never_quit’s BodyBlog

Again it’s been a while….life gets in the way sometimes….ya know?  My dad, my maternal grandmother, my maternal grandfather and my dog all died last year. My mom was taking care of her mother and she lost both her parents within two weeks of each other. Granted, my grandfather was 102 and my grandmother was 96 but it’s still super tough on her. I finally convinced her to move down here close to me and she’s been nearby for about a month now. It’s a good thing but man oh man-talk about an adjustment for me (and for her!). I only lived with my mom until I was 12 and then lived with my dad so there are issues to say the least. So the focus has not been on me-and it seems to always spark guilt when I do try to focus on me… So a new semester has started and I’m signed up for karate again. Every class I go through mass amounts of anxiety beforehand and even think about dropping the class. Everything from I am embarassed about how I look to I don’t deserve to go because I’ve already missed so much goes through my head. Last Thursday I came ‘this’ close to dropping the class, but I went anyway. I ended up leading the warm up exercises for the class and at the end of class one white belt guy came up to me and told me how much scarier than my husband I was! I’m a brown belt and hubby is a green belt-I tell you what-that made my day! I ALWAYS feel better after I go and I just wish that I could forego the whole angst episode beforehand….hopefully it will be easier to go next class…and continue to get easier until I actually get the balls to go to the main dojo again, instead of just the college class…..baby steps…baby steps….

Howdy all!

It’s been a while since I’ve checked in. This summer has been tough! Good news is I got all A’s and one B in my classes-not bad for having been out of school for 20 years! I’ve been accepted to the university as a transfer student and I’m all set for that for fall term! Bummer news is that we had to euthanize my furry, four-legged best friend this summer. That little dog has been with me for 16 years and it was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. I kept reminding myself it wasn’t about me-it was about him-and giving him the gift of peace was the right thing to do. It didn’t make saying good bye to him any less painful though So I’ve been depressed and grieving-and eating emotionally too I’ll have to add. It’s strange, when I’m depressed I feel like my body is very heavy and that I’m moving in slow motion. Sometimes just getting out of the house takes a herculean effort that I don’t always have…

Marie 

It’s been forever since I’ve written-so sorry! Finals week is two weeks away and I’ve been busting my butt doing homework. And….I turned 40! EEK!!!! You know what is totally cool about it though? I’m doing what I want, and I’m not stuck in a job that is killing me! Woo Hoo! Working out has been sporadic at best unfortunately, but I am getting to karate once a week or so. I’ve signed up for the summer karate class and that is every Tuesday and Thursday for six weeks so I’m looking forward to that! I’ll let that be my kick start and the time I have between summer term and the start of the school year at the university will be high intensity time. I’m excited and scared all at the same time-back in a university after 20 years! This past term at the community college was good to get my head back in scholastic mode. A few more weeks and finals will be over-phew! Wish me luck!

Marie

This may seem like a very small thing, but for me it was HUGE! I went to the gym today! I haven’t gone in years. I was terrified: terrified that everybody would stop and stare at me when I walked in because I’m so overweight. I was just plain old terrified. But, I went! I went I went I went!!! I spent the entire time trying not to look at myself in the mirror. This may not make any sense at all but I cried in the car after I left because I was working so hard at not thinking about how huge and ugly I felt. But I went-and I feel like I crossed a huge hurdle. I was hoping that there would be at least one person at the gym as big as me or bigger and when I walked in there was a lady on the recumbent bike who was bigger than me even and I wanted to run up to her and hug her and tell her that I loved her…but she would have probably not understood LMAO!!! It’s good that I curb some of my instincts out in public LOL!!!

My hubby came with me and he basically played trainer to me and set the weights and pointed at machines and said "do 12" or "do one more" and "yes you can". I love him!

I went!!!

:) 

Balance Danielsan! Balance! (A brownie point for whoever knows what movie that is from!) Why is it SO hard to balance the things that I want to do-that I NEED to do-in life?! It seems like I focus on one-like my music-and the rest suffer. I focus on my homework, and I don’t find time to practice. I focus on karate and working out, and my homework goes down the tube. ACK! I keep talking about getting organized and scheduling things, and haven’t actually done it yet…so….I’m going back to square one and I’m simply going to write down what I eat-everything-regardless if it’s good or bad or whatever-just to get in the habit again. That is my goal for this week-simply to write it all down.

Yikes! It’s been two weeks since I last updated my blog. I even got a message from the bb.com admin saying so! Wow! I’ve been hanging on by my fingernails it feels like these last two weeks-school is kicking my butt big time. The good news is I auditioned for the music school at the university and I’m in like Flynn! Woo Hoo! The bad news is I haven’t been working out regularly…but wait…the other good news is that I have been continuing to eat well and haven’t fallen back into my old pattern of not eating all day then consuming half the fridge at midnight! I’m going to take the big plunge and go to the gym with hubby tomorrow. He’ll probably pass out from shock when I do LOL!!

I figured out how to load pictures-fun! Here is a picture of a pair of Sai, which I used in the demo last night. You may have seen them in the movie Daredevil; however, she was holding them wrong! They’re no good if they just dangle-gotta keep ‘em tight against the forearm to serve for blocking and when pointing out the index finger is kept tight along the center. Anyway….here is a picture of the Sai and of the Daredevil chick holding them incorrectly

Howdy again! I’m still amped from last night’s workout-woo hoo! And I go back tonight at 7 - yay! So for those of you who have been reading my blogs (1? 2?) I talked about Maynard and how he changed my life and it all started when he landed on the hood of my car. I found the picture! so…assuming I can figure out how to stick a picture in my blog…voila Mr. Maynard!

