I can. I am. I will.

Three days ago I made a decision. I was going to give myself ninety days of devotion. In this time I was going to concentrate on making myself healthy in every aspect of my being. To attend to my physical health I started a work out program with my husband that, at this moment in time, has my fibromyalgia and endometriosis trying desperately to convince my brain that I am not healing myself but hurting myself. In time,  I will convince it that this is simply not the case and that I am actually making it stronger and healthier.  Aside from that I am also trying to be more conscious about fueling my body better by drinking more water and eating healthier foods during the day. This has always been a task for me. If I am not hungry, I don't eat, and so normally I am only eating once a day at the very most, sometimes I eat once every couple of days instead.  I am working on this. Drinking more water is also something that has been very difficult for me. I had to drink copious amounts of it when I was pregnant for endless ultrasounds and I developed a gag reflex to the act of drinking it. In the last three days I have went from drinking none, to drinking almost 2 liters. I can overcome this and continue to increase the amounts of water I drink. I have also stopped smoking. This one is probably the hardest for me in the physical health category but, like the other steps I am taking, I am doing it, I can succeed and I will achieve my goals to have overall physical health. As you can see very clearly, I have defined the words I can, I am, and I will. This is part of how I am devoting my energy to my mental health. These simple words have become a litany for me when I am feeling discouraged, frustrated, overwhelmed or simply too tired to continue. I can do this, I am succeeding, I will be victorious in reaching my goal. I gave myself ninety days and already I have accomplished so much in the first three. Perhaps for some my conquests do not seem all that glorious, but for me they have been mountains I have struggled to climb in the past, that I am now slowly but surely scaling with determination. My emotional health is yet another area I am working on healing. This is perhaps the most injured of my aspects. Life has definitely thrown me some hard blows, as it does everyone, but because I did not see my own self worth and because my emotional self was not healthy, I allowed the negativity of the circumstances to define my emotional state. I lost sight of my own ability to heal myself. The first step in this process is forgiveness and I am working on letting go of the past so that I can be happy in the present and look forward to a future where I will be healthy and strong enough to face anything life has to throw my way with grace and poise. This process is not something that happens instantaneously. Even after my ninety days there will still be a lot of work to be done to end up where I see myself being. However these ninety days are  enough to become a new foundation to build on. I can be anything I want to be. I am taking steps towards a goal that I have set for myself. I will get there, no matter how many times I may have to ask for directions because I have stumbled off my path. I hope that each and every one of you remembers how truly powerful and remarkable you are. We are all capable of achieving greatness and overcoming the most difficult of situations as long as we remember those simple little words; I can. I am. I will.
Namaste

Duct Taping The Mouth Of My Inner Hyde

I am unsettled. It has been one of those morning so far where I am sitting back and thinking on who I am, what is important to me and where I go from here. There are so many changes I want to make yet even as I contemplate each and every one of them I am also remembering the last time I made these attempts without much success. So I sit and wonder where I went wrong on the previous tries so that I can figure out how to do it right this time. Perhaps that is half my battle. I am over thinking it all instead of just doing it. The curse of an Aquarian, I suppose, for we are the thinkers of the zodiac. This trait is very prominent in me, but like everything in life, there are advantages and disadvantages. I am always thinking and I am capable of great thoughts, ideas and philosophies. Unfortunately though, my thoughts are not always focused and productive and instead of helping me to discover amazing things about myself and how I can make my world a better place to live in, they do the opposite and consume me with negativity. Even as I write this, I am desperately trying to find a way to spin this thought in a more bright and positive direction but it is exhausting sometimes. I don't always feel like I have the energy to monitor every thought to find the motive behind it and the direction it will lead me in and so I stop caring about my thoughts and where they take me. It doesn't matter that logic is telling me how very detrimental this is to my over all well being. That one tiny piece of logic becomes lost within a sea of illogical emotion and when I am already feeling overwhelmed and exhausted it becomes easier for me to just let it get swallowed up than to swim through the mass of unproductive thoughts and float that one tiny productive thought to the surface so it can breathe. And again, even as I write this sad truth my thoughts are telling me that I if I want to see change I have to stop taking the easier road and work harder, followed quickly by the thought that I am not strong enough, not determined enough, not worth enough, to be able to succeed. With a constant Jekyll and Hyde movie being played out within my head, I feel defeated before I even begin. So how do I silence the unproductive thoughts so that I can hear the productive ones more clearly? Make the choice to only hear the productive ones. Sounds so simple, doesn't it? Yet the reality is that it is far from that. It is a continuing battle for me and I have to admit that I am always questioning whether or not it will ever become easier and whether there will ever come a time in my life where it will become such a routine and habit that my mind will automatically seek the positive thought and let it lead me. Perhaps if I give more, do more, be more. But there is just one problem with that. I am already struggling and I am not sure how I do that without once again becoming so overwhelmed and exhausted that this cycle continues to repeat itself over and over again. It is easy to have positive thoughts when all is right with the world, but at times like this, when we are bogged down and bone tired, it is a challenge and I am really trying very hard to process this and ride it through in a productive way by using this blog as one of the tools in my arsenal. One thought at a time, right?
Namaste.

