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When we think about health……..it is my conviction that doing something different, something outside the normality of your life, routines or schedules is really good for you. Susan and I recently married after having known each other for three years. I have been really keen to build new memories for us that become pages in a new book in our lives, as a consequence we have been to new places together, inside myself I have so so fel;t the health benefits to my mind and soul doing this. So as I sit here at Austin airport waiting for a flight….that’s my healthy thought. It’s good to do new things, to go new places, see new things and feel different winds on your skin.
Yes we ate lunch at the Saltlick in Driftwood, ( highly recommended, HIGHLY) and yes we had really expensive martinees on 6th Street on hump day while music played everywhere and we seemed like the oldest people out in the hot evening………..and it was all FUN……..and good for the soul, for our souls and marriage. Sometimes there are things you can not afford to not do.
Go on, step out, do something different…on your own or with someone you love.
Go to Austin……….find the Saltlick, watch the sun go down at The Oasis on Travis Lake………….go on.
Tis a healthy thang!
Here’s some photos from the story
In New Zealand it is winter. We are approaching the longest day and to be honest, while it’s dull and grey some days, it’s nothing compared to some countries in winter. New Zealand winters are tame as. Thinking in terms of emotional health, I really struggle in winter. I need the sun, and lots of blue sky. While I enjoy the rain and being inside in the warm, soup and a warm bed, winter really challenges my spirit. I am not the kind of guy who has to be doing stuff, so the still aspect of winter isn’t what effects my emotional health, its something with the light and the mood of the earth in winter.
I have moments hanging out the washing where I feel the sleepiness of the earth, that stillness in the trees as they sleep, the grass slowing down, in fact everything is slowing down, thoughts and feelings, the whole of creation is wanting to sleep.
In these times when we are prone to perhaps feeling down about life due the seasons, it is good to do some activities or seek things that will refill our emotional tanks. Eating well and maybe a vitamin D top up can really help. We also need to extend some kind of grace to ourselves in this time. It will pass, it is a natural rhythm. We can harness that and enjoy the downtime (excuse the pun) as our bodies rest for a busy summer. Tis a great time to read and have a creative inside project for those rainy and home-bound days.
I have found myself over the years so believing that every weekend should be a three day weekend. Believing because after a three day weekend, apart from thinking Tuesday is Monday and turning up for things on the wrong days for a while until the penny drops, believing because it feels so good. How did people get on in the old days when you never stopped work?
That’s one of the things I love about God. The command to rest on one day of the week was sourced in common sense and a need to replenish the batteries, and for our own benefit as human beings. It was not some law by a megalomaniac creator wanting our homage………….(maybe tho, in His wisdom He knew we would get so busy we would squeeze out time with Him).
There was a health principle in the Sabbath concept, as there is with most things people see as rules from God.
Our need for rest and replenishing the spirit, body, soul and mind with time reflection on our lives and with those we love.
God has so been blamed for bein g a bossy britches when really it has all been about our welfare and whats good for us.
That’s a health principle.
Time to stop.
Three day weekends just seem to have that blend of time for everything.
Saturday on the jobs around home you need to do.
Sunday perhaps doing stuff you need to do with people and…….
Monday just for the luxurious things you would like to do……………
There is nothing like the feeling of Friday night or waking on the Saturday morning knowing you have an extra day………..and then there is the deliciousness of Sunday night knowing that tho it’s raining and the rubbish trucks still gonna come by, you don’t have to go to work.
Now I happen to enjoy my job as a teacher and 9/10 days i am okay with trotting off to the treadmill of necessity, BUT the luxury of that extra day is wonderful………..a day to lavish on sitting and reading, or doing what you want because you have had two other days to work on list reduction.
Tis on days like that I feel that the wonderfulness of being able to write down thoughts, or paint or go take photos, listen to music or just still with coffee. Time to do things to help make sense of what’s happening in my life, and put it to paper, song, paint or knitting…….. and enjoy being a human and alive with all its complexity. I like that time.
That’s the health principle?
So my thanks to the Queen of England, and the Commonwealth and all that! Eh wot.
Happy Birthday to You.
Getting through to the end of a hard week I could think of a number of things I wanted to do as soon as the work week was over and I stepped thru my front door.
