Embracing My Health

I’ve been mentally composing this post for a good couple of weeks. I’m so glad to be sitting down to do it now.

The work I’m starting, as I type these words, is a renewal of commitment to embracing my health (personally) and Embracing My Health (the website). Since I started the Embracing My Health website, I have lost 40 lbs and am eating healthier than I ever have. Yay me! It’s a start and a good one. I want to acknowledge that. It was a start and not continuing journey through to the finish though. That’s why this is the time to reconnect to the journey of my love and desire for personal health.

Those of you who know me, you know I’m a health and fitness research junkie. I love to read articles, research journals, magazines, and books. I watch documentaries and religiously follow blogs of experts in the field. I love to do research and help my friends and family as they seek their own optimal personal health and well-being. This is all awesome stuff. I love it.

In fact, just last night, I watched Simply Raw: Reversing Diabetes in 30 Days. What an inspiring, honest and human, documentary. I cried when the subjects went off insulin and achieved healthy, undreamed of milestones in improving their health. I was struck by how tightly their health was tied to their sense of self, their spirituality, their dreams and hopes for their tomorrows.

Getting to watch these people transform not just their physical health but to also launch a new path of spiritual vitality was beautiful and moving. Getting glimpses into what they were going to create moving forward was exciting and inspiring. Seeing it – being around it – it lights me up! I started getting geeked out thinking about the people in my life being healthy, vibrant, and engaging their world from a platform of energy, fitness, and optimal health. My brain began to spin. How can I help people do this? How can I help them into and through their next steps? What can I do to help my friends and family understand the importance of personal fitness, the necessity of eating the yummiest and healthiest foods, and experience the joy and satisfaction these things bring to our spirit. I went to bed with these things spiraling through my mind, my thoughts and dreams reaching out and asking for an answer. As I was about to fall asleep, I thought, maybe I don’t need a perfect, magic-bullet answer. What I need is a path. My prayer, as I drifted, was for a path to put my feet onto.

Ask and you shall receive! It’s no accident that this morning, one of the first things I read was this quote by Ramana Maharshi:

Correcting oneself is correcting the whole world. The Sun is simply bright. It does not correct anyone. Because it shines, the whole world is full of light. Transforming yourself is a means of giving light to the whole world.

Um.. yeah. Yeah. YEAH! That’d be that path I asked for! Thank you!!

As I read and reread those words, I realized something. See, I turned 40 this past March and while milestone birthdays like this one are prime and often good reasons to recommit to what I believe in – they’ve never held adequate motivation for me. As I read those words, I realized what does hold motivation for me. It’s my family and friends. It’s my community. It’s you!

With the answer I was given today, and with this post – my Embracing My Health journey begins again – or continues (depending on how you look at it).

Transforming my health and my life for myself – it seems like it should be more than enough for me to follow through on the desire I have to embrace my health. It’s not. What IS motivation to me is this; that through my journey, my struggles and achieved milestones and my stories – that these beautiful, amazing people who are in my life – that they see paths to health, fitness and spiritual growth. And if they want it, it is possible for them because it was and is for me.