Every time I am afraid
I feel confused and helpless
I ask myself
What should I do?
My mom told me what I should do
My dad told me what I should do
But maybe I outgrow their voices in my head
Maybe they become possibilities
Of what I could do
Maybe what I needed from my mom and dad
When I was confused
Is the space to self soothe
A safe place to feel the confusion
So the path would become clear to me
I completed my knee challenge in terms of going hiking in Zion national park. I felt like I succeeded in a big way but still have a long way to go in terms of getting where I need to go.
What is next for me? I know in the long term, I want to be very physically active. I want to be able to practice martial arts, do a little parkour and gymnastics. I know it will take a lot of effort and time to get there and it feels quite overwhelming for me.
I’m going to set a few large goals and then look at some of the very short term goals getting there.
2 year goal – the ability to practice martial arts, parkour gymnastics and skiing. My goal isn’t to go too hard in any of these areas, just to be able to do them safely.
1 year goal – to get back to preinjury levels
1 month goal – be able to sleep, walk, stand and light exercise with zero discomfort. I will call this goal little freedom.
I don’t really know what the next step in my process is. It feels too soon to set a schedule yet.
I just want to slowly rest and explore for now.
My feelings are that challenge videos make for really good productivity but I need to slow down sometimes and feel the feelings.
Maybe I will write a poem:
Creaky Knees
When I bend my knee
It feels like I’m grinding
Hinges made of old stone
Like the kind in movies
That open secret magical passages
And grate against themselves
I say that I want to be able to do martial arts again
But the truth is
I don’t know what I want
I am afraid to dream again
Of a world where I can be active
I’m so used to being scared
Of clutching my knee close
So as not to hurt it
I feel like I’m too old to have these dreams anymore
Of flying
Like I did when I wanted to learn parkour
Everything scares me
I feel that
I need to understand this part of myself first
Listen to what it wants to say
“Everything is a danger”
It tells me
The protector of my knee
Of my body
It feels safe to not move at all
Ok, I decided something weird that I’m not sure is going to work yet.
I decided that I’m going to keep this challenge going on forever and we will have different objective driving it constantly. It will be a sort of daily journal where I get to focus on Profit in Peace, finding my ikigai, tapping into my coaching energy, feeling into my body, working on my challenges, and discovering that the world is a magical place.
It will continue to be labeled like the other challenges, but it is different in the sense that it doesn’t have a specific end date. The end date might be just when this mentality, thinking of this as a Profit in Peace no longer serves me. Which might be never.
You know in a way this should be called Blog Post. Because it is the most blog post of blog posts. The sole purpose of these posts is literally to work on my life through my blog. But “Blog Post” just doesn’t evoke what I need for it to evoke, so we ain’t doing it.
So what is the focus for today?
Today we have a similar bent to yesterday but a little more focused on gaming. In no particular order, I want to:
Yesterday, I went for a short run.
Here is a poem about it:
Tingling in My Back
That’s the feeling when I push myself
My knees not ready for the impact
I want to massage my stomach and back
I’m aware of others watching
I wonder if Alice would be embarrassed of me
I want people to like me
Especially the girls
I think about how I learned to control what other’s thought of me
And that’s when everything went to a place
Shaky and scary
I remind myself
What others feel
Is out of my control
I’m proud of my innovative knee exercises
They make my prickly knees
Feel warm and supple again
I just came back from my most recent run. Today I focused on processing the anxiety being surrounded by everyone’s opinions of me. I realized a couple of things.
Dr Bea Mackay
She told me an exercise
The same one
Every session
Breath in breath out
I realized
It isn’t about other people
They never mattered
Neither did their opinions
I’m them
As a trigger for my pain
The sharp inhale
To take the pain
The release of the exhale
Filling me with warmth
From head to toe
The point was never to win their approval
It was to feel my pain
It is so interesting how Dr. Bea Mackay’s exercises are so similar to Wim Hoff’s. And Wim Hoff’s exercises are about enduring and thriving in pain too, just his are about cold and her’s are about emotions. No wonder so many people talk about the Wim Hoff method bringing them relief from chronic anxiety.
I kind of dropped the ball on these because I don’t know if I feel like challenging my core wounds, but I think I need to keep going for the 21 days at least. It is interesting because you are supposed to focus on one core wound. I don’t know which one I would focus on, but maybe if I just keep going there is one that I will want to focus on.
I was talking to a friend about how it is hard to work on yourself sometimes. What I told her is that it is sometimes scary to think about who you might change into, but I think there is another reason. Sometimes it is hard to work on yourself because in order to work on yourself you first need to look at yourself in the mirror and face who you are, and that isn’t easy to do.
I think a big core wound or belief is that there is something wrong with me, that no one will actually like me if they know who I really am, that I’m weak and creepy and unattractive.
Walking up to her out of the blue
On the streets of new york city
On the college campus
They both told me
I made their day
The next girl
Will think you are the one
She told me
And when I asked the girl
Lost in her own world
In a song she just found
Whether or not she thought I was attractive
She said yes
I felt she wanted to say more
But was too shy
I am completely confused and upset by how this girl that I play Valorant went from having so much fun to always getting annoyed and mad.
Facts that I know:
She used to be my favorite person to play with for several months:
However, somehow, after months of having lots and lots of fun, everything has taken a dramatic turn:
Some factors that I think may contribute:
Altogether I can’t really make sense of this phenomenon and it does bother me a great deal. I suppose on some level I must accept that something about Valorant and playing with me triggers her in some deep way and that I shouldn’t let that stop me from having fun. It does make me sad that things have changed so dramatically and I lost my favorite Valorant buddy.
Valorant has become significantly less fun for me now. It almost feels like work, instead of a game that I loved. There was a period of time when I was playing with her that I truly let go of the need to win and actually just had fun. I don’t know what I need to do to get that feeling back. I hope she finds a way to have fun as well, but it breaks my heart that it isn’t with me.
Today I will write a poem about the core beliefs on emotions pushing other people away and the I am bad core belief.
I was feeling defensive
She made me feel
Uncomfortable
Like the stress she felt
Was being put on me
I lashed out accordingly
Hours later, I felt regret
I didn’t think it was her fault
She didn’t even fight back as hard
As she usually does
I wanted to be cold
And hard
But instead, I felt my emotions
And told her
I was sorry
That I didn’t mean anything I said
My mom is not good at apologizing
She finds it uncomfortable
But she looked at me
And told me
I know
I just made a little discovery about the nature of “should” and regret. What should I do, what should I have done, what is the perfect next move. They are interesting ideas but they can sometimes limit our understanding of the truth.
It doesn’t matter what happened in the past, or what will happen in the future, only how we feel about them now.
That is why everything is about processing feelings and even the permission exercise processes feelings about the future. Nothing matters but now.
It doesn’t even make sense to think about the future and the past because all we can control is the now.
Because nothing matters but the moment, we can process the past, we can process the future, and make our decision from where we are on how to feel the present. We can make decisions from the vantage point of now. We can do things now. We can feel now.
I was scared of the past
Scared of what I might find
I was scared of the future
Scared of what I might do
But the place where I stand right now
With all the things that brought me to this moment
And all the paths that move on from here
Is all that matters
There is nothing I should do
There is only feeling what is
Only discovering
Acting
Understanding
Waiting