Putting In The Reps

One of  the most difficult things that we can do toward our healing is to choose something that is our anchor, and then follow through on the activity every single day. Mine is a Chi Gong Meditation. This was taught to me when I was in a deep, cavernous pit of emotional and mental pain. It was difficult for me to do anything at all at the time, let alone memorize a whole Chi Gong sequence. To my teachers, it wasn’t considered much of anything, just a simple daily practice, but to me it was huge. I had to take the video and keep stopping it as I took notes on everything. I wrote it out piece by piece and did this over and over until I memorized it. Then I began my practice every day. I did it every single day (minus maybe 15 days or so over the course of 4 years). I give this so much credit in my healing journey. Part of it was the fact that it got me moving my energy every day, and the other part, which I find even more important, was the discipline. 

I had taught myself discipline many years before this as well, with another spiritual practice, I had the same every day dedication to this as well.

However,  even though I had discipline in this one area, it didn’t mean that it was prevalent in the rest of my life. But this time around with this Chi Gong Meditation, I began to see the correlation between my discipline, and how it would benefit other areas of my life. I began to employ it to the more mundane tasks, like cleaning, organizing, being on a schedule, preparing my own food, taking time to eat, going for walks outside every day, as well as every aspect of my business. These may seem like basic things that everyone does, but to a trauma survivor these are things that often go undone. 

When I began to look at the world through the lens of discipline, I was able to get so much accomplished. I felt so proud, able and ready for anything life had for me. As things often do in healing, little by little, this fell to the wayside. My Meditation continued, but the rest of it did not.

When we are pushing ourselves forward to change our lives, it’s shocking if a person continues to remain perfectly on the path without ever reverting, even briefly.

Reverting is part of the process of getting there. (I am not talking about alcohol or drugs, that is a different topic) Hopefully we revert for very small periods of time, but even if they last months or years, it’s OK. Because now we know what we need to do. It’s not like it was before when we didn’t know and were in perfect misery all the time. It’s not like that now. When we revert, we cannot revert that much. Because our inner knowing and knowledge that we have done what we previously believed was impossible, we had actually lived it at one point in time, that makes it much easier to pick up where we left off. So when we fall off, and our old habits take over, it’s OK. The only thing we need to know at this point is to stop beating ourselves up for reverting in the first place. We can just start where we are. That’s all we can really do anyway. We can’t start from some spot where we see someone else is. We must always start from where we are. Understand that there’s no way back to that person we used to be. That person is no longer in existence. That person is just a memory. 

Start from where you are. Be the most amazing version of yourself that you can imagine. Then, when you have reached that goal, be an even more amazing person, and so on, don’t stop, ever.

~Janice M. Burke

Image by Klub Boks