I’ve been having these thoughts lately. I guess I need to flesh them out. They’re thoughts about health, science, mind, and emotion. I’d like to think that I have grown out of anxiety – the sort that affected my decisions, emotional well-being, and even my physical health. My peace. But maybe I just became really good at closing myself off to the hard parts of life. It’s hard to tell. I mean, don’t we have to make those sorts of decisions, like closing off, in order to make room for better choices? Better environments?
I’ve taken a new attitude towards my self – whatever that self is – and my intuition leads me to view the total of my functions and expressions as a whole, rather than view them in their parts. My thoughts are not divorced from my emotions, nor are my emotions not intimately connected with my thoughts. My physical body is likewise no less connected to the other two, and all these parts play and affect the others parts. In some moments, I can see this interplay as though standing beside it all…as a sort of witness.
You know, intentions mean everything. And it takes a lot to see the underlying causes of our intentions, the intentions beneath the intentions. And…this puts me in mind that integrity becomes a sort of base goal, a foundation that all goals, and all expressions, should be based on in order to be the most authentic ‘me’ I can be. So it obviously follows that to live the most authentic life, to be as present for it as possible, I need to be as self-directed as possible, and in order to do that, my various systems and parts need to be as harmonious, healthy, and functioning as possible. There needs to be an even and uninterrupted flow of communication with them. I need to be as undisturbed as possible. Have you heard of the term Ataraxia?
So here is what is bothering me lately: I live by my intuitions and my gut feelings. I know that there are too many choices in life to make them all, and so I weigh the perceivable consequences of choices, as and when they arrive, and I make my decisions, little decisions and big life-changing ones too, based on the consequences that I am most willing to marry myself to. What feels most right. Does that make sense, dear reader? Marry myself to? Anyway, it is far too clear to me that my gut health directly affects and effects my emotions, my body and the health of all its organs, and my thoughts. So what is really eating at me is, how can I trust my gut feelings, if my physical gut is not healthy? How drastically does that change how I show up for life, my loved ones, and sunny days? How can I have real integrity if I’ve allowed my gut to be diminished? Or poisoned? Or not attended to? How does this affect me? This mind? Self-identity even? Oh, God…how I see other people and the world? How I treat it all?
I see it as a dance, and as melody and as rhythm in one. It’s beautiful when it is in tune.
So, in order to love the very best I can love, I am making these choices…for the consequences of them. I run trails so that the world is a better place for people to live. I am vigilant with my diet, so that the world is a better place for people to live in. I tie strings around my fingers, and leave furniture in the way – to remind me to check in with my thoughts and inner dialogs and to ask, “Is this string of thoughts healthy? Do my deeper intentions tie into harmony or discord?” So that the world will be a better place for people to live in! If I am the best man I can be, if I put the effort in, and if I align…and balance…then I bring more to the people around me. I bring something nutritious to the environment. And happy people around me make me happier too…like spiraling up. And I just know, deep in my gut, that this is what makes the world better for all the creatures to live in – the creatures seen and the unseen creatures too.
