Feeling the fear and doing it anyway

I am paraphrasing the famous title of Susan Jeffers' 1987 hit book. I confess I have never read it, despite the phrase and probably some of the ideas having neatly entered the popular zeitgeist. I am now feeling a bit silly for not reading it. In the 80s I was preoccupied with self-improvement (and I was doing it very badly) and sadly I was hijacked by Linda Hay and entered what I like to call my 'decade of self-blame and recrimination'. What a shame.

There has been a two week lull in blogging for me, as I became ill and it was a proper; lie-down-in-bed-for-two-days-and-then-stagger-about-on-deer-legs for another 6 after that illness. Combined with what I had already scheduled as a bit of a mad week time-wise, it defeated all creative thought.

I would like to say I stuck to my new healthy eating beautifully but there were some blips. However, I held a lot steadier than I have in the past. Since the aim before the summer break was to train and maintain, I was on track as much as I could expect to be.

So let me head back 2 weeks, because I had a moment of epiphany on Saturday June 6, which went a bit like this: I had done my second workout with the divine Sam Blakely the night before. I had not wanted to go, I was tired, hot and sort of over everything. But I dragged myself along and of course finished it feeling fantastic and empowered. The next morning I woke up and it was hot. Really really hot. The temperature gage at home inside said 34 degrees but it felt more like 38. On any given Saturday this would see me perched in the 2 square inches of cool air produced by our asthmatic air conditioners, watching TV, and feeling guilty about being lazy.

Instead, I put on my swimsuit (this in itself is a bit of a mission in self-help talk; lycra and sweaty fat bodies do not co-operate and it is very hard to avoid seeing yourself), and I went down to the pool. It was genius, I immediately cooled down and better yet, I did ten laps of the lengths pool. Slow, not very technically correct laps but I could feel my body tiring so I knew I was working out.

Then a young couple walked by. In our condo there are a lot of students form the INSEAD down the road. They are most often in their late 20s or 30s, European, here for a limited time, and treat the place like a holiday resort. So this was an INSEAD couple. They saw me and started talking about me. I don't speak French but I know enough about body language and facial expressions to get the gist. I was so stung, and angry. I tell you if I could have hauled myself out of the pool fast enough I would have. Not to yell at them, but just to point out that I could actually see and hear them, and what made them feel so superior to everyone else anyway? I didn't of course. I just kept swimming. I had decided to be resilient. I had decided to be tough. I was feeling the fear and doing it anyway, wasn't I?

Well I got back in and headed to the shower. I felt great! Everything would start to improve! I had nothing to worry about! I am resilient! Then, for some reason, my Dad popped into my mind. And I started to cry big fat messy tears. I stood there sobbing for the longest time, and for the life of me I could not figure out where it was all coming from. But here is what I think now.

Resilience can be a bit addictive. Don't take this the wrong way, it is an enormously positive quality and something to really foster and encourage in ourselves and our children. But in my family it lent itself to more of a stoicism and the culture was very much one of keep going, put up and shut up, tough it out. And for me, that has nosed its way in to my sense of what resilience really was. Resilience implies elasticity, you go with the flow but allow yourself to bounce back. Its more flexible and fluid. Toughness means you stretch until eventually, inevitably, something snaps. And it was exactly this kind of toughness which killed my father.

My dad was a big, strong, policeman of Irish ancestry. He was good at everything 'manly' like fixing cars and building and catching crims. One evening he slipped while putting out his wheelie bin for collection and badly broke his ankle. No one else was home so he crawled inside and called an ambulance. He was 65 and his approach to anything like this was to simply push through the pain. After a few days he was released from hospital to recover and he refused to take any pain relief. He told me this every time we skyped. I was due home for the first visit since our move to Singapore and I was shocked to see his leg when I arrived. I insisted he see the district nurse about it and after arguing back and forth he agreed to go the next day. The following morning he died of a pulmonary embolism in front of my son and I, after a blood clot from his ankle broke away and entered an artery in his lungs. He was 65 years old, and in quite good health. He was overweight but active. However his refusal to take pain medication had meant he had spent too much time immobile after his release form hospital. And he had ignored his symptoms. I am not blaming him for his own death. But I do think the whole stoic culture of getting on with it had a large part to play.

So where am I with this long shaggy dog of a tale? Why does this mean I was standing in the shower sobbing away? Well I think I have been mixing stoicism up with resilience for a long time now. I got unexpectedly pregnant, to a man who wanted nothing to do with raising a child. I decided to go it alone and I did. I went to work preparing to have a baby (and ate a lot of ice-cream and put on a lot of weight). Then I had the baby and went to work preparing to return to school (and ate a lot of comfort food and kept that weight on thanks very much). Then I returned to school, while still breastfeeding, and finished my degree, and enrolled in my teaching diploma (and I spent a lot of time writing essays at 2am and eating chocolate to stay awake and just a little more padding crept on each year). Then i got a job in a school, a great job with a really terrible, toxic boss (and I spent a lot of time looking forward to lunch and stuffing all of those feelings down with a nice cake or a pie). Then, I moved to Singapore. I applied for a job and no more than 6 weeks later I had moved here with two suitcases and a 4 year old in tow.

It was been an absolute winner of a decision to come here in every respect except one. It is hard to make new friends in your 40s. And when you work in an ex-pat environment, often your new friends leave. So that net of supportive, helpful, generous friends you got used to is no longer there. That, combined with my 4 years of hard study and NQT training meant I had isolated myself. Food and work had begun to fill that gap.

I was crying in the shower because I was finally fully realising what reaching out for help meant. And how my view of myself was shifting. And how I had been running dangerously close to my Dad's early death from who knows what, caused by my own inability to stop and take stock and ask for help. And here I was worrying about what some random strangers may or may not have been saying about me. I mean, for all I know they could have been talking about something else entirely.

