eat though I personally had to struggle with learning to be satisfied over and against being full. In a few days, my body went through detox like a heroin addict going off the stuff. I was moody, irritable, and had strong physical cravings.
Within a week, the moodiness was gone, the cravings subsided, and I felt an abundance of energy. Along with a yoga class for weight loss I have joined, I literally felt better. Feeling better, I wanted to do better. I am in the process of learning how to make better choices with regard to food and exercise. I am choosing to become vegan because of a greater commitment to my health, and to the health of the planet.
Yet, it's my choice. I'm not advocating veganism, as a choice for others. What I am advocating is that with some loving support, a new outlook, and a plan with how to get there, I am losing weight, becoming more active, and I am feeling I can handle the emotions that I was using food to suppress.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Life is Speaking
It's been far too long since I have worked on this blog. It began as an initial outlet to modify the effects of my self-diagnosed depressive affect a couple years ago. Now it may be evolving into the launch pad to document a whole new phase of my life. I told myself that my initial foray into blogging was an attempt recapture my original passion, as a writer. In hindsight, I was fighting for the soul. I was trying to get back the self I sacrificed for an inauthentic image of something that had failed me miserably. The image of being someone that others wanted me to be.
Under the guise of a self-projected certainty to others, I was otherwise lost. (I imagined my self-projected certainty was experienced by many, as the arrogance of an angry, brooding person.) My lack of direction was an artifact of making far too many reactive decisions to the angst I didn't want to experience. I went to graduate school, because I was bored, lonely, and not sure what to do with my self. I trained for a couple of professions that seemed like a good idea, so I didn't have to deal with the agony of not knowing how to live life. I was in dating relationships with people than were less than what I needed rather than wrestle with my lack of self-esteem and undervalued self-worth.
I'm starting to think that, in some cases, depression is an often under appreciated catalyst by the psyche to capture our attention that something has gone wrong. Perhaps, depression is the soul's version of heartache that comes with longing for something more authentic. Consequently in those cases, what may be required is not medication, but the willingness to hear one's true self calling itself home.
I truly have come to appreciate the wisdom of the 12 Steps used in addictions recovery. The first step being to admit there is a problem. Given my predication toward crude language, I tend to re-order the language of first step that sometimes a person has to admit that shit is fucked up! It really doesn't matter who fucked it up, but that we take responsibility for putting it back together again.
The real questioned was how was I going to use everything that I had ever experienced in my life to claim the life I wanted. To paraphrase the writer Parker Palmer, how was I going to let my life speak to me? Likewise, how was I going to listen?
Since the summer, I've been listening to my life, as it spoke to me in a country town in Brazil while spending time with a Portuguese spiritual healer. I've been paying attention to its murmur while in a crowded auditorium in Detroit with an Indian guru. I've been engaging with my life's speak while poundings drums and plucking bass strings. I've heard what it had to say while taking photographs of nude female models for gallery art shows.
Life is always speaking. It's just a matter of my being attentive to what it has to say. Particularly, when life makes it pronouncements around places I thought I would never go, along with people I didn't intend to to meet. Life has a better sense of humor than most comedians. Admittedly, I'm not sure if I want to listen to life suggests that I go hang out in India for a while. Ah, who knows, but I'm still learning.
Under the guise of a self-projected certainty to others, I was otherwise lost. (I imagined my self-projected certainty was experienced by many, as the arrogance of an angry, brooding person.) My lack of direction was an artifact of making far too many reactive decisions to the angst I didn't want to experience. I went to graduate school, because I was bored, lonely, and not sure what to do with my self. I trained for a couple of professions that seemed like a good idea, so I didn't have to deal with the agony of not knowing how to live life. I was in dating relationships with people than were less than what I needed rather than wrestle with my lack of self-esteem and undervalued self-worth.
I'm starting to think that, in some cases, depression is an often under appreciated catalyst by the psyche to capture our attention that something has gone wrong. Perhaps, depression is the soul's version of heartache that comes with longing for something more authentic. Consequently in those cases, what may be required is not medication, but the willingness to hear one's true self calling itself home.
I truly have come to appreciate the wisdom of the 12 Steps used in addictions recovery. The first step being to admit there is a problem. Given my predication toward crude language, I tend to re-order the language of first step that sometimes a person has to admit that shit is fucked up! It really doesn't matter who fucked it up, but that we take responsibility for putting it back together again.
The real questioned was how was I going to use everything that I had ever experienced in my life to claim the life I wanted. To paraphrase the writer Parker Palmer, how was I going to let my life speak to me? Likewise, how was I going to listen?
Since the summer, I've been listening to my life, as it spoke to me in a country town in Brazil while spending time with a Portuguese spiritual healer. I've been paying attention to its murmur while in a crowded auditorium in Detroit with an Indian guru. I've been engaging with my life's speak while poundings drums and plucking bass strings. I've heard what it had to say while taking photographs of nude female models for gallery art shows.
Life is always speaking. It's just a matter of my being attentive to what it has to say. Particularly, when life makes it pronouncements around places I thought I would never go, along with people I didn't intend to to meet. Life has a better sense of humor than most comedians. Admittedly, I'm not sure if I want to listen to life suggests that I go hang out in India for a while. Ah, who knows, but I'm still learning.
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