The first was to spend some time with my best friend if she was still up. I knew she had to get up and work early.
If that wasn’t able to happen plan two moved to top place.
COFFEE made in my own coffee machine.
I had slept in this morning and had wanted to have one ever since……
The other option was to head down town and take some photos, to do something for my creative soul.
So what happened?
I managed to spend some time with Susan before she hit the hay.
I made the coffee. And drank it.
I got ready to head down town to get some photos, and fired up my MP3 player to listen to some lectures I had downloaded, and that were so unlocking doors for me.
OFF I went…(after washing some dishes and enjoying the sun in my back window while I worked)
Here is something from that unwind time.
Why post something on a health blog about this.
Doing something we enjoy and that gets us out of our weekly after work space, is good for you.
Healthy lifestyle is about what we do as much as it is about what goes into us, AND it’s not just about exercise in the normal sense.
It’s about how we exercise freedom with our choices, and choices that we make based on our knowledge of our needs and what will help us me emotionally healthy.
I am glad I went out.
Now I am off to the gym!
I have been thinking and wrote this……….health in a wider concept perhaps.
Writing is such a part of my emotional health…..
Beauty Therapy in a nutshell
(a muse)
I find myself hungry for beauty.
Not the kind you might think.
Beauty has many faces & unfortunately
the deepest & rarest beauty is born through pain.
Birth is never a painless process.
Ask any woman or polished gemstone.
Beauty sneaks up on me & jumps out from behind doors.
She smiles at you in strange places.
I know this.
The shell I live in does not totally define me,
but it can limit me.
There’s more than meets the eye to the man in the mirror.
I can see who I really am,
who I really can be, who I have rarely been.
I want to live longer, taste life even more deeply,
to love & laugh at myself & the world,
to finally give up being what I am not.
Beauty is not only skin deep.
The peanuts will have to go!
© BlindPoet
June 2010
I have been thinking lately about the changes in my life, and the nature of love.
I find myself so grateful for this moment that I live in now and how all the deepest changes and the creation of some kind of beauty in my life have been facilitated by relationship, and the journey of loving.
Relationships are never totally easy, they weren’t intended to be, and if they are you are supremely blessed or perhaps you are not really relating at all. It can be like a dance where you never touch or a safe non contact sport.
I don’t mean physical touch and contact here, I mean the soul kind!
The deepest and most wonderful intimacy comes from being truly known and knowing, being understood and understanding, being accepted and accepting. Healthy relationships are works of art, and I so value mine.
Relationships of any kind are opportunities to learn a lot about ourselves.
Unfortunately sometimes we twist that ourselves opportunity into opportunities to tell others about what we have learned about them. It’s like they are moons and us the planet they orbit, we only see them in the context of relationship to ourselves.
There are reasons people develop that kind of relationship style, and they highlight the neglect of one of our most important relationships. The one we have with ourselves.
Those reasons probably all boil down to unresolved hurts and what we have done or not done with them. Often the truth is that we have deeply buried our hurts like dumping toxic waste down a deep mineshaft to be out of harms way. We develop malignant growths around them or we camouflage them with behaviours, decoys, distractions, masks, attitudes and addictions. We protect, insulate and anesthetize ourselves from the toxic messages arising from our hurts. These messages continually loop inside our heads and they tell us that in some way we are deficient, unlovable , useless, dumb, talentless or unworthy. And we believe it! All untreated sickness eventually takes its toll on our health.
Instead of being open we become closed and understandably self protective. We point the finger at others, playing the blame game. Looking at ourselves in relationship is just too painful when we have buried or bandaged unhealed wounds. Why would we look at ourselves critically and risk exposure to the messages inside our heads, telling us that we are no good, dumb, unworthy, stupid and will never change.
In pointing the finger at others, we could be repeating what we grew up with, copying our role models, or the environment that shaped us the most. It may mean we have not come to a critical point of reflection and change. Defining moments have come and gone in our lives and we remain unchanged. We do not experience re invention, new growth or re birth. Life goes on down the same old same old path.
