Lots of things have come together for me this week, and today’s post seems like just the day to write about what I’ve been thinking and learning about.

This week I have been thinking lots about fear, anxiety, and control. I have never considered myself a fearful or nervous person. I think most people who know me might describe me as courageous and fearless. I was the laid-back type who didn’t spend time worrying about things that didn’t seem likely to happen. I fear very little. And I always thought anxiety was somehow linked to irrational fears. Anxiety is linked to nervousness. I am almost never nervous.

But then I began eating for nutrients and health instead of out of compulsion and mindlessness. I started thinking very hard about what I was putting into my body and how it affected me physically, mentally, emotionally. But what I notice now is that while my binge eating has decreased, my binge thinking has increased. And now, some days when the stress is just outside the beneficial stress window with looming deadlines and cars that need fixing, and appts. and decisions to be made professionally and personally…and your treadmill has died, my thoughts take on a life of their own and begin to race to keep up with all the things going on. Preventing this process has been my coping mechanism most recently. However, preventing all the things that could happen to induce the binge thinking is outside of my control, and so this approach works the majority of the time but not always.

I’m wondering, though, if there’s not something else I could be doing to understand why I turn on myself.  Here’s the hard part. I am a very reflective person, so how does one reflect on past experiences and events to learn from them without then ruminating over them and worrying about the future. And so just as I am thinking about all these things after a bout with such worrying earlier this week, I come across this quote and my mind is blown. I realize very quickly that my anxiety and yes, fear, has to do with my inability to control all of the things that may or may not happen. Attempting to control things that are simply outside of my control takes a patience and dedication I do not practice often enough until now.

And so what does it mean to let go of the need for control and thus this fear of “losing control,” I think it takes a leap of faith, metaphorically speaking, in myself and who I am, although as you’ll see below, practicing such a metaphor literally can be empowering.

And so change and becoming the best of ourselves takes a giant leap of faith, and sometimes, as fearful as it is, we have to make the jump. And so I was reminded of the time I took such a leap off a cliff in Jamaica. Shane thought I had lost my mind. I was only 6 months into committing to my health, and I was gonna do things that I hadn’t been able to do in prior years because of my weight and b/c I was so out of shape.

But here it is for all to see. Me taking a leap of faith.

 

And today I woke early and couldn’t go back to sleep, and so I watch Disney’s Brave. I hadn’t seen it, and some really awesome friends of mine thought that was crazy—“How had I, Michelle, not seen Brave?” Well, I watched it this morning, and all I have to say is WOW! 

 

What a great story for little girls and us women trying to find our way and deal with our fears. Be Brave!