Thoughts On It All

Emotions.  What the fuck.  Insane.  Not that I’m having bad ones, they’re actually fantastic right now but I had a night last night where everything happened.  What do I mean?  I essentially had a talk with a great friend of mine that was a decade in the making.  I told that friend today that I feel “like something that was bottled up and hidden forever was finally let out.”  That what it feels like.  It’s incredible.  SO incredible.  When this happens, however, it take it sometimes takes it out of me.  There are so many emotions and feelings that are released all at once.  In this instance literally 10+ years of emotions, thoughts, and feelings.  That can be overwhelming to the body and it can, in turn, start affecting me physically.  Now this physical experience is not exclusive to me, nor is it exclusive to only this one experience, I have had this happen many times in many different situations.  It’s essentially when I am dealing with an emotional moment or a bunch of moments that are too strong for my brain to handle and I cannot handle all of it it spirituality so my body then takes on and absorbs what is left.  You ever had something so incredible happen, good or bad, that you wake up the next day and you feel hung over?  You then think, “What did I drink or eat the night before that is making me feel this way?” and you then realize that you ate the same thing you always eat and you didn’t drink any booze.  Know that feeling?  That’s what I have heard referred to as an, “emotional hangover” and today mine was a doozey.  Usually it just sucks my energy away but today I actually woke up with a legit headache.  Sit and think about that for a sec.  Emotions physically fucking with our bodies.  That’s a hell of a thing to accept.  Took me a long long time to see that it actually happens to me.

Today was my yoga day and I went.  And it was rough.  So so rough.  I equate it to my emotional hangover and the fact that at the book store yesterday there were a bunch of home made candies and cookies.  Of course I ate a bunch after not eating much sugar.  I didn’t eat a lot though so I feel like todays bad experience with my yoga class was really mostly emotions.  On top of that conversation I had last night, yesterday right before the conversation actually I asked a bunch of people to help me with something I had come up to a wall with, something I have never really been capable of dealing with.  Some may read this and think that’s not a huge deal, but for me, it was.  HUGE.  I’m really really really really bad at asking for help, so to me that was massive.  That on top of the big talk I had made me feel like I was emotionally drained.  Totally.  In a very good way.  “Feels like light”  (btw, if you haven’t noticed I’m kinda hippy-esque when it comes to this shit so deal with it).  Back to the yoga.  It was so insanely hard today.  I was rehydrating because it’s Bikram Yoga and I was going less deep as I was trying to take it easy on myself yet I still got dizzy and had to sit some stretches out.  More than most.  2 days ago I had to sot out more than I ever have, even more than I did on my first day, so what if my body knew some how what was coming up.  WEIRD!  Anywho, back to the imbalance in yoga.  It was because I was a tad chemically imbalanced somewhere in my body.  I don’t know much of anything about the physiology of emotions and chemicals in the human body, but I do know how to listen to and hear my body pretty well and that is what my body was telling me.  Chemicals are off.  As in my body taking over what my head and heart couldn’t handle with yesterday.  I felt it in my athletics.  Big time.

Over the past month or so I have been dealing with a lot of sloth when it comes to my practice with running and cycling.  I have got out a little but not much more than once a week for each.  This is way better than not at all and I am also practicing yoga which does tak up a lot of time and energy, but I do truly love cycling and running so why not practice them too?  Emotional energy.  Or, actually a lack thereof.  I wrote above about only two situations, the emotional conversation and the asking for help, but there is rarely just one or two instances that lead up to the emotional hangover.  In my opinion, the human body very well could be the most amazing thing ever.  It can handle some insane amounts of physical and emotional ups and downs, so to have emotions physically affect the body is crazy big.  It’s never just the one thing that does that.  Ever.  Period.  I can now see that this has been weeks and months coming as I look at myself and my actions over the past few months, like slowly walking away from passionately cycling and running all the time.  That, to me, is a fantastic gauge. The best, really.  I love both pursuits so intensely, so to walk away from them and not practice at least one of them every day I am keeping myself from something I love.  Some may say, myself included, that in that action of walking away I am keeping myself from love.

I have worked SO hard at getting where I am in the world of running and cycling.  I have spent SO much time in my thoughts, asking for advice, taking the advice, reading, writing, on and one, all of which is in the spirit of building a healthy relationship with running and cycling.  When I make choices to not practice a lot, I am walking away from all that hard work.

I sit here marinating in an amazing moment of life that I probably will always remember and grow from.  It feels as if there was a massive explosion within me where some glaring character defects and short comings got blown away and I am now left to clean up and sort through what remains.  I still see all around me some things I need to work on but the balance has now shifted towards attributes and abilities (I’m assuming that’s what the opposite of character defects and short comings are).  What I’m super grateful for is the fact that I didn’t totally collapse inward and stop the cycling and running all together, because now, what I can do is take the new Pat (if you havent’s figured it out yet this is a rebirth) and gather up all I have learned so far and all that I continue to learn and apply it towards running and cycling among many other parts of my life.  I have a really cool feeling about that and I think some amazing things are going to be happening in the near future in regards to all that.  It’s a really cool time to be here where I am in my skin doing what I do being me and I can’t wait to see what happens next.