starting a new routine for awareness

DAY 2

Today was quite an introspective day, but I started a healthy routine that I hope will put me in a good place once I keep it up.

My morning was basically astanga yoga, breakfast, meditation, gym.
I have been wanting to start a yoga home practice forever –and I finally did! It’s a really demanding form of yoga, but I didn’t go through the whole primary series. I only did a couple of poses after the sun salutations. This, just as the rest of my life, is a process…. I I will do a little more every day and build up my strength and stamina and get better at it at my own rhythm.

I’ve been struggling with self-esteem (lack of self-love) issues for a very long time. It is probably safe to say that my lack of self-esteem is one of the major causes of my IC. So my mornings are basically dedicated to changing that.

1. The yoga calms my mind and gives me more body awareness… (not to mention a toned body). This is key in learning how to listen to my body, and what it is suggesting that I need. I am getting better at reading the signals, but I am sometimes unfortunately still resistant to them. For exemple, I know that if I smoke a cigarette, I suffer from it immediately. Yet, I still do it from time to time. This is quite puzzling, when I spend so much money on the treatment, and when I can be so disciplined with my diet, my supplements and with keeping all other toxins out of my life. I even buy organic food and cleaning products. Perhaps one could say that those are not addictive, but I have a really strong will. It is something else –I know that it has something to do with self-sabotage and I am getting to the heart of it. I am also looking forward to understand the more subtle signs…

2. The time I spend in meditation is when I can create a space for observing my thought patterns, and when I am fully relaxed, I can work on suggesting different ones to my mind. Relaxing didn’t come easily to me – it is/was part of my character to always need to be “doing” something. When someone suggested relaxing, I usually just rolled my eyes and thought : “relaxing is for loosers”. Putting myself under an incredible amount of pressure, to perform, to succeed… is also part of why I have IC. So I am learning to let go. I meditate several times a day, each time differently. Sometimes, I have to meditate spontaneously, when strong emotions come to the surface. When this happens, I immediately drop everything, lie down and make sure I connect with them, and allow myself to feel them. Before, I didn’t allow negative emotions any place in my life. Everything just got repressed. Negative emotions were not something that were part of the “perfect me” that I was striving to be.
Sometimes, I just meditate on my breath, clearing my mind. Sometimes, I allow myself to “be” with my organs, and give them space to tell me what I need to know (this, I have to do more, as they didn’t say much :-)
Other times, after my mind gets really quiet, I can feel that my body falls asleep a little and then I begin to visualise and say my affirmations out loud.
Today, I started a meditation called the “dream-meditation”. You can download it from Deepak Chopra’s website for free. They suggest doing it before going to bed, so that will be the very last thing I do today.

The “dream-meditation” basically consists in replaying in fast-forward your day, and observing yourself doing all you did, without judging yourself. The benefits are more awareness in general, and on the longer term, connecting with that awareness to consciously make the choices that are for your higher good. This, I thought was really interesting and I will be sticking to it. As I just started it today, I will give it some time before I report on my results.

3. Going to the gym always elevates my mood and if I keep it up, feeling good in my body will help me gain more self esteem as well. Two years ago, I started getting pain in my knee when I ran longer than 10 minutes. Another “unlikely” symptom related to IC. This truly devastated me because it was my favourite exercise to blow of steam and because there seemed to be no cause for it (and I went to many specialist to hear once again “that it is all in my head”). Lately, I have seen some improvement… I can run much longer although I don’t dare push my limits too much, in fear of feeling the pain and getting depressed by it. Today I walked quickly, gradually increasing the elevation of the treadmill and did some abs and arm exercises I got from Joey Atlas. Ladies, if you want to get into shape, Joey really has some great tips!!


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I worked some, but not much. The rest of my day was taken over by cooking and freezing soup and spending time online, trying to find Goldenseal root from Eclectic Institute. I finally had to settle for another brand, arg, iherb is still out of stock.

Some improvement on my skin has given me hope that this detox-related acne will not leave ravaging scars on my face. I’m keeping up my routine of lemon juice toner and honey masks several times a day.

That’s all for today…
Talk to you tomorrow,

Hugs,

Perfect Health