Blaming others is an effort to escape honest and risky critical self examination. When we blame others in aggressive, subtle or passive ways our love is far from healthy. Our behaviours, attitudes and actions don’t lead to the happiness and intimacy with friends and loved ones that we long for. We are alone with ourselves, and we don’t even like ourselves. This is the worst loneliness there is.
Why are we not able to make changes?
One reason is that change takes work, and its scary work.
Another is that we need some kind of light to illuminate areas that must change , but often our eyes are closed, or we are not looking at all or in the right places.
Change involves surgery, a scalpel to cut out what is toxic or some yuk tasting medicine to treat it and put it into remission.
Change can hurt, so most of us avoid the need to grow unless we reach that point of wanting to despite the pain .
That point may be arrived at through a faith calling us on to selflessness or better loving. It may be someone lovingly ( or out of frustration and anger ) opening our eyes to things that need attention. Or as is often the case, change is facilitated by some very painful personal experience that nearly destroys us.
My defining moment was the painful kind, involving the shattering of a family and a marriage of 23 years.
When the time comes, some people grow up, some stay the same. I wanted to grow up. That was not one BIG decision, it continues to be a series of little decisions, lots of them, some easy, some hard and often arriving out of left field when you least expect it.
Suddenly you realise, ‘Houston we have a problem’.
No not a problem, an opportunity to grow!
I discovered this website that has helped me to keep growing up, helped me to make more sense of myself and understand some of the ‘why do I always……..’ questions that have followed me for 53 years.
It’s all about how we love and may help you understand yourself and your closest relationships and those of your everyday world more.
Check it out, it is very very cool.
http://www.howwelove.com/
Recently, I married my best friend. I am so excited to be in a relationship where there is courage, honesty and commitment to grow and change where we need to, AND have heaps of fun loving and loving healthily along the way.
I am so blessed by Susan.:-)
I have been reflecting recently on the love and faithfulness of my mother, before Mothers day arrived even!. I have come to the conclusion that my mother who she has been and continues to me is a significant part of my overall wholeness and emotional healthiness. And that is not because of some perfect woman. No my mum was like us all as parents, we learn as we go, and we have our blindspots.. However I have realised she got the something very right and these things have only just come to me with this clarity as I have read several notes Mum has written and what she wrote on a card for our wedding recently.
Why is it that we don’t realise everything in one huge blob of understanding instead of the urrrrr duhhhhh! moments that punctuate your life as you come to simple significant understandings. The answer is of course obvious.
- We wouldn’t be able to cope with one huge dose of knowing and understanding, ourselves, others and the world around us.
- We may not have grown in our lives to a stage of being able to understand, want to understand or be worthy of understanding.
My mother has been wonderful all her life at letting her kids know how she feels about them, how she loves them and how God loves them, that we are all loved equally, that there are no favourites. My mother lives without a mask. And that is a rich heritage. She is not concerned about appearances, status or approval. She has lived a life that she knows is under the observance of God.
I realise in this moment of writing how valuable that really is. I hate pretense, and realise that I have lived in an open and honest home growing up, with all its faults and failings, that I have been loved by an open and honest mother. Perhaps that is why I place such value on being genuine and that the good parts of my self esteem I have to thank my mother for. I am 53 and have come to this understanding in the last week. I have so much to thank my mother for. I told her that on the phone the other day. I am lots of good things because of her. Thanks Mum. I love you heaps. I will be a better husband because of you and what you have taught me about love.
Yes it is one of those days when for one reason or another you are thoroughly tired of yourself.
One of those days when you have lost sight of your beauty and you just want to go away somewhere and be like a rock, still and deep and nothing to feel, just be like a rock.
It’s a day when I know that I need to write something that will capture the chaos in my mind, the agony of being me, the me-ish things that seem to haunt my existence from days I can’t remember, long time gone and give me grief now.
A day when I need to write and be released from myself in my writing.
Its not all bad, don’t we all have days like this that have built up over our whole lives, or weeks or the last few days and you get to this point, or emotional state.
This day is the point.
My point.
Every day after this can be different because of what I feel, learn and let myself experience from this day.
I have a choice with what I do about it.
I write to process, and record it somehow.
Sometimes like today, I am willing to feel this kind of stuff, the stuff of being a human being, and know that it passes, that it isn’t the sum total of my whole existence or the whole truth of it.