Woo Hoo!!! I feel frickin’ awesome! Why did I ever quit training??!! I stayed for the 3rd hour of karate tonight-the advanced class and it is SO awesome to be back! We did a weapons demo-traditional Okinawan and Japanese weapons, and I worked a bit before class and remembered my Sai kata, and demo’d with the black belts-that was frickin’ awesome! It’s all coming back to me, and Sensei Dan talked to me after class and said some really touching things to me-it about made me cry! He said that some people never finish anything, it’s as if something stops them just as they are about to finish a degree, or their black belt and he said to me, "you are not one of those people and it makes me so happy that you are here and I am so proud of you" WOW! I feel like I’m walking on clouds-I’ve got bruises again and I came home with my gi soaking wet-awesome! Once a week is NOT enough, so I’m going to go to Sam’s class on Friday-hey that’s tomorrow! He teaches at a local rec center on Tuesday and Friday at 7-unfortunately I have class on Tuesday at 7-so can’t do that -but I can do Friday. Hmm…2 days in a row, then 5 days with no karate-I’ll have to figure something out for those other days. My biggest goal right now is to get my conditioning back and be able to go full out without dying-and to lose weight because that will help my conditioning too.  Sensei also said that he would talk to Shihan Demura and let him know that I’m training again, so that by the time he shows up for testing at the end of class, he will know and then I will start training at the main dojo again! I’ll have to figure out a way to pay for it…ack! Now that I have the time, I don’t have the money-but when I had the money-I didn’t have the time! I’m sure there is a life lesson in there somewhere LOL Anyway-Sensei Dan told me to wear my brown belt to class - so I’m right back at the front of the line and I’m the highest rank colored belt-I’ve GOT to work my ass off-what a phenomenal trust and opportunity he is giving me! My god I love my life! Sensei also said, that I deserved to be happy now, after all the hardship that I endured with the divorce and all, and then having almost my whole family dying last year-he said now it is MY time-and that I’m making my own happiness and finishing school and he knows that I am going to get my black belt. I WILL!

I am realizing that I will never accomplish my larger goals in life if I don’t acknowledge all the little goals reached along the way! My inner critic dismisses all my little accomplishments with such phrases as, "it’s not good enough" or "I should have done more" and turns positives into negatives, which then become a no win situation. Why continue if no matter what I do it is not good enough? SO! Constant reinforcement of the positive! Some people may not relate to this at all, and I ENVY you! But for me, it is a constant battle.

Part of the battle is allowing myself to be human, and to not have completely unrealistic expectations. Unrealistic expectations just guarantee failure, which in turn reinforces the inner critic. That inner critic is like a maniacal nightmare zombie that keeps getting up, and that is what I have to do to beat it-kill it every day over and over! Because you see, it will eventually stop coming around every day, it will get tired of me killing it over and over. I will get better at stopping it, and do it easily-and when he stops coming around all the time then I’ll have time for visits from positive guests

I need tools to kill the negative zombies! The more tools the better! One tool that I remembered from a class I took once is a nice little positive daily ‘perspective check’ that consists of 4 simple questions. You see, when the negative zombies dismiss all my small daily accomplishments, they go in for the kill: they attack my self worth. Once they nullify the small hurdles of my daily successes, all that is left is defenseless me. I’ve done nothing good, what I did do was so small and pathetic that it was worse than doing nothing, I don’t even deserve to try or to even hope that I could ever do anything positive. All I deserve is pain and agony and being miserable and maybe that will make up for being such useless trash.

So-to change my perspective and fight to protect my self worth, I will ask myself 4 little questions every night:

1. Who loves me? As I start listing people that love me, I realize that the list is much bigger than I realized, and that I admire the people who love me and value their opinion…so maybe I’m lovable after all? And the zombies lose strength…

2. Who do I love? Again, the list starts growing-larger than I realized as I think of family members, family members who are in heaven, my animal companions, friends that I have in my music world and so many friends in my karate circle…and maybe I go back and add some of those people to the first list… I’m loved and I love… and the zombies lose strength!

3. What did I do WELL today?! This is what changes my focus and my skewed perspective and sucks the power away from the zombies and gives it back to me! This is where I DON’T GIVE THEM MY POWER! Last night I asked myself this and yesterday I taught my trumpet student and gave him a good lesson and he got better. Every time he told me what he COULDN’T do I asked him to tell me what he COULD do! A 10 year old kid! And he is already being attacked by the zombies?! And I learned from my student-I took what I was teaching him and used and applied it to myself What else did I do well today? I let down some emotional walls with my husband. I shared with some close friends how very much they mean to me. I remembered this daily exercise and actually did it and shared it with other people. 

4. What would I like to do better tomorrow?  And this question is great-it is phrased in such a positive manner and makes improving yourself a wonderful motivational circle. What’s my kneejerk way of doing this that guarantees failure? I list all the horrible things that I did-"I ONLY lost 1 pound last week, I didn’t work out yesterday-I’ll try and be less of a total waste of air tomorrow…etc." NO! I’m so tired of this going on in my head! So, I’ve listed all the things I did well, and tomorrow I would like to do these things better: I would like to work on my homework some more, I would like to do another 30 minutes of aerobic exercise, I would like to spend 10 minutes stretching again-that felt great…etc.

The nice thing about this site is that it is another tool to accentuate the positive. There are other people out there fighting the zombies-and it is much easier fighting them with help than alone!