Confronting yourself is loving yourself

Welcome! Thank you for checking out my blog. I appreciate you taking the time to read what I have written. Perhaps you will share some of your thoughts inspired by what is here in the comments below or share this blog with a friend.

Last year I reached a point where it was time to work on my health again. I was nervous to confront my weight, I was frustrated by how hard it was to lose weight, and I had a behavior of indulgence when my mood was down.

I went to the doctor as part of my process and there the doctor confronted me with my high blood pressure, high blood sugar, and the conclusion that my problems were mostly caused by being overweight.

I sat confronted by my behaviors, confronted with the natural consequences of my behavior, the cost of which was going to be ongoing health problems unless I changed something now.

But I didn't want to give up my indulgences. I didn't want to change my eating. The self medicating those indulgences provided reduced my stress and made me happy, so instead of confronting my opinions and reactions I could just eat away my discomfort.

Over the next six months I tried to discipline myself without the deep rooted changes I needed. I made modest progress. I lost weight. But my stress level was growing and my indulgences were hard to resist. It was a constant struggle.

Until late last year. I was facing the end of 2013 without much change to my health. Still on the medications. Still 50 lbs overweight. It was clear to me that for me to change I had to do something more serious. I had to confront my behavior of indulgence. I had to start parenting myself in much stronger and deeper ways. I had to get to the root of my discomfort and start to work on it.

I had to confront my expectations of abandonment and root out the beliefs that still affected my self-esteem.

But these are hard things to bring to the conscious mind. They are deeply rooted in my sub-conscious because they have been with me from the youngest of ages. So I made three agreements with myself:

1. I would no longer treat hunger as an emergency.
2. I would determine my feelings when I thought I was feeling hungry
3. I would work daily on my feelings of fear, guilt, or shame.

Throughout December and January I found this struggle daily. I lost 12 lbs in January and I was much more aware of what was going on with my feelings. Then it hit me. I was still discounting myself. I was still believing that something was wrong with me. I was still limiting myself. I was still using feelings of fear, guilt, and shame as sticks to create a need to indulge, only now I was just working on the feelings and working through them instead of indulging.

Up to this point my confrontations with myself had been about my behaviors. But now it was time to dive deeper. To dive down into the underlying beliefs. I knew this was going to be hard. I had tons of information and tools to help from the years of therapy, but I was missing one ingredient --  an unwillingness to accept my feelings of fear, guilt, or shame as conclusions to my situation. I needed an unwillingness to keep thinking of myself in negative terms. I wasn't ready to let go of my self doubt. It was still serving me somehow.

You might wonder, “but how would that serve you?” I have always gotten a lot of happiness by indulging myself. I have worked to change behavior but I still wanted to indulge myself with food, pride, self-pity, and media distraction.

But as my friend Karuna Poole wrote in her blog article Living in Gratitude, I was putting happiness ahead of Joy. I could accomplish feeling happy but I wasn't feeling the joy that awaited me on the other side. Then I did several things --

1. I started listening to myself and my unhappiness.
2. I started focusing on what is right in my life.
3. I started sharing with people what was making a change in my life.

I started realizing how much happier I was when I was focused on positive energy and outcomes.

I have started last week to spend ten days without being negative. Today is day three.

I’ll report back here with more outcomes I learn from this process.

Thanks for coming to my blog. I appreciate all the feedback I’m getting.

#ThisStruggleIsReal

Welcome! Thank you for coming to my blog. I appreciate you taking the time to read what I have written. Perhaps you will share some of your thoughts inspired by what is here in the comments below.

As some of you may remember from a post I made a few weeks ago I'm listening to audiobooks by Tony Robbins.

In the latest chapter of Giant Steps: Small Challenges To Make A Big Difference he challenged me to take the 10-day challenge. His challenge is to always be in a positive, problem-solving attitude.

Today my eldest daughter introduced me to a hashtag she and her friends are using, #ThisStruggleIsReal.

My last post was on #DreamingBig which I've admitted is a challenge for me.

So all of this comes to together in my mind like a nice stew, the flavors mixing together over a slow heat -- the heat of life and living with intention.

What I'm left with is finding how all of these hashtags come together to make a great soup, #StayPositive #ThisStruggleIsReal #DreamBig.

or am I suffering from #TooManyHashTags?

At first they appear as if this soup won’t work. How can they all be true at once? But then I had the one ingredient I seem to be missing too much in my life, #Hope.

With this final ingredient my soup is starting to smell "AWESOME!"

Keeping positive is a challenge to my critical, pragmatic thinking engine. Dreaming Big is a challenge to my critical, pragmatic thinking engine. Both are self-created obstacles. Yet at the same time, #ThisStruggleIsReal for me. When I try to force myself into thinking that my self-created obstacles should be nothing to overcome, when I discount the value this thinking engine has provided me in my life, when I try to force changes to behavior while still holding onto the beliefs of a lifetime, and when I act like what I've done and been in the past has not served me well, my mind starts to break into warring factions. Self-doubt is born from the confusion that is manifest.

