Crossing the Bridges: Health
Like many things in life, health comes in three forms. Physical, mental, and spiritual.
It is extremely important that there be balance between these forms. We frequently do not recognize this, and the price we pay is amazingly high. As I am striving to create the life I most want, I need to take more time in addressing these.
Let’s start with the one I have down, I believe, the best. Spiritual. My spiritual health is good. I know who I am, I know where my faith and beliefs lie. If you read Pathwalking, you have gotten a pretty good look at my philosophy, and my belief that consciousness creates reality. Certainly there is room for improvement…there is always room for improvement. But this is the place I feel most confident, and this is where I think I have the best handle on myself.
This brings me to physical. If you know me, you know that I am overweight. You don’t develop a gut like mine without years of work. I fluctuate between pretty heavy and obese, and I have been struggling with this pretty much my whole life. Beyond this my cholesterol has been historically high, and heart disease runs in my family.
I am active. I walk a lot, I fence at least once if not more times a week. I work to get to the gym, where I do cardio and weight lifting. I am pretty damned strong, flexible, dexterous, and my endurance is pretty high.
But I still eat larger portions than I should, and I still consume too many things that are not tremendously good for me. Too much bread, salt, sugar and more. I am constantly working to improve upon this part.
One of the issues here is my mental health. My mental health is the matter that causes many of my issues both physically and spiritually.
I have suffered from clinical depression for much of my life. I have been through therapy, I have taken Prozac, I have worked hard to cope with this and to not let it dictate my life. Further, I have some anger issues. No one ever gets hurt, but in my youth I punched a few walls, and I used to get pretty ragey on the road, which has begun to creep back into my being over the past couple years.
I am well aware that these are linked together.
This is, of course, a vicious circle. I get depressed, I eat, I get annoyed with my body, I get depressed, I eat, I get annoyed with my body, I eat, I get depressed…ad nausea. To combat this, I have worked on my spiritual health. I have developed my philosophy to help me better understand the notion that consciousness creates reality, and from there to work on manifesting more things I want for my life.
For some time I was able to avoid depression. I was in a much better space overall, and I lost weight and I got healthy spiritually and mentally. I saw a great many positive changes, and I even began to create Pathwalking from this.
Lately my mental health has been less stellar. Why? Two primary reasons. One – the season. It is winter. Grey skies and cold generally make me feel down. It is what it is, and so long as I live in the Northeastern US, this is how it will be.
Two – current events. The political situation alternates between making me sad, making me angry, and scaring me. The Executive branch is under the control of a narcissistic, mentally unstable billionaire, a white-supremacist hell-bent on destroying the social order and a bunch of sycophantic flunkies. The Legislative branch is under the control of angry, self-righteous, self-interested idiots hell-bent on lining their pockets, reassuring those who contribute to their campaigns, and obliterating the middle class. The Judicial branch is in danger of being hamstrung by the other two branches…so overall the republic is looking very, very sickly.
Because I cannot completely stick my head in the sand and ignore what is going on out there, this impacts my mental health…and like a domino, that in turn effects my physical and spiritual health.
What do I do to combat all of this? This. I write it all out. I write Positivity to explore something good and positive in the face of so much negativity, and work on my mental health. I write Pathwalking to work on my spiritual health, and check in with my conscious reality creation. Crossing the Bridges checks in with the results of the processes, and my work to land in the place I most want to be.
I need to put more effort into my physical health. I need to move past planning this and do better with taking action on that end. Better physical health leads to better mental health and spiritual health. It all ties together rather nicely.
I know this is a bit rambling, but I need to work through the process. As always – Thank You for crossing the bridges between my worlds with me.
GOAL LOG – Week 5:
Diet: Continuing with being mindful about what and how much I am eating, though a couple days went untracked.
Exercise: Two days of fencing, no gym.
Writing: The three blogs got written, plus an extra blog post.
Meditation: I did not meditate. See mental health above.
Gratitude: I wrote five things I was grateful for on two days this week.
Clearly, I need to get back on track here.
This is the nineteenth entry of my personal journey, the Crossing the Bridges series. My collectively published writing can be found here.
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