This post is inspired by someone who is very much into taking care of their health through different means including being intentional about what they eat, doing yoga, etc. They posted on IG about having lost some motivation that was affecting their ability to be as consistent as they want to be in following their health routine.
I have had similar expectations of myself and similar feelings about it. I know what health routine works best for me but don’t keep to it all the time. For me what works are things like eating raw vegan, growing sprouts and wheatgrass and juicing them, doing yoga and pilates, meditation, getting out and exploring the fabulous outdoors I’m surrounded by. But I don’t do this all the time. Where I work they provide food for free which most people would think is amazing but for me it’s a stressor. There are about 5 ingredients on the salad bar I can eat that are good for me, but beyond that everything else they provide is toxic to me in one way or another; yet, I eat it anyway sometimes...often in some stretches.
It’s so easy to get down on myself for it because I know what’s best for me but don’t do it. I started to realize some things when I read this persons’ post about losing motivation.
It’s true that the human brain tends to want to do what we give ourselves to, so it could be said that if you lack the motivation to do something, start doing it. Once you start, you’ll find the drive for it. However, while we know that being consistent at something is supposedly the fastest way to the results we want, it doesn’t always work that way. It’s as though we have this expectation of being a machine about it. We aren’t machines; we’re bio-organisms. Machines and bio-organisms both have rhythms, but there’s a difference. A machine is built to not deviate from its rhythm, whereas a bio-organism’s rhythm has an ebb and flow to it. It would actually be weird for it’s rhythm to be so perfect that it never fluctuates. That’s so true that something would seem out of place if that happened. Consider the movie Trueman and when he finally caught on that everything was an act because it all happened the same way every day. [At least I think that’s part of how that went. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen that movie, but the point is he caught on that everything was so artificial even when it was all he knew. Life is organic, as soon as we try to make it something, it’s as though we invoke all these forces working against what we are trying to make it]. For us to deviate is natural and not a failure. It’s the ebb that gives way to the flow which makes the flow so much sweeter.
Your heart doesn’t beat the same number of beats every minute. You don’t go to sleep and wake up at the same time every day. You don’t have the same dreams every night. You’re not in the same mood all the time which is not only impossible according to neuroscience, but it would make for a really boring life. You have your loves and passions when it comes to hobbies and interests, but you’re not always in the mood to do them. If your hobbie is something that requires acute attention to detail, it would be foolish to expect yourself to work on a project when you’re really tired.
In the Industrial Age we started to get really advanced with creating machines. Machines are built to do the same thing over and over like clockwork. We got so good at building machines that now when they break down we get irritated because it costs us something or even just because it inconveniences us in one way or another. I worked in technical support and customer service long enough to see how much, stress, hate and anger can come out of us when a simple machine fails our expectations. We tend to allow those events to throw us into a state where we totally lose site of who we are and expel so much negative energy on someone who didn’t have anything to do with it, and then we say to them “This isn’t directed toward you. I’m just angry with the situation.” I get that, however, you don’t realize that you are inherently hurling all that negative energy at that person (Sorry, soap box of a tech support veteran. Thankfully I’ve found art now). In those moments our amazingness and the love in us goes completely AWOL for a minute. The negative response that comes out of us is so vehement and often vastly disproportionate to whatever inconvenience we’re experiencing. I have been shocked and amazed over and over at how much negative energy can come hurling out of us over a simple problem with a service that costs $10 per month. Is that email problem really worth erupting with so much frustration and even anger and hate?
Let’s take it another step. If I was in a room full of people and started to really lay into someone, most people in the room would believe I was doing something wrong, and I would know I was doing something wrong even as I was doing it. But, somehow for so many years I could justify taking something out on myself and believe that was okay because it was myself I was angry with or disappointed in. Since it wasn’t someone else it was ok...but was it really? No, it wasn’t. I’m a person too. I don’t get to hate on myself anymore than I get to hate on anyone else.
Yes, consistency is important when it comes to developing a lifestyle, habit or working toward a goal, however, I wonder if man’s fascination with machines in the last hundred years became a fixation that got into our psyche because of their efficiency. I suppose it really isn’t the machine’s efficiency that we became fixated with, it’s our own. We build what we can envision. When we built machines, we (mankind) were finally able to have a measure of control that always eluded us before. We became obsessed with perfection and now we were able to get high on achieving that perfection by creating it artificially... all in the name of efficiency for profitability.