Other days I don’t let myself feel it, or acknowledge I feel it. I push it somewhere else, I block it very effectively, or put on some disguise or cover up. But more often than not because of my personality I can’t hide the bad days very well.
Some people are very good at it……….they learn it from childhood, when their feelings are denied or when they are hurt in some way physically or emotionally, or when they are invalidated by significant people in their lives. They get the message they don’t matter, so they make themselves invisible. They spend their whole lives doing the invisible thing to avoid the pain. They don’t think they matter. Feeling ultimately causes pain because their feelings and emotions were so hurt or ignored, so they try not feel anything. They do not need anything, they become very self sufficient. They don’t handle people who do need anything from them very well.
People with this kind of background develop ways of being human and having some kind of feeling in addictions or relationships based on physical sensations that briefly create emotional intensity. At least they feel human somehow, even if brief.
We do things for comfort.
I can be like that a bit, but somehow I have come to know what I do, what I need today. And risk sharing that.
We all have pasts, with wounds that haunt us, and the future is about healing those things that surface.
They often surface in our relationships with those closest to us. I have recently discovered this website. I think its awesome.
www.howwelove.com
The fact that I need a hug, or to be held tells me that my soul was scraped raw somewhere in my past, that I am wonderfully human.
My poets heart is sensitive to my inner working and writing is good for me.
See I feel better.
P.S I actually needed the hug several days ago and started to write then. Writing is a way of hugging myself. After all, some of my needs I can meet myself………….and a lot of good honest writing has come out of that act.
The other night I went to a sushi cooking class at The Auckland Fish Market. It was a wonderful birthday present from a good friend.
I have always enjoyed sushi and bought into the ‘It’s gotta be good for you’ vibe.
Some lunchtimes I had dashed down to the local sushi bar and felt all virtuous for having chosen that over something fatty and cholestrol laden!
Is sushi good for you though?
The simple answer is, yes it is!
But like anything there is a proviso.
Moderation is a key (just like it always is) and the quality of the ingredients also play a role. Xcuse the pun.
Traditional sushi is low in calories, high in fibre, vitamins and the good old Omega 3 acids.
Sushi is a fun way to eat.
This week as I have made my own at home for taking to work I have found myself well satisfied for my lunch with 4 pieces. I have not gotten hungry in the between times.
It’s not hard to make really, you can improvise your heart out. Fresh lean ingredients………fish, chicken, squid. YUM.
I have lost weight, and saved money this week.
That’s gotta be good for you mentally and physically!
The important thing to remember when eating sushi is this, like all foods, when eaten in excess it is not very healthy. The fresh, nutritious ingredients are not calorie free, although they are low in calories.
Be weary of Westernised sushi…..not all sushi is equal or all sushi good for you just because it’s wrapped in seaweed!
Have fun. Go to a class.
Auckland Fish Market Seafood School
I don’t know about you but sometimes smaller works better.
Most workout/fitness programmes end up being at least 1 hour long. I have learned that when you exercise for 35 minutes plus you are into the zone that eats into fat reserves, and the available carbohydrates have been burned. Ultimately the 1 hour plus 3 times a week works for building muscle and fitness when combined with exercise that gets your heart going.
BUT………sometimes when you have worked all day, and getting to the 1 hour can just seem too much.
I am lucky and just live up the road from the gym. Lately I have been enjoying the ability to dash down to the gym and do a quick 30 – 40 minute workout just before it closes at 9pm. And I might do that 4-5 or more times a week.
I am figuring that this is better than nothing, and in the weekends I can do the full programme.
This works for me. And seems to be having the results I want. I had been working on a split workout that serates different muscle groups, so I just rotate it all.
ALSO I have an aversion to doing cardio in the gym. I would much rather be out in the air, on the road and pushing against the earth than a treadmill.
The good thing with this approach tpo working out is that in my head it doesn’t become so big that I don’t do it.
Of course it;s all about my ability to do this living so close, and making your exercise programme work for your unique situation is what its all about. If I had a training buddy then maybe the one hour thing wouldn’t be such a hurdle for me. But I work alone and small is good.
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