Having come to the true realization that relaxing my mind is where I am able to heal my body. Having come to realize that I must maintain this relaxed state consistently right now…. I’ve been taking some steps to try and help me relax.
That being said, relaxed is not the same thing as happy.
It has come blatantly to my attention that not only must I be relaxed but I must be happy. Now I’m a spin doctor – and I don’t mean the band from 90s 🙂 although I suppose it has appropriateness which I’ll spiderweb in a moment….
Staying Happy – its something I’ve spent a good bit of my life “learning how to appear, and how to present” the overall feeling of happy.
When things get crappy, its easier to put on a smile than a frown. Its easier to see the brightside than to continue to seek the bottom of the whole. Its easier to look for the sun, look up at the clouds and the sunshine. These things, these “easy” things – they have a tendency to drag your mood along with it.
This is not to say that I am a “perpetually happy” person – I’m not, I just know the quickest way to get away from the crud is to focus on the positive. There is ALWAYS something good. There is always some way of viewing everything that has a light or a rainbow. Sometimes we just can’t see it.
In the course of this, its also easy for me to forget to acknowledge the fact that there is validity to my grump or sad. Those feelings are valid. They are real, they have meaning, they drive certain rhythms in my body, and failing to acknowledge them is how I got where I am in the first place.
Life isn’t going to be perfect. Its going to be filled with new miserable experiences all the day long – the goal is NOT to avoid all the miserable, the goal is to be able to live and endure the miserable with grace and humility, while surrounded in the comforting faith of the knowledge that miserable will blink away into bliss at any moment. The more you seek and gravitate towards the happy the sooner the bliss comes.
So the spiderweb. The song by Spin Doctors that was … well most famous “Two Princes”,,,, It goes thru this whole diatribe about two princes – two perspectives on reality and the accoutrements that go with them…. all to boil down to “be happy” …. sorta does seem appropriate.
All of this rambling to say …. it occured to me recently that I don’t have a good mechanism to tell – in Truth. When my emotional state is around a 2 or 3….. Recently I had an encounter that suddenly boosted me unexpectedly to a 6 … at which point it was super super easy to identify “Hey I was feeling real bad” …. The not overly unexpected thing was I had been feeling really really physically bad… but the emotional state going to a six…. it sort of bolstered my immunity in an instant, and I suddenly felt like this dark heavy weight of “ill” was lifted. I was physically feeling better because emotionally I was feeling better.
I’ve had a couple of times lately, when my old “stand by” emotional go to of emotional eating …. wasn’t going to be satisfying enough to be what I wanted. IE – when you can’t think of something that sounds so good to eat, that you know it will give you a brief moment of “aha” emotionally – well that’s emotional eating, but when you can not come up with anything to give you that boost…. that tool … that “emotional eating shovel” …. it just isn’t working. Time to explore the shed! Time to find some other tools – Heck maybe they were be of better service to me…. The old one certainly has had its ups and downs over the years.
Going back to the beginning of this thought – I need someway to help me “yellow light” that emotional state – rather than trying to “as usual” move it…. I need something to help me say “Hey there is a something in the road…. maybe lets not just drive past it at top speed”….
My body is too smart for my mind – it recognizes “Aha your a 2 time to focus on playing vs healing”…. My body is a spoiled 2 year old – time to pay the piper and get it back into a healthy learning path.