Haven't posted in a while, so I wanted to put something out there! COVID has certainly been a roller coaster ride for the world. Millions of lives lost, hundreds of thousands of business gone forever, and billions of lives impacted. COVID has equally been a magnifying glass to illuminate, highlight, and expand both the good and bad concerning many parts of our lives - a double edged sword of awareness and raw truth.

Life is full of challenges. They are par for the course. To have obstacles is part of the human journey. Challenges are there to push us out of our comfort zone. We don't want them at the level of the ego, but we need them at the level of our spirit.

In this video, Moeen, an athletic therapist at Milesfit, spoke about how he helped heal a client’s chronic pain. When his client first came in, he had several injuries: in the shoulder, the hip, the achilles, the groin etc. All in one client! After a few set backs, Moeen helped get his client pain-free within a year. (The set backs involved re-injuring himself, etc.)

The holidays are a time of the year of mixed-emotions. Joy/sorrow, happiness/depression, love/hate, etc. The holidays are a period where your typical day-to-day halts to a certain degree and your consciousness starts to pierce though different areas of your life (you see the people around you, the environments in which you find yourself, some of your fears/shame/emotions, etc.) Lots of self-reflection (or just lots of booze and food to run/hide from some deep-truths!) As things surface, we always have two choices: 1) numb things out or 2) make some changes.

“Thomas Edison failed more than 1000 times while trying to invent the light-bulb! Every-time he failed, he declared that he found another way to NOT invent the light-bulb.” Are you screwing yourself over? Who here has self-sabotaged before? Raise your hand and join the club! Why do we do this? Well, I think that's a great question to ask because it seems quite bizarre that we would sabotage ourselves from getting what we want! We're peculiar beings, aren't we? Self-sabotage is an interesting phenomena. Especially because I don't think the body wants to self-destruct. As a matter of fact, I think it could be quite the opposite! What if self-sabotage was our own body trying to protect us from ourselves and it had nothing to do with screwing ourselves over other than the perception of such by the inability of our conscious minds to understand what's up? How could this be?

We're all works in progress doing the best we can with what we know (and doing the best we can given the circumstances of our lives). Perfection is an illusion. Ideal happenings don't exist. What we want never unfolds as we envisioned it. That's the name of the game. We only know what we know, and we don't know what we don't know. Life is a journey of uncovering that which we don't know to make the unknown known. If we had it all figured out, there wouldn't be much point to the quest of life. The hero's journey is about self-discovery through constant micro-journeys jump started with calls to action, followed by facing dragons, and finally coming full circle with the treasure in hand. Journey - challenge - victory. And, victory can mean getting yourself beaten down to a fine pulp. Sometimes you have to lose to win.

“Be the change you want to see in the World.” This is one of my favourite quotes. The sentiment here is one of ownership and personal responsibility. As frustrating as it sometimes can be, the world does not conform to our will. While we may not have total agency over the world around us, we do have agency over ourselves. We can tell ourselves our problems come from the outside in, but the solution is always from the inside out.

"We don’t need anything more to make ourselves whole when we live in a state of gratitude." I’m sure many of you have experienced negative self-talk. In fact, I’d go as far as to say we all have experienced this at times in our lives. We get down on ourselves and the voice in our heads seems to never have anything good to say. This is often caused by low self-esteem and fear. These fears are rooted deep in us, and are often enforced by the images we see around us. We live in a society that tells us we are not good enough, that we need to buy things to improve ourselves. So the self-talk persists and we become trapped in a vicious cycle.

“At Milesfit, we facilitate the physical, emotional and psychological transformation of our clients through fitness.” Change can be daunting for all of us. The way we live our lives is influenced by many factors. Our upbringing, our experiences, the things we’re exposed to by the media, the things we tell ourselves and allow ourselves to believe about the world.

We live in a society that often asks us to be something other than ourselves. The pressures to change ourselves are everywhere. “Fitter” body, nicer clothes, whiter smile, better job, more money. We are constantly taught to strive for more and more, to focus all of our energy on improving ourselves and paying for solutions to problems that don’t actually exist. We’re taught that being ourselves is not enough. We have to be more. We’re told that if we don’t do these things we won’t be accepted, we won’t be liked, we won’t be loved. We’re social creatures. We thrive on connection and belonging, on being a part of a whole. When we’re told that just being ourselves isn’t good enough and that we run the risk of being left out unless we change, we often cave under that pressure.