Vicki Pike

It’s Not Personal, It’s Science

Do you love your body? Do you hate your body? Do you tolerate your body? Many of us judge ourselves based on what we see in the mirror…maybe our skin is too light, or too dark, has too many spots, or is saggy, dry or oily. Maybe our legs are too short, too long, too thick, or too skinny. Maybe we get upset at the way we look in jeans, a tank top, shorts or (Lord help us) a bathing suit.

Day to day we go through our lives judging ourselves by what we look like on the outside, when – you guys! On the inside, there is absolute MAGIC going on!

The number of cells in our bodies number in the TENS OF TRILLIONS, which is amazing on its own when you realize we all started from just ONE! The human eye is made up of more than 20 separate structures with MILLIONS of nerve endings. Google how the eye works one day when you’re bored, it’s so complicated it’s amazing that it even works. And I could spend all day long talking about the human brain. It’s the original master computer, and even after thousands of years man can’t replicate it. It generates its own electricity ya’ll!!

Then we have our muscle structure. It takes almost 100 muscles just to walk…from your abs, to the muscles in your hips, your glutes, your thighs, your calves, your shins, not even to mention the ligaments and tendons. Plus your nervous systems and the signals your brain has to coordinate, send and receive!

So my challenge for you this week is to simply move your body. Go for a walk…if you can only walk down the street and back, do it. If you can jog down the street and back, or around the block? Do that. If you’re not able to do either, then move what you can move…your arms, your torso, your fingers, your neck. And instead of concentrating on how uncomfortable you are, or how much you feel like people are judging you, or what you’re missing on Netflix, I challenge you to not think at all. Just feel. Feel how your stomach flexes so you can move your hip, which helps swing your leg forward, and causes your knee to bend, and your foot roll so you can propel your body. Feel how yours arms automatically swing in opposition for balance. Feel how your heart knows it needs to start pumping faster and harder (even if it’s just a little) because it’s AUTOMATICALLY responding to the demand of the rest of your body. You don’t even have to tell it to!!

You guys we are walking, talking, miraculous wonders of the universe! Whether you believe in creation or evolution, we are the smartest, most evolved species on the planet. Doctors spend YEARS studying the human body, they may never know what it’s fully capable of. And we’re reducing it all down to what we look like in a pair of jeans or a bathing suit??

I say we take that back. Check yourself throughout the day, if you catch yourself having a negative thought about the outside of your body, go inside. Your heart is pumping automatically. Your eyes are looking around and processing all the images automatically. We chew and swallow and process nutrients automatically. You guys our bodies ARE AMAZING! I propose that we commit to understanding it better, and begin showing it the respect that it is due.

Thank you for reading my little blog 🙂

Transitions and Letting Go

One thing I’ve learned about getting older, is that it comes with a whole lot of having to say Goodbye…to old habits, to old friends, to family members, and let me just say that I don’t like it.

No sir, not one bit.

When we have to say goodbye to someone special who has passed away there’s obviously nothing we can do about it, they’re gone and it’s out of our hands. We can only hurt, grieve, and mourn our loss, but then we have to continue moving on through our lives without their physical presence.

But what about having to say goodbye to someone that is still living? Like saying goodbye to our children as they strike out on their own? Or a parent, or grandparent, or a spouse that has been affected by disease and who is technically no longer ‘there’ mentally, but is still with us physically? Or a former friend or partner that we had to walk away from, or who walked away from us. How do you grieve for someone or something that is still physically here? How do you get closure from that??

There is a Buddhist parable called “Sallatha Sutta: The Arrow”. You can read a full version of the text here, but a (severely) paraphrased version would be: Imagine a person has been shot by an arrow. It causes them pain, so in grief and anger they beat their chest and become distressed. Because of their response to the first arrow they are now feeling ‘two pains, one physical and one mental’. It’s the same as being shot by two arrows, only the second arrow is one they shot at themselves.

We have every right to feel pain over losing someone, whether physically, mentally or emotionally (or all three), or transitioning to a new season in our lives that we didn’t necessarily choose (hello fellow empty nesters, or simply growing older!). Maybe the person or relationship we had to leave was hurting us in some way, or was unhealthy. We cannot ‘un-shoot’ that first arrow, it was out of our control and it’s natural to feel angry and hurt because of it. But we MUST stop shooting ourselves with the second one.

Sometimes holding onto that grief, or that anger or that hurt feels ‘safe’ because it’s familiar. And maybe some of us have honestly held that space for so long that even the pain of being in it is less scary than the uncertainty of letting it go. In that way, holding onto past pain seems to serve us.

But that is a false perception. The reality is that holding on to pain and hurt is holding us back from happiness. It’s keeping us stuck, walking in an endless circle of resentment and anger. Friend, we HAVE. TO. LET. IT. GO! For our own future happiness, and for the sake of those who love us. We deserve so much more! We deserve to be free of that pain and that anger, and I assure you it is 100% possible to exist outside of it! WE are the only ones being hurt by holding on, and WE are the only ones who can let it go.

How to let go of pain may look different for each of us…maybe journal the shit out of it. Write it all out, get a notebook, pour out a stream of consciousness onto the pages and then tear them up, or burn them, but don’t re-read them! Don’t go back.

There are an unlimited amount of positive books, blogs and podcasts to turn to…anything by Rachel Hollis, or Brooke Castillo, Tony Robbins or Jenna Kutcher. Go for walks, work it out in the gym, color, paint, create, talk to a professional (this is the 21st century, there is no shame in seeking help), meditate, or even join a group of like-minded positive people. It’s not going to be easy, but it’s going to be worth it. (If you need inspiration on how to commit to your healing check out my prior blog Committing to Commit.).

