Refined purpose and new focus

For the first time in 5 months, I feel led to blog! I have been too busy living to be online as much. I have been continuing to grow and continuing to eat some raw foods. I have been journaling more lately and see a therapist regularly. This has helped me grow tremendously this year. I can feel the changes and others have commented on them too. And there's much more to come.

Since last December, I have had green smoothies almost every day. I usually skip the weekends to give myself a break. Usually these are fruit, water, and greens, and sometimes other bonuses like green powders, chia seeds, slippery elm bark powder, etc. Sometimes I make green protein smoothies instead. With those, I leave out the fruit as my stomach doesn't seem to like fruit with such a high level of protein all at once. It took some work (my first creations were kind of gross!) but I've got those protein shakes down to tasting really good too. The last was kind of cherry cordial-like. Mmm!

The rest of the time, my diet's not "raw." I stay away from dairy and wheat with rare exceptions. They make me ill and no mind-over-matter positive thinking can keep them from leaving me at least mildly depressed. Why would I want to go back to feeling sad, lonely, tired, and apathetic? We made a vegan, gluten-free pizza at home the other day, with fresh home-made tomato sauce (which was way easier than I thought it would be, by the way), and it was quite probably the BEST pizza I've ever had. It was SO good.

I do need to get away from eating corn all the time - I know it bugs me too, at least in large amounts. And I have been reading more about the connections between gluten and soy intake and thyroid problems, so I'm reducing my soy intake too. I hardly eat soy anyway, so that's not hard for me.

In my efforts to achieve great health, I've focused on food and diet pretty exclusively for a couple of years. That has done me a world of good, and I've learned so much. I'm not going to drop the ball on it, but it's time for me to focus on some other things too:

• Overeating and fast eating: How much I eat and how I eat can be as what I eat. Eating too much "healthy" food, or gobbling it down too quickly, will leave me as tired and icky-feeling as an "unhealthy" food. I've long had an issue with overeating because I didn't want to see any food go to "waste," but I'm working on that. It's still a "waste" if it's making me feel sick, after all! I also need to get used to the idea that my small frame and small appetite means I don't need to take or eat as much as a 200-pound man or a marathon-runner. Also, I am trying to take the time to eat slowly and mindfully, remember to chew thoroughly and breath deeply. This makes a world of difference to my digestion! And if I'm eating more slowly, my body is better able to signal me to stop when I am full, reducing how often I overeat.
• Sleep: Ever felt like your life would be easier, like you could get so much more done, if you didn't have to sleep? I've felt that way sometimes. Couldn't I at least have to sleep less? But really, if I had to sleep less, I'd just feel I have to do even more. For as long as I can remember, I've slept too little during the week and tried to "catch up" on the weekends. The more I learn about health, nutrition, and healing, the more doctors I talk to and the more books I read, the more I learn that's all a bunch of hooey. Sleep is important, not just on the weekends, but every night. It's needed for health, disease prevention, concentration, intelligence, energy, digestion, beautiful hair and skin and weight loss. Want to look and feel great? Commit to getting enough sleep every night. I'm going to!
• Exercise: I've long being pretty lackadaisical about exercise. It's not that I'm entirely sedentary - I like to go on hikes a couple of times a month, some days I dance around the house when I'm feeling good, and I play games with my friends and my cats. But it's been over five years since I had a committed, regular exercise program and it's past due for me to do it again. Again, the more I read about health, the more I learn that exercise is not an option. It's essential. 

Focusing on diet is important - it really is a big, big part of health, probably the single biggest factor in disease causation, prevention, and healing - but it's not the whole picture. Exercise can do a LOT to either make up for or compliment your diet. You can get away with eating more crappy food if you exercise more... but eating crappy food means longer recovery times are required, too. But that, my friends, is a whole other post!