Feeling the fear and doing it anyway is the only way I will get through this and out the other side. I need to keep reminding myself that whenever I have done things that felt really right for me, they have turned out to be the best choice. When I eat lots of nourishing, healthy food (and I do mean eat, I am not focusing on calories at all yet), I feel so much better for it. When I get some real exercise done, I feel stronger and happier. Worrying about what I look like puffing and hefting myself about, or eating with a sense of dismal guilt for past meals, is counterproductive.

But more than just pushing through the fear is the absolute importance of sharing the experience. It's important to have some people in your corner, giving you a shout out when things go well, and another shout out when they aren't.

Two weeks on and I have found myself in a very different state of mind to the one I had in that shower. I got back on the exercise horse as soon as I could. And I discovered new and tasty salads to eat. I have been getting plenty of sleep. I don't know if I have lost much weight, the scales and I have a bit of a funny relationship and I am always amazed at how I can fluctuate 3 or even 4 kg in a matter of hours. I am a few weeks into my 'transformation' now, I think 5, and it is much more of an internal shift than I thought it would be. This in itself is a major difference for me, as in the past I have always fallen prey to that initial euphoric rush of losing pounds. Now I find myself focusing instead on how I feel, am I hungry? Does this taste really good or is it just a chemical mess? Could I walk or cycle somewhere instead of jumping into a taxi? I certainly hope to lose a significant amount of weight over the next few months, but I am trying not to obsess over the numbers just yet.

I'll finish up with a quote form Susan Jeffers: “Patience means knowing it will happen . . . and giving it time to happen.”

Monkey Mind

This week has been a mammoth.

In fact it was a little unsettling. Until I read a Vesak weekend article about a Singaporean woman who has just taken vows as a nun, in a Buddhist monastery in Washington. She spoke eloquently of her journey towards a spiritual life, and at one point mentioned her realisation that her mind was filled with negativity. She referred to this as 'monkey mind'. It is a term that my old Aikido sensei used to use, and when I read it, a bell rang immediately.

This is the broad definition of the term: "unsettled; restless; capricious; whimsical; fanciful; inconstant; confused; indecisive; uncontrollable".

Essentially it is a mind which is not fully under the control of the thinker, bouncing from branch to branch, looking for different bananas. Or, in the case of my mind, cake and poop to throw at myself when I mis-step. (My monkey has an attitude problem).

So the week has been one of small steps. And that is not a bad thing. I am dipping my toes in first rather than leaping in full speed as I usually do. (There is another Buddhist term for this; the impulsive and galloping Horse mind). I have been eating very healthily at breakfast and lunch. And even this change has meant I feel a great deal more energy. I saw Liza again on Wednesday and along with several very useful ideas for snacks and meals, the conversations we are having are helping me to focus on what causes my overeating. As I suspected; its not exactly a simple thing.

The end of the working week saw me trudging my way (mentally anyway, physically I was whisked there in a taxi) to my first session with Sam. I admit that I was dreading it. Primarily because each time I start exercising after a long hiatus, I seem to have discovered a new level of not fitness previously undiscovered! but Sam! What a treasure! The backs of my legs are still sore but I don't mind, I had no idea how amazingly great it would be to have a trainer when I was exercising! I thought it would be more... well actually I don't know what I thought it would be, I think my monkey-demon-poop-thrower had stopped me from really visualising it.

So all in all, a lot of stuff has come to my attention this week. Stuff to do with my mother, with my relationship to food, with my own wellbeing. There are so many threads that I am not at all surprised that I am experiencing monkey mind. It has been a bit much, but it has also been at the right time, if that makes sense. It is incredible how resistant we are to change though, even when we are not happy with the status quo.

The weekend came, and Saturday saw me zipping about doing errands and then realising I had made a massive, giant balls up with a funds transfer. The kind that puts you in the red with no way out. I don't know how I could have been so silly and I spent most of Saturday night trying not to think about it. I am still masterfully zen minding it by thinking-not-thinking about it. This is a bad habit of mine.

Sunday was a day for tackling the apartment (ever noticed how tidy things get when you are avoiding doing something?). Which I suddenly recognised had become as disordered as my eating and my general level of calmness. I spent 7 hours scrubbing and cleaning and only got the living and dining areas done. I wrote a note for my helper. Rumpled it up. Wrote another note. Rumpled THAT one up too. Decided that I would have a chat with her. (Still haven't, this is a bit of an ongoing issue). The flip side of this was I felt properly worked out (I was really going for it housework-wise) and I do love the tidiness. It helps my mind settle.

Monday I was hot, flustered and tired. I rode my bike for a bit. Added sweaty to the hot and flustered. Went to bed, early, with a mild sense of resentment at myself for everything. Attempted to ignore the lack of order in my room. Another weekend.

So here I was today, on Tuesday, monkey minding my way through the day. And I had a proper, good, old fashioned bad eating day. I left no carb alone. I am writing it all out.

How to conquer the monkey? Well, not by dwelling on it. The monkey will be the monkey and I need to learn not to try and distract it. I have to be like water, as Bruce Lee would say. There is a lot of stuff rattling around in my life that is not ever properly finished. But despite all of this, I really, truly feel I can do this. Because even if I did have a long weekend full of stress and frustration and a general sense of not being in the 'zone', I have also been incredibly touched by the support I am getting. From strangers. From people until very recently were strangers; with a lot of experience and wisdom and the absolute right to expect payment for their time and services. It is amazing to me. I am so very grateful. I think I might actually deserve a break. And that is a pretty good place to start, right?