Like they say, the time is going to pass anyway. Would you rather spend it holding onto past hurts that no longer serve you? By resisting and resenting change that is inevitable? Or will you let go of that second arrow, and spend your time discovering the whole world of possibilities that lay in front of you? Thankfully, that choice is up to you.

Thank you for reading my little blog 🙂

Vicki

You are Enough. Right now. Just as you are.

So I’m probably not the first ’empty nester’ to start examining their life’s journey, trying to figure out who I am and how I got to Here. It’s probably a bit of a cliche by now in fact, but it’s all new to me so I’m going to put into words what I’ve figured out up to this point.

When I was a kid I unknowingly trained myself to become invisible. Being visible did not always lead to good things, and sometimes those ‘things’ were downright not good. So I learned to be quiet, avoid eye contact, and keep a very low profile.

I think that we all pick up behaviors when we’re younger that we use to survive, to help us navigate an adult world when that world is scary or uncertain. The problem is how do we let go of those behaviors when we’re adults and those behaviors no longer serve us? Especially if that world is all we’ve ever known?

I have finally figured out how to stop looking at life through the eyes of a scared, self-conscious, intimidated child. I’m a big girl now, but I discovered recently that I’ve never entirely let go of that old narrative, even after raising my own, wonderful, independent children. I’ve held on to it all of these years, because I never knew that I could let it go. That it no longer had to be a part of who I was!

I have no idea if you’ve ever felt the same way. If, at whatever stage you are in your life right now, you might still be carrying around your old narratives, your old insecurities. But, just in case you are, let me be the first one to tell you, NONE OF IT WAS YOUR FAULT. YOU WERE JUST A CHILD, AND YOU ARE WORTHY…of love, of attention, of security, of good things and happy days, of being SEEN! Don’t wait for someone to give it to you, take it!! It’s yours, and you have every right to it.

Okay, there, that’s all I wanted to say. Please know that you are worthy and you are loved and you are special.

Thank you for reading my little blog 🙂

Committing to Commit

So here’s the thing about committing…you can’t try to commit to something. You have to decide up front that you’re all-in, that it’s a non-negotiable. It’s getting up at 4am to get to the gym by 5am, now matter how sore or tired you are, or how comfortable your bed is. It’s staying home on a Friday night to write that thing that’s due by Saturday even though your friends are texting the shit out of you to go out with them to a club. Or the movies. Or dinner. It’s respecting yourself enough to honor the commitment you made, to YOU, in order to better yourself, or to better your situation. It’s not giving up on YOU, even though giving up on yourself is so much more comfortable, and, oh, so much more familiar.

Maybe you already knew all of this? I will admit it has taken me a very long time to figure out this piece. I’ve always been really good at deciding to try something new, and then beating myself up when I would (predictably) quit. Every time. No matter what it was…writing that paper, going to the gym, trying to find a different job. I would find a temporary, external motivation like a blog, a movie, or an Instagram post, and when the external motivation faded, so did I. I mean, after all what did it really matter? It was only myself that I was letting down, it’s not like anyone else was getting hurt?

Then one day, after beating myself up for quitting yet another thing, I found my answer. I noticed that, if a friend or family member asked me to go somewhere with them or help them with something, and I told them I would do it, then I would do it. I would show up for them, no excuses. Obviously they mattered to me so I wasn’t going to let them down? And that’s when I understood why I couldn’t commitment to myself, it was because

I DIDN’T MATTER TO ME.

I didn’t possess enough self-respect to follow through with the things I told myself I would do. I wasn’t important enough to show up for me.

You always hear people on social media and podcasts talk about how “we need to love ourselves”, and I was never sure what that meant exactly? I mean, it’s not like I hated myself, so, wasn’t that kind of the same thing? But then I remembered an epiphany I had once (a long, long time ago) when I realized that two people couldn’t truly love each other unless they also had respect for each other. So then, wouldn’t the same hold true for the relationship we have with ourselves?? I mean think about it…if I didn’t have enough self-respect to honor what I told myself I would do, then I didn’t really have self-love either, which was why I could repeatedly quit on myself. It’s because, at the end of the day, I didn’t honestly believe that I was worth showing up for.

That may sound sad, but it allowed me to wake up to the fact that I needed to start respecting myself. To understand that I WAS worth showing up for, and worth loving too, for that matter. I mean, would you ever say out loud to your best friend, or a loved one, the things that you say quietly to yourself? Would you ever treat them like they weren’t worth showing up for? YOU are a living, breathing human being, YOU are worthy of respect, and YOU are worthy of love. Doesn’t matter what you’ve done, or who you’ve been, or what your circumstances were in the past. You are a perfect creature made by God, or the Universe, or whatever you choose to believe. You are a part of this world and you are worth showing up for, so BELIEVE THAT, for your sake, for the sake of your friends, and for the sake of your loved ones.

So commit to something. Today. It doesn’t need to be something huge and scary, just start small. Commit to getting up a little earlier to spend some time in thought by yourself, or journaling. Start a morning routine that sets a positive, even tone for the day. Or commit to spending a half an hour – or one hour – a week doing something creative…color, paint, make something, dance, or go for a walk. Whatever it is, block out the time, and make it a commitment, a non-negotiable.

Because YOU are worth showing up for.

Please feel free to comment below, I’d love to hear your feedback.

And thank you for reading my little blog 🙂

-Vicki