I did a dumb thing on Saturday. Well, it didn’t feel so dumb at the time, but it seriously turned out to be dumb.
The local 3 day event was short of helpers, so I stuck my hand up to help a friend (no that’s not the dumb thing! 🙂 ) and I was on the BBQ all day. Actually that worked out well, because I didn’t have to constantly re-balance myself from watching horses being ripped around unnecessarily.
The dumb thing was that I drank 5 cups of 1/2 strength capuccino over the day and it stopped me from being able to listen to my body.
The other dumb thing was that this was a giant BQQ – very wide – and without that ability to listen to my body as well as I have been developing, I worked too far away from my body at times and although my good posture was only occasionally out of whack, over a 7 hour day that seriously over-strained my lower back. I was in the mind space of “don’t want to let the other person down or get in their way” by wanting it set up differently to accommodate what was good for me.
So… I came home stiff and sore, buzzing with caffeine and needed to work that out of my system. So I decided to take myself (and my Maremma dog Lily Bear) for a short walk to loosen up the stiffness.
Dumb thing number three was that the caffeine stopped me from listening to my body and I walked too far – only 2 kms, which is a short walk for me these days – but the last 1/2 kilometre was more and more painful and I could feel my pelvic muscles starting to cramp up.
Dumb thing number four, was that when I came home I had family over for dinner and I didn’t go and lay down and do some of that fabulous Reverse Breathing to help me recover – I fed horses, made the salad, chased the tiny grand child squealing around the house for kisses.
By the time everyone had left, I was at the point that I felt that one more step was going to cause serious damage. I had to do what a friend calls “the pimp walk” – an exaggerated swagger of my hips just to get to my bed without having to crawl to it.
I spent a miserable night, waking up in pain and needing to do all kinds of healing things to get myself back to right again. I managed a lot of healing in that first night, but it took 3 days altogether.
Can you hear the underlying pattern here? When I went into a Quiet Mind to figure out what went wrong, I understood that the caffeine in the coffee was the underlying cause of not being able to listen to my body repeatedly during the day. It was kind of like the vacuum cleaner that was making such a loud noise that I couldn’t hear the telephone ringing – the caffeine being the loud noise that stopped me from hearing all the little things that my body was trying to tell me.
If I had been listening to my body I could have looked after myself. I could have re-organized the BBQ to accommodate both me AND the other person working it, I would have known when to turn around on my walk, I could have asked someone else to feed the horses and make the salad (people LOVE to be needed) I could have eaten some anti-inflammatory food and laid down and done some Reverse Breathing until everything felt good again if I needed to to.
In fact, I probably wouldn’t have even had to lay down.
So the caffeine created the loud noise of the vacuum cleaner so that I couldn’t hear what my body was trying to tell me – until my body had to yell very loudly at me to get my attention – and by that time, I was in trouble. Sugar is another one that I know puts me in trouble.
What is it for you?
The odds are that if you are on this program, that your body has started to yell at you too – so what is it that is creating the loud noise that is getting in the way of you being able to listen to your body easily?
Your subconscious knows exactly what that vacuum cleaner noise is, so here is a Quiet Mind to access your subconscious and help you figure that out – it could be something physical like the coffee was for me and like I know sugar to be. It could be some emotional thing like my unwillingness to put the other person on the BBQ to any trouble – and there is always going to be a solution that suits both of us. It could be just a habit that you are unaware of, or an old belief that no longer serves you – whatever…
In my experience, understanding comes in layers, so feel free to come back to this Quiet Mind every now and again for any new insights in this regard.