How Often Do You Push Through

How often do you push through?

No one is looking, so if you can be honest, how often are you just pushing?

The women I talk to every day tell me that this is how they live, some sort of blending of obligation, should, have to and must, and they tell me it is killing them.

I ponder a lot how we get here, having lived in push through much of my own life, through grad school and two degrees simultaneously, having my oldest child in my last year of med school and my masters program in oriental medicine.  Building a practice, having more kids, grocery shopping, cooking, being a wife, friend, daughter, sister.

Then, taking the little bit left and turning it on myself by way of “I am not enough” “If I only looked better” “If I could just be thinner, I could feel better about all this stuff” on and on, turning what I had left into a toxic stew of diminishing return.

I would take my tired self and push to exercise because I was supposed to, or because I was dissatisfied with me, or because I wanted to look better in jeans.  I would go on restrictive diets for health or weight loss, I would even meditate from this have to sort of dogma.

It didn’t work.

All I succeeded in doing was exhausting myself further, and any gains I got were quickly erased by the toll being out of balance, exhausted and frustrated was taking on me.  Funny thing is, it wasn’t just my body, I was anxious more, angry, snappish at my kids, my husband, I was internally so judgy, it was a bit frightening.  Of course I didn’t let others see this, I kept my public face all nice, calm, happy, joyful, inspired and more.  But, truth be told, I was suffering and it was getting worse.

Each time I would hit one of these low spots, I would push again, and figure I just needed to take this more seriously, I needed to stop being lazy, it was in my head, I had gone soft.

Until the day I realized that my inner conversation was becoming my life, and I didn’t want to become the bitter, over-analyzing, tired, judgy, cranky, “get away from me” woman that was inhabiting my body.  

I realized I had been using the same philosophical mindset of push to try to get out of push, and well, of course it wasn’t working, it couldn’t.  I was treating my body like a failed, flawed stupid hunk of meat, and it showed.

I began to learn it wasn’t the perfect diet, or the perfect amount of steps, or the perfect supplement routine, it was how those things are done, and if they were done as a partnership with my body or as something applied to my body.

It is a huge distinction, one that sets the tone for everything that follows, one that dictates what can happen, will happen and what we experience.

When I made this shift, I was able to turn to ease, peace, grace, joy and feel it not only in my body, but that critic in my mind was able to take a back seat.  From this space, I was able to finally cultivate energy that could sustain me, energy that I knew how to replenish and cultivate in an ongoing way, and because of that, I was able to release pain, become more productive in a relaxed way, was able to laugh again, be inspired, playful, and present.

The key: it isn’t what you do, but how you do it.

Partnership is the secret sauce in healing all things.

The idea is, if we eat, move, breathe, think, feel and live from collusive partnership with our body, and commit to that relationship while giving it exactly what it has been asking for instead of assuming what it’s symptoms mean, we then let our body trust us, and we cultivate a relationship where we trust it.  From this space, we can do anything!

When I work with women, yes, we work on food, but, we do so from this what would make my body have the greatest ease today.  Not what is the best fuel, or function, or most anti-inflammatory, or most on point clean food I can eat...but what fosters this partnership the best?  AND we do so from a place of pleasure, because if we negate pleasure in the process, we might as well give up on the whole endeavor.

As we do this, we shift our conversation with our body, we learn to be comfortable feeling what it feels, even the sticky stuff, and we become in love with the adventure of living in our body.

From this place, we can have energy, hormonal balance, sleep, sex drive, digestion and more becuase it is happening from within us rather than outside of us.

Imagine trusting your body

Imagine feeling sure of your relationship within you

Imagine feeling peaceful when you think of your health, your body, your life

What would that do to your next 10 years?