A Breakthrough Moment

So yesterday I was sitting in the Denver airport awaiting my final flight of the day to bring me home to Minneapolis. I’d been on the road for a week, visiting friends in Park City, my parents in St. George, Utah, and hitting Las Vegas for one night before the flight home.

That’s the primary reason I haven’t posted as much as I have in previous cleanses – it’s hard to steal away to write when you have limited time to spend with your loved ones. But in addition to that, I have to admit I haven’t felt the most inspired to post this time around. And after some serious consideration, I’m pretty sure I can blame that on my big fat ego. It wants people joining in and participating on the blog – I guess I believe that’s some sort of affirmation for me and my efforts. So when there’s not much activity on the blog I lose enthusiasm.

But I started thinking about that as Mark and I wended our way through the desert toward Vegas on Monday. I realized that I shouldn’t pin so much of my sense of self-worth on other people’s actions (or lack thereof), and that I shouldn’t rely on the affirmations of others as my sole gauge of my value. It also dawned on me that every cleanser has a different experience – some of us are gritting our teeth just to hold on through each day; others are sailing right through without feeling too much change. On top of that, everybody has a life to tend to – that’s challenging enough without adding cleansing to the mix.

I think that’s my lesson this time around – to remember that no one else is responsible for how I feel about myself, and that I can’t control what anybody else does, even if we’re all doing the same thing at the same time. Because even if we’re all doing the same thing at the same time, we’re all experiencing it completely differently.

One of the greatest things about cleansing is that it gives us the chance to wake up to –and through – mindful eating. As we give careful consideration to everything we put in our bodies, that mindfulness translates into other aspects of life. So after we wake up to mindful eating, we can wake up to mindful living – being aware of what’s going on around and inside us in every aspect of our lives.

By being mindful of my feelings of apathy and making the effort to understand them, I learned a valuable lesson about myself, I figured out how to deal with an issue that’s been haunting me my whole life, and now I have some new wisdom that I can carry into other aspects of my life. That’s why I keep cleansing – each time it delivers new, enlightening insights that help me move a little more gracefully through this life.