I have recently been struggling with metta for myself. For those who don’t speak Buddhist/Dharma Lingo (henceforth to be known as Dhlingo) metta is Pali word meaning roughly “loving-kindness”. I have a history of negative self talk and general feelings of being ashamed of being who I am. This meditation hit me hard. I wasn’t just crying but sobbing on the mat and I now feel like a weight has been lifted off of my heart. Thank you for this lovely gift. https://insighttimer.com/kristinneff/guided-meditations/loving-kindness-with-self-compassion?_branch_match_id=571007114219682540
Tag Archives: first hall
Illness, injury, and rebirth
Hello everyone!
Just an update for those of you who are following my 1st hall training with T25. I had to take two weeks off due to illness and an injury that was not T25 related (word to the wise wear a cup even when working with kids.) an now I am restarting with week 1. In my two weeks off I gained back the 3 pounds I had lost because dieting during an illness if not done correctly can prolong your illness. I don’t know how to properly diet, and needed to get better ASAP so I refused to put any of my meals in MyFitnessPal and just ate what I felt I needed.
Now that spring has sprung I will have many more opportunities to exercise. Just yesterday I walked to and from the kwoon. That is 6 miles round trip! I am really excited to have winter behind us.
What is your favorite springtime activity? Let me know in the comments!
Imagination is the path to success
Imagination is how we create new possibilities for ourselves (space). This added space gives us room to grow. If you can not imagine yourself succeeding at your goal how can you even begin to achieve it?
As a recovering negative self motivator, I understand how hard it is to create this space for yourself. Recently I have been looking into Lucid Dreaming as a possible way to create this space.
Lucid Dreaming is a concept where through different techniques one can learn to detach their body from their mind and dream but at the same time know it is a dream and willfully interact with it. So far in my investigation it has been much like other meditations I have found you may find you have some things to deal with personally before you can move forward. I don’t want to speak too much about my experience because I do not want to influence anyone else’s experience.
YouTube has some great guided meditations and binaural sound meditations that can help with this process. This is one I have found to be helpful to me http://youtu.be/QfUh5v8V0F0
Let me know in the comments if you’ve had any experience with Lucid Dreaming…
Namaste!
Some other strange supplements
In my last post we talked food, protein, and supplements. Due to my finances, I really can’t afford to buy fresh veggies. Well ok that’s not totally true, I can’t afford to buy fresh veggies knowing that they may go bad before I can eat them. So my partner and I put some resources into powdered food. We had been using powdered milk for a long time, it doesn’t go bad and makes decent tasting milk. Note I said decent not Fantastic. She doesn’t really drink it a lot and I have trouble digesting it so powdered was the way to go for us.
With this prior success we decided to buy a lot of different powdered foods. We have kale, spinach, butter, yogurt, 2 different cheeses, peanut butter, banana, lemon powder, brown gravy, eggs and even whipped cream. many of these have been used in recovery shakes that my partner has concocted. ok before anyone pukes on their screen the cheese, butter, gravy, and eggs are not going to show up. I’m still hoping one of them will have whipped cream on top 🙂
To make these more filling we did go and buy some frozen fruit for a little bio mass. here are some example recipes, we have used. Remember these are all still in Beta so you may not like some of them because I know I sure didn’t 🙂
Here are two examples that are 2 servings each
Shake 1:
2 scoops of whey protein
3/4 cup rice milk
1 tbs banana powder
11 g sugar
1 cup mixed berries
8 oz water
then blend
Shake 2:
1 tsp spinach powder
1 tsp lemon powder
2 tsp yogurt powder
1/2 cup rice milk
1.5 cups mixed berries
2 tsp sugar
8 oz of water
then blend
Exercise is all well and good but did you change your diet?
This is how my diet typically looked
So now we can see why I had a weight issue. The goal is what is set as default in MyFitnessPal (totally recommend downloading that). So I am assuming that is a normal diet. We can see that I was not really doing so well.
The week of my 30th birthday I decided that I couldn’t treat my self like that anymore and we can see here what changed.
I bought T25 at the end of that week and had to wait on shipping. Here is now things are looking are now.
Not too shabby. I did run into some issues however. You noticed above that my protein was way too low. Once I started paying more attention I realized I still wasn’t getting enough protein. So I did some research into protein powders.
I know this is a hotly contested issue on the internet and I am not calling myself an expert by any means, if anything I am a lab rat on this subject. I did however look at some research from the Mayo Clinic which basically said, and I’m paraphrasing here “Protein is Protein”. They did say that egg protein was the most complete but that protein is protein. This being said you can get this from food, and that is probably the best way to do so. But I am not in a financial situation right now that is going to allow for quality meat purchases right now.
So my choice was Whey Protein. Most people out there are now thinking “Whey Protein, do you even lift brah?!?” and the answer is… no. I understand why people would be concerned. Most people use Whey Protein to add more protein than normal so they can get swole. I needed it because I had a protein deficiency.
We’ll talk more about my diet in the next post…
Kung-Fu with Washu 