Acting Like A Child....Not Always a Bad Thing

I am not sure, to be honest, if I have ever done a blog on this before. Today I have been having some issues with staying focused and positive. I am human...I err. As much as I love to post positive messages on social networks to help my friends and family stay positive when they might be feeling discouraged, I also post them there as a reminder to myself to stay on the path I am trying to make for myself. I posted a couple positive quotes today and I was taken aback by how the simplicity of the words carried such a deep and profound message. It had me thinking back to some of the stories from my childhood and the lessons they were providing. Then I started to wonder why, even though we have all read such stories as "The Little Engine That Could", "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" and the "Three Little Pigs", just to name a few, those lessons seemed to all but disappear as aged. We no longer think anything is possible, we forget to respect others and their property and do not apologize when we have wronged them because our own pride and sense of 'rightness" gets in the way of doing what is actually...right.These are decisions we all make at some point in time or another and are sometimes not the best thought out of plans. Makes one think of all the stories and the lesson they convey, doesn't it? And those are but three in a vast number of books written for children, to help mold them into thoughtful, respectful, compassionate, productive adults one day. It seems to me that it would do every person some good to go back and read the books from their childhoods and see if they have indeed, taken those lessons to heart as they have grown in age and experience. How many of us can truly say that we have managed to use those morals and ideals every step along our own paths and lead by example to the generations that will follow? I know that I have stumbled many times along the way. I have not always been respectful or mindful of those around me. I have not always taken responsibility for my actions or words. I have not always made the right decision and I certainly have not thought that I could do or be anything as long as I had that faith in myself. The lessons we are taught while young are suppose to grow in their convictions as we age and put them into practice. Instead, sadly, I find the opposite is true. They are looked at as fanciful and imaginative, not really part of  the real adult world in their simplistic natures. We expect our children to learn these lessons and take them with them through life, but how can they when they see that all their adult role models seem to have forgotten how to put those same lessons into practice? We lead by example and if we are not remembering our own lessons, they cannot be expected to remember the ones we are striving to teach them. I urge you all to think on the lessons taught to you through such "childish" stories and ask yourself: As an adult, have you truly learned and put into practices the lessons and messages those stories were written to offer or have you been too busy being an "adult" that you have forgotten the important role they were meant to take in your lives? I know that I have and it is something I will work hard to rectify.  I  will leave you all with a quote to ponder by none other than our favorite childhood bear, Winnie The Pooh: “I'm not lost for I know where I am. But however, where I am may be lost.”
Namaste

Two Flew Out Of The Cuckoo's Nest

Today marks yet another passage of time for me. My second daughter turned eighteen today, leaving only one left under my parental wing to guide and mold, hopefully into a well adjusted, functioning adult over the next four years of her teenage life. I must admit, I am not sure what to do with myself. I always had three girls and now I have one girl and two women. While my oldest still lives here with her boyfriend and infant son, my newly adult daughter moved out last week, making her the first birdie to leave Mama's nest. It was an incredibly emotional and difficult day for me. All my parental fears came flooding to the surface. I worried that I had not taught her enough, showed her enough or experienced enough with her. In the end, however, I had to accept that I had done the very best that I could do with the circumstances and tools at my disposal. I had to become at peace with that and that was perhaps that hardest thing to do. Or so I thought. Today, I realize that this day is the hardest thing I have to do.Today she is an adult and I have to now let go of the reins of authority and instead pick up the reins of friendship. Today I have to allow her to make her own mistakes and learn her own lessons without me there to try and cushion all the blows that life will deal her as she does these things. Today I have to trust...in her and everything my work over the last 18 years has taught her and trust that it has been enough. This is extremely hard for me. I have had my trust shattered and it has been a very long road back with many speed bumps and pot holes along the way. But for her, I will summon all my courage, all my will and strength and do just that...trust. We can't hold them forever. Eventually they grow up and have to fly on their own. It's a double edged sword. I am so beyond proud of the person she has become, the goals she has set for herself and succeeded at and I am looking forward to seeing what she does with her life and the lessons and morals I have taught her. But on the other hand, there is still that claws deep parental fear, the mama lion who needs to be able to protect her cub. I don't think we ever loose that as parents. We spend almost 2 decades of our lives teaching them, watching over them, guiding them and protecting them. We can't possibly  be expected to just shut that off one day because they have turned the age of adulthood. I made a lifelong commitment the day I brought each of them into this world and although there have been many rough patches I have managed to keep those commitments. I promised to protect them, love them, shelter them and educate them and I have worked hard and tirelessly to make sure those were promises I never broke. I hope in the eyes of my two young adults that I have succeeded and I hope that when my youngest becomes an adult that she will know that everything I have ever done has been to keep the promise that I made to her when she was born. It's really all we can hope as parents.
Namaste, be blessed.