Mental & Emotional Inventory

There are some ways in which they are separate, but Mental and Emotional health overlap in so many ways, I will often be lumping them together, today included.
Mentally/intellectually, I'm a pretty smart person, and always have been. It was a key part of my identity growing up - I was the really smart kid, and didn't have a hard time with any subject at school. I think that was at least as much to do with the way the school system was structured and my ability to figure out what adults (teachers) wanted as it was to do with me really being smarter than my peers. I think it's terribly sad that so many very smart children are indoctrinated by the school system to equate learning with suffering and themselves with stupidity. But that, my friends, is another rant entirely.
Intellectual challenges are important to me. It is vitally important to me that I continue to learn and grow throughout life. As I've said before, without change, life gets stagnant.
Mentally, my ability to think clearly, concentrate, reason, and understand and solve problems quickly deteriorated in college. I'm not sure why, but I'm certain it had to do with poor diet, lack of sleep, and emotionally abusive relationships, as well of years of poor-self care catching up with me. I sometimes joke that I got stupider in college... and it's only half a joke. I miss that sense of mental clarity and alertness, as I rarely feel it fully any more. I don't feel all that smart, anymore.
Ideally, mentally, I'd have a quickness of thought, clarity of mind, and ability to reason clearly and rapidly, without the dragging hangups I developed late in my teens. I miss math. I want to practice and love math again. I want to do higher math for fun. I want to tutor/teach HS kids (and adults) in math up through calculus, and be able to instill in them the understanding and sense of fun and amazement I used to have for the subject. Learning can be so exciting and fun. Unfortunately, our public school systems have a tendency to suck all the excitement and fun right out of learning.
Many, many years ago I realized the important of applying one's mental abilities to understanding, interpreting, and controlling emotions. Our emotions are affected by so many things - even more so if one is, like myself, a particularly empathetic person, open to the influences of others' emotions. Diet, sleep, exercise, addictions (to anything, including foods) and unconscious cues (such as smells or sounds that call up remembered emotions) can all cause emotions in us. Without practicing self-awareness and making mental connections, we can act on emotions without realizing we are just feeling that way because we are tired, our blood sugar is low, a song has triggered a painful memory, etc.
Emotionally, I have dealt with depression off and on my entire life. There have been times when it has been very dark, but the majority of the time it is more subtle, and I have had to learn to pay attention to my body's cues and what triggers I am susceptible to. I am pretty good at handling depression on a daily basis, but occasional bouts of a deeper depression require outside support. Luckily, I have a strong support network in my friends and family. I cannot overstate how important this is. But even more important is a belief in and love for YOURSELF.
I'm currently in therapy and quite pleased with my therapist. I've had a few before and decent ones are hard to find. I'm finding this one is responsive when we run into stylistic differences and willing to customize to what I need. She is what a therapist should be - a facilitator, not a boss or advice-giver. She is really helping me work through some of the deeper, more hidden psychological issues I didn't even know I had, and it is really good. It's also very different than previous therapy that I've had. I'm up in my head so much of the time that I haven't been able to do much with the deeper emotional level, but she's got me doing some gut-level work too, from time to time, which is very helpful. I am a firm believer that the right match in a therapist can do much for your mental and emotional health, even if you feel you are "healthy" already, and I would encourage everyone to consider seeing a therapist to talk about any issues, even small ones, that stand between you and radiant joy. Becoming aware of your emotions, becoming mindful of them, allows you to begin to unravel conditioning that affects your life in both daily and in large ways.
Ideally, I would have clarity regarding my emotions and triggers and I would be able to understand the true source of the emotion and respond accordingly, with intention and mindfulness. I would no longer be subject to the whims of chemical imbalance (body is tired, have a migraine, ate something allergenic) but would be aware of them, minimize them, and act with this knowledge in mind. For example, I feel an emotion of irritation with my husband. I could a) snap at him and call him out on some slight, telling him how he messed up and needs to apologize, or I could b) realize the snack I had an hour ago gave me a migraine and my body is aching from not being able to handle the food, making me tense and causing me some pain, and therefore the emotion is physically based and the physical discomfort will pass - nothing has actually occurred worth yelling about.
Furthermore, ideally I would not be subject to react based on previous conditioning or unfulfilled unconscious needs, as I would have worked through and be aware of that conditioning and those needs and could work on de-conditioning and seeking healthy, conscious fulfillment (or release) of my needs. Therapy is super-useful at this, but so is any deep mindfulness such as meditation, yoga, etc.
We as individuals and as a society (and as the whole world!) would be so much happier if each of us took upon ourselves the responsibility to be fully mindful of our actions, words, and even thoughts. We shape our reality with the way we think about it, so true mindfulness starts within, with the observation and constructive reshaping of our thoughts. We can change our lives by changing the way we think. For more on this exhilarating and empowering concept, check out the works of Louise Hay, Wayne Dyer, Eckhart Tolle, and Deepak Chopra.

Anyway, I think that's a pretty good starting point for my mental/emotional inventory. More to come as I process it.