I’m not saying that isn’t good on some level. It’s good for business, but it seems we’ve blurred the line between ourselves and our machines. Since our machines are really an extension of ourselves, and since we can achieve near perfection with vicariously through them, it’s not so difficult to make the leap to expecting machine-like perfection of ourselves. Maybe this doesn’t resonate with you because you didn’t design or build any machines, but someone did and even if that person wasn’t in your family while you were growing up, those machines are part of your existence. Most people reading this post have never known a life without those machines being part of your everyday experience. It’s in your psyche even if unconsciously. I’ve seen us get as upset with ourselves when we fail our own expectations or the expectations that we perceive others have of us. Those expectations are so powerful that we can project our own expectations on to others and assume others hold expectations of us that aren’t even in their consciousness. The negative energy we send toward ourselves only makes things worse. If we have an expectation of perfection of anyone or anything including us, it’s going to be blown sooner or later.
That’s when shit blows up. That’s when we blow up. If it doesn’t come out as anger, it’s shame. Few things if any are more demotivating and demoralizing than shame. Any motivation we derive from anger toward ourself is going to be short lived because we don’t work based on expectations.
If we have an expectation of ourselves that is based on perfection, it isn’t any different than having that expectation of someone else or a machine, and when that expectation of ourselves is blown, we have two options: anger/shame or acceptance, fear or Love. If we choose anger/shame, we will only perpetuate the state of demotivation which becomes a vicious cycle.
If we Love ourselves enough our motivation is desire instead of expectation and obligation. The natural result is to be more consistent, not the other way around. When discipline flows from desire, love and passion, you don’t call it discipline anymore. It’s Love, joy; that’s the most powerful motivation in the Universe.
When you’re invested in the process and the journey rather than the outcome, you don’t have to be so tied to the outcome for fulfillment. You can enjoy the process and wherever you’re at in it right now. When you can enjoy where you’re at right now, you can be at rest. From that place, when you’re in an ebb rather than a flow, you love yourself enough and are committed to the journey instead of perfect perfection, you can enjoy the perfect imperfection of the moment... of yourself.
When you’re there you can embrace every moment and receive what it has for you. If that moment is a flow moment you will get so much more benefit out of it because it will feel effortless and energizing. When it’s an ebb moment, you’re not going to fight it, and that moment will move through you more quickly than before. You get to move onto the next moment so much faster, and that next moment is probably a flow moment…right were you wanted yourself to be all along. Paradoxically, that fastest way through a period of low motivation is to embrace it, not resist it.
If you’re in a moment of wishing you had more motivation than you have and you’re having trouble embracing the moment because you feel like you’re behind or losing time, it helps to look at your place on your journey. This means looking at your past. We’ve come a long way as a society and learning to see the value of the moment rather than focusing on the past, but our memory is there for a reason. If you’ve invested stock in a company and it drops 10% in 2 days, you could get really discouraged and think it may be time to sell before you lose more, but at the same time, if you sell then, you cement your loss. If you look at the graph of growth over the last two years and see that despite the 10% loss, you’re up 50% over the last two years, and there’s been a pattern of 10% drops preceding 15% gains, you can find hope to rest in it and let it bounce back.
In the same way, when you’re in the process of developing a lifestyle, a way of living you want to make your own rather than simply holding it as an ideal or renting it, it’s easy to get discouraged when we falter. Just like our expectation of stocks to be a perfect 45 degree increase or better yet, a bell curve, we have the same expectation of our adoption of the lifestyle we envision. We want to feel satisfied with our performance so we can feel good about ourselves. But, since we aren’t machines and can’t expect that kind of linear growth from ourselves we have to find a better perspective. Rather than being so micro-focused on the moment, if we look at where we are now in comparison to where we were at any point in the past including the time when we were not even conscious of the way of living we’re now adopting, we can find some real satisfaction in how far we’ve come...even if we’ve found ourselves back on the couch with our hand in the bag of potato chips when our goal is to run a marathon or be a triathlete.
For understandable reasons, we value different moments differently. The moments that happen in life that we naturally, exuberantly celebrate feel more valuable than moments like taking out the garbage. However, in truth all moments are valuable. You can’t get to the moment you really want to experience without experiencing the moment you’re in right now, however disappointing it may be. It’s your ability to embrace now that empowers you to do what you need to do to get to the moments you tend to value the most.
Knowing this time is only temporary allows us to fully embrace it and ride it for everything it has to offer us. It allows us to enjoy what is probably a much needed hiatus from peak performance which is good for the mind, soul and body.
Taking care of our emotions is just as important as taking care of our body and is more important than meeting our goals and expectations. We are an integrated being, and we can’t be so focused on taking care of the body that we neglect the heart and mind.
Then, when you’re rested naturally, you’ll find that desire comes flooding back in at a level beyond your wildest hopes. You’ll have all the motivation you want and even more than you could have should’d on yourself to have before you allowed yourself to rest. Many times stepping back from something is not a set back but rather enables us rest, refresh and be even better at it when we get back to it.
No moment is wasted unless we try to control it instead of embrace it.
You’re everything you need to be right now...imperfections and all. Perfect perfection is no longer required of you. It never was. No matter where it came from, it was only an illusion. You may now embrace perfect imperfection.
You may now embrace yourself.
