Saying Yes To EXERCISE

I have my routine.  I go to the gym on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.  Then I give myself the weekend to rest.  It's my part time job and I'm starting to treat it like work, which is what I'm doing with a lot of things in my life.  Since I don't have a formal job I'm getting paid to do right now, I am making as many things that I do a part of my regular schedule.  This is to make sure that nothing in my life is just a hobby, but a job.

It's my JOB to work out.

I work out mainly to clear my head.  It makes me feel like I'm constantly cycling out the toxins in my body.  I'm sweating.  I'm LETTING GO of fat.  I'm LETTING GO of this idea that I won't have the body that I want, which translates into the falsehood that I can't have the life I want.  So I'm practicing the action of putting forward what I want by letting myself have it.  Each push up is a YES.  Each pull up is a YES.  Yesterday my chest said YES over 200 times and my back said YES over 150 times.  I'm saying YES to the body I want and the life I want.

YES sounds like a mantra (and YES, it does sound like a mantra).  These things help me.  Each YES culminates in an action that gets me one step closer to who I want to be.  It sounds all new agey and shit, but it works.  And it's better than the ways we say no to ourselves countless times without thinking about it.  So to counteract that with an intentional YES means that my goals are less and less impossible one YES at a time.

My boyfriend came home from tour a few weeks ago in the middle of the night.  It was dark and I was asleep.  He hadn't been home in ten days.  When he crawled into bed, he grabbed me like he always does.  We love to be cuddled up in each other all night long.  It's the first time in my life where I have been able to do that.  It's a complete surrender--a LETTING GO, if you will.    So he comes home and he wakes me up with kisses.  Then he feels around and he says that I've been getting more solid and slimming down.  In ten days?  That seems impossible.  But it wasn't because it happened.  It reminds me of a Zen saying I'm incredibly fond of.  You have to be here now to be there then.  That basically means, don't think too far ahead in the future.  Just focus on being in the moment because if you focus on that, you'll find yourself at your destination before you know it.  Just goes to show how precise the Buddhists are because Be here now so you can be there then covers it much more concisely and articulately.

Even that was a lesson.  Just by going to the gym every day, I was saying YES to something.  And sometimes I might not even know what I'm saying YES to.  I'm just going to the gym and doing my sets and reps.  I know exactly what I'm there to do, so I don't have to think about it too much, which means I don't start doubting myself and start stopping myself.  I just go from exercise to exercise, a few YESes here and a few YESes there.

When I look at myself in the mirror at the gym I do have a sense of vanity.  I like what I see.  I like seeing the muscles working and being productive.  It's a reflection (pun intended) of my own productivity on a larger scale.  Because my boyfriend notices my hard work and my mirror notices my hard work, I feel validated.  I feel a sense of purpose.  And that sense of validation has made my desire to fool around (totally allowed in my relationship) when my boyfriend is out of town less desirable.

Because I said YES to exercise, I realized that my horniness when my boyfriend was out of town came from a place of needing to be validated.  Since my boyfriend wasn't there to tell me how cute I was or to show me affection with a hug or a blow job or my fucking me, I needed to get it by showing off in the showers at the gym or jacking off with a stranger.  I would mask the lesson by saying that I needed to get off or I needed some excitement since he was out of town.  When I was with my Ex, I would say that I needed to do it because it was a stress reliever because of the turmoil I was dealing with at home.  But it all came down to a need to be validated.  And once I really started saying YES to exercise, I was validating myself.  I didn't need it from an outside source.  That's not to say that I won't ever fool around when he's out of town.  But it's less motivated by validation or I'm motivated less often by my motivation.

I suppose you could say that I'm just getting older and our libido changes.  But even that means that priorities are different and that I'm living with enough experience to finally figure out why certain things bring me pleasure and why certain things in my life have outlived their usefulness.

And if all of that self reflective mumbo jumbo doesn't work, then I can be happy with my bigger chest and bigger arms and flatter tummy.  It works on that level too.