Essentials – Healthy Mind Fit Body

Three elements of inner peace for lasting enrichment

Are you ready for your personal revolution?

Of course we’re talking about a nonviolent revolution within. :)

You’re likely reading this because you want to resolve your weight-loss distress and various inner struggles, including having stressful thoughts and emotions, which have been so difficult to deal with effectively.

Maybe you’ve been stuck on a sub-optimal plateau, not attaining the results you want. Or, perhaps you’re at wit’s end with your weight-loss struggles. Yo-yo dieting, exercising harder, and even counting calories have just led you to feel like throwing in the towel. Basically, you’re tired of not having your hopes fulfilled.

In order to resolve these things, take time-in for yourself. This means to embark on a healing journey, a voyage into yourself to explore the possibilities of inner peace and personal fulfillment.

Contrary to the majority of mainstream diet and exercise plans, the main keys to enable lasting lifestyle changes are within yourself. They involve an increase in the quality of your inner relationship, based on the following three psychological practices, each of which delves into your mind and heart to enable true self-healing: Self-acceptance; Self-empathy; and Self-compassion.

These three keys are self-regulating and self-sustaining psychological practices, meaning you yourself will learn to generate the vitality you need, in order to achieve the things you really want for yourself, both mentally and physically. Indeed, these keys enable you to unlock your true potential, no matter what’s been going on in your life or how difficult it’s been for you to break costly patterns.

Fortunately, these three practices can be learned in a few weeks and then experienced for a lifetime of success in health and well-being. Essentially, they’ll help provide the integration you need to live a happy life, which is your birthright.

Of course, as you might suspect, we face some major challenges here, since not only have we likely not been taught these psychological practices, but we also have mostly been taught and shown their opposites: self-rejection; self-denial; self-criticism; self-shaming; and, self-blaming.

These opposites, by their wounded nature, lead us to sabotaging our best intentions and efforts.

Undoubtedly, the various traumas we experienced in childhood tend to manifest in these opposites. And tragically, being in opposition to ourselves in various ways is largely normalized in our culture. Hence, most people take it for granted.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Of course, these challenges we face aren’t easy to overcome. However, you can build in self-esteem as you move forward. You can move beyond the status quo and learn another way—an enriching, non-costly way that provides true inner comfort and ease.

This is about discovering your capabilities of healing and growing, by covering the psychological essentials to inner well-being and resourcefulness.

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Self-acceptance is alignment with your inner reality. Acceptance of yourself means coming to honest terms with what’s happening inside you—how you are relating to yourself, to others, and to the facts of reality. This entails emotional authenticity, instead of the typical defense mechanisms that we use to cope with aspects that are upsetting, discouraging, and stressful.

You do not need to agree with or like all aspects of yourself, just as you do not need to agree with or like all facts of reality. This is about acknowledging them as realities, instead of trying to make them unrealities.

Sentence completion exercises are a helpful way to access your subconscious mind, by offering an open-ended space to reveal what’s on your mind and in your heart.

Below are three sentence stems that we invite you to complete by writing six grammatical endings for each one. Write whatever comes immediately to mind, in order to avoid self-censorship. The following three stems can enable you to attune to the practice of self-acceptance:

If I were to acknowledge the reality of what I’ve been experiencing…
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One of the challenging things about self-acceptance is…
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As I begin to accept all aspects of myself…
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Self-empathy is another step further into yourself beyond self-acceptance. Once you’ve recognized what’s going on internally, or what’s alive in you, you can then begin to come to empathetic terms with these experiences.

Empathy directed into yourself means noticing and honoring what’s happening emotionally, and mentally in general.

Seldom is it recognized in our culture that self-empathy is just as vital for human well-being and flourishing as empathy. Self-empathy is as much of a need as empathy, yet it’s not a common practice and, sadly, it’s seldom encouraged in children as they’re told by authority figures to follow various rules.

The fact that adults typically don’t relate this practice to children means that adults didn’t have it related to them when they were children. So, the costly cycle of not really taking time-in to hear and understand one’s own feelings and needs tends to continue. The following three sentence completion exercises can shed light on self-empathy:

If I were to empathize with myself, instead of criticize…
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When I didn’t get my need for empathy met early on, I felt…
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If I were to learn the process of self-empathy now…
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Self-compassion is a type of self-empathy that directly addresses the facets of suffering you’ve experienced, and are experiencing, within yourself. It brings relief, nurturing, and love to unprocessed pain, sadness, fear, confusion, and distress. For instance, instead of “self-medicating” with an external substance (for instance, any legal or illegal drug of choice, including various foods), you can take time-in to compassionately connect with your needs that haven’t been getting met in the way you most desire.

Self-compassion is about treating yourself with kindness, instead of with facets of self-alienation and self-disparagement that are so common. Here are three more stems, which deal with the nature of this most healing practice:

If I were to recognize the extent of my suffering…
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Self-love to me means…
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In order to have compassion for my inner conflicts and anguish, it might be helpful if I…
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In completing the above stems, you’ve likely gained some new, important, and nourishing insights, as well as encountered some potential stumbling blocks that have been active within yourself for quite some time.

The three mental essentials that we’ve covered can enable you to achieve the following:

Nourish yourself in a culture that often demands sacrifices.

Live in ways that are self-loving, rather than self-punishing.

Notice and honor your subtle thoughts, images, and feelings that reveal your inner wisdom.

Ensure that your fitness regimen is truly respecting and valuing yourself, the best within you.

Cultivate the inner resourcefulness to face difficulties and challenges, rather than run (or race) from inner demons.

Live for the joy of it and of accomplishing your goals.

We all witness the scrooge of the status quo, the mainstream, bland, and ineffective approach to weight loss, health, and fitness.

We see it in the schools. We see it in the media. The dogma has been: “Diet and exercise.”

We were raised with these less-than-healthy, less-than-useful ideas. “Eat fewer calories and you’ll lose weight—and watch your fat intake!” Or, “Get in a caloric deficit by exercising.” “Just burn off those calories, and you’ll be fine.”

These dogmas don’t need to own us. They don’t need to dictate our success in the realm of our physical well-being. They don’t need to keep us from having a healthy body and a happy mind.

So, it’s time to evolve past the repetitive voices, recognizing the unhelpful messages from the past, many of which emanated from our TVs.

This revolution will not be televised, after all, because this revolution happens within! Your true-self has the vital answers about yourself, as we noted in this podcast episode:
http://healthymindfitbody.com/2017/04/12/116-self-leadership/

Self-leadership is what can take you to new heights of insight and integration—to allow you to blow past old goals—to allow you to achieve lasting, permanent changes to your health and happiness, changes like:

—Losing the body fat that you don’t need
—Becoming the person, both inside and out, you were meant to be
—Rekindling your child-like wonder about the world
—Getting back to fun, and away from the taskmaster or slave driver within
—Being able to look, perform, and feel the best you ever have (regardless of your age)
—Connect to yourself and with others for enriching experiences and empathetic understanding

Big things are possible with small, self-focused efforts.

We look forward to your ongoing success!

Kevin & Wes
Healthy Mind Fit Body