March 18th, 2020

Self Acceptance or Something Like It
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It was a lesson that I have read from Phil Maffetone many times: Having poor nutrition and expecting positive results exercising is like filling your gas tank with the wrong type of fuel and expecting the car to run the same.  Despite having experienced this lesson first hand a few times, I'm still testing it..

I have fallen off of the exercise train and recently been trying to hop back on. I had a great weekend of running and nutrition, and although I recognize that I have a long way to go to where I want to be, I felt positive about where I was. Then, on Monday, I gave myself a day to rest. Instead of letting my body recover, I filled my tank with lots of the wrong type of fuel on Monday night and continued to do so into Tuesday morning. When my feet hit the pavement on Tuesday night for a run, they wouldn't budge. I felt bloated and heavy, I was sluggish, experiencing moderate heartburn, and my heart rate was unusually high. As I begged my body to at least make it a mile, I heard the lesson in my head: don't fill your tank with the wrong fuel and expect good results. 

I continued to walk and was planning what other exercises I could do at home, when suddenly I began wondering why if I knew this lesson already was I still testing it. It lead to a small realization about myself - something to the effect of having a binge personality - and then something happened that was unusual for me: instead of getting down on myself and/or coming up with a plan to fix what I would normally consider a personality flaw, I simply thought "yes, that's me and that's ok; at least I know and can recognize it, and hopefully that will help me moving forward". 

In the moment that followed, I noticed the pavement under my feet and nothing else. My ears had dulled the sounds of the nearby highway and construction going on around me, and my eyes blurred everything outside of the pavement immediately underneath my feet. My eyes welled with tears and my throat became tight. I didn't feel sad or overwhelmingly happy or really anything exceptional; it was a feeling I could not identify, Next I noticed that I felt grounded - physically grounded - to the pavement below; like the scene at the end of Moana when Te Fiti's heart is restored, she's glowing and full of life again, and sinks down into the Earth as she and it become one. 

So what did I experience? I honestly don't know, but it felt beautiful and clear. Was it true self awareness and/or acceptance? Maybe. Was it a new maturity in how I approach bettering myself? Also maybe. Or perhaps it wasn't related to what I was thinking in my head at all.
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I wasn't sure which section of the blog to categorize this moment into, but it felt important to share. 

Feel free to share a story here of a similar moment in your life  :)