This is when hope pulls me from the confusion. Hope to me is the energy of acceptance and patience. Hope brings calmness to my life and gives me a moment to pause. Hope reminds me that all will be for my highest and best. Hope is trust that my future self will find how all of these ingredients do in fact come together in what can only be called Magnifique.

I'm reminded of something I heard Amma once say when she was offering advice to someone, "This of course is easy for me to say as my tongue has no bones."

I took from that statement that even though her direction was clear and obvious she understood that for the person, #ThisStruggleIsReal. If Amma can have patience and understanding for those who struggle from what are obvious, self-induced issues then I can too.

This is my struggle. The struggle to remain positive when looking at how in my life I've trained my brain to question and point out the flaws in things. To keep in problem solving when I feel like falling into despair at the very idea of the changes.

I will continue to #StayPositive, #DreamBig, and at the same time know that #ThisStruggleIsReal.

Thank you for participating in my life through the exchange of ideas. Bless you!

Dreaming Big - The possibilities scare me into inaction.

Welcome! Today I'd like to thank you for reading my blog. It is a great pleasure to write and share with you and I appreciate your taking the time to read it.

This post is inspired by a blog prompt from Dungeonprompts. This week's prompt is DREAMING BIG.

To dream big?!? When I grew up, dreams in our house were very small. Yet we did dream all the same. We dreamed of my parents finding jobs. We dreamed of having a good place to live. We dreamed of having more than just enough to survive. Our home was full of small hopes. Hopes that never died even through the adversity we faced. Each new place and circumstance came with its own dreams.

My story begins there. As I grew up I learned to keep my eyes on the ground in front of me. To keep my hopes and dreams small. To get what I wanted and needed one step at a time. And I am glad to say that I have come a long way one small dream at a time.

But to dream big? The very idea is daunting. To write this blog post gives part of me a sense of dread. To that part of me dreaming big is to suffer big disappointment, and to write about dreaming big makes it that much closer to a reality. Thus it brings me that much closer to inner death. The death of a dream born on the wings of adversity and eventual disappointment.

So my internal pragmatist jumps in and takes over, keeping my vision short-sighted and my hopes well within the level that my inner fears will not be triggered by. Yet it's not a pragmatism born of knowledge about how to go about achieving my goals. It's a pragmatism born of my fear of falling short of my dreams. It's a very limiting pragmatism.

But to dream big? The very idea creates feelings of anticipation. The very thought of dreaming big is enough to get me (F)eeling (E)xcited (A)nd (R)eady. My pulse rate rises and my mind races through the paths of prediction, blazing through the imagined futures of my possibilities.

But I am confused by this inner sense of readiness. It feels the same as real fear. It reminds me of the pain of disappointment. It reminds me that I never got to play the trumpet. It reminds me of Boy Scout badges unearned. It reminds me of the fighting in my family and the break-ups that forced us to move again and again. It reminds me of the anger of others at me for staying in my room and working on my games.

In my mind all possibilities of achieving my dreams become blocked. So I flee back away from those big dreams. I put my head down and continue along the small dreams, the dreams my own limiting thinking believes are possible.

But to dream big!! I never learned to be a quitter, but I have been quitting. I have quit before I even began. I have quit to avoid the anticipation of fear. Anxiety strikes again! 

Until this blog prompt I never focused my mind on the question. If I was to dream big what dreams would I have?

I have no five-year plans. I have no vision of myself beyond the next iteration. All my goals and plans are related to small dreams. Don't get me wrong. My goals have placed me along a path that can take me far. But my vision on that path is placed firmly right on the ground in front of my feet.

To dream big? You know, I don't really know what that is like to do. I can imagine it's like walking with my head faced up to the sky of possibility without knowing what my feet will encounter. But what if I trip? What if I lose? What if I fail?

Those voices are strong, but I know them all too well. The voices that I learned so long ago. Voices that do not now serve my highest and best.

So today I will choose to Dream Big!

Will you dare with me to dream big? Will you share your dreams with me here? Will you post a dream you are afraid to share out loud in the comments below? Will you share with us here that thing that makes you feel excited and ready? Will you?

I will get us started.

I dream to speak to groups and crowds and let my story serve as inspiration to those whom it will. 

I dream of meeting Tony Robbins and spending time sharing ideas with him.

I dream to publish a table-top role-playing game and a novel. 

I dream to blog and vlog so others can remember, laugh, and cry along with me.

I dream to create and learn something new everyday, so that when I look back there is a trail of works in my path of learning.

Thank you and bless you one and all for being present in, and participating in, my life.