Hello Old Friend,

Sometimes life gets in the way. Routines get disturbed. Things slip out of your fingers, and before you know it, those routines become nearly impossible to find again. For me, I try to go back to them, and I wonder why I can’t do what I did. There was the time I did the same workout every day for a year, and lost 40 pounds. I looked and felt amazing, and then, life transitions happened. I’ve tried for six years now to go back and do that thing again, only putting it off until tomorrow. And little by little, those 40 pounds found their way back.

For a creature forged out of billions of years of adaptation, I seem to really resist adaptation. I always want to go back to the way things were when I was doing the thing. And rarely do I ever recognize soon enough the need for me to adapt.

I think it’s an ego thing. Adapting means surrender. It means admitting that my circumstances have changed, and accepting that I cannot change them back to how I would like for them to be.

So instead of changing my circumstances, I must adapt. And this ego has a hard time with that. I

So I’m adapting. I’m adapting this podcast a bit too. Instead of stretching at the beginning, we’re just going to jump right in and give you something to think about. And we’re just going to give your mind one thing to think about while you meditate for a minute.

Today we’ll start:

• What are you trying to go back to that you need to adapt to?

Sometimes figuring it out isn't all it's cracked up to be

You know when people stepped on my toes or wronged me in the slightest, it used to upset me for a long time. Years. And I'll tell you, the surface area of where I could get hurt was disproportionate to my actual size: if people voted a certain way or believed a certain thing, it hurt me. If people sent their kid to a school with a particular name, it hurt me. Personally.

And if I'm honest, I wanted that hurt. I wanted to be in a constant state of outrage because it made me feel powerful. Important. Bigger than. It took me too long to realize that grudges will kill me. That sense of power I get, not just over being right, over being wronged. I used to cling to that because it made me feel powerful, and like other people were just hugely immoral compared to me.

Here's the thing about outrage -- it destroys us at the cellular level. Recent research shows that it leads to mitochondrial level. It starts screwing with our hormones, and that can spill into our blood stream and cause actual disease including hypertension and type 2 diabetes. Not to mention stress coping mechanisms like drug and alcohol abuse and all the problems that spill into that.

It's taken me a long time to learn that outrage is a drug and an emotion that I can not afford to hold on to for very long. It's taken me even longer to realize that the only way through it is forgiveness. Forgiveness is a wellness gift I can give myself Just like exercise or a healthy meal, I have to practice forgiveness -- even if the other person never knows they're forgiven. It's required for my survival to forgive.