Liljumper’s Adventures

I love my parents, they mean the world to me and are so supportive to me. They have been there for me every step of the way and I know they will continue to be.

In times of trial, they have remained with me and supportive, even when I was doing things they didn’t agree with.

They let me. They let me make my own mistakes, learn from them, and still love me. They allowed me to grow and change and have loved me at every stage of my evolution.

They love me even when I annoy them, when I ask what if questions, and would you rather questions. They love me when I’m silly and serious. I know I could talk to them about whatever I thought of.

Their love provides a baseline, a foundation for me as a person and for my life. It is because I know I am loved and that I have a safe and loving base that I can go ahead with my life, do the things I want to do, need to do, hate to do. Knowing I can always return home, to where I am loved.

Their love is the wind beneath my wings, all allowing me to fly free and go forth and prosper.

They mean the world to me. So thank you for being you so I can be the best me.

Posture is my biggest goal, or habit I want to have this new years. I have been pretty good about drinking water last year and taking better care of myself, but I want this year to be the year of my best body (Thank you Oprah for telling me this on a commercial I saw about a hundred times).

But I want it to be more. I want it to be the year of my best body and mind. I want to cultivate a better sense of my body, my fitness, but also my mind. While I exercise my body I want to explore and train my mind. This will be affected by my yoga practice, but also my return to creativity and change in mentality.

That is my biggest goal of the year. It’s not a new years resolution. For some reason that sounds too…concrete to me. While it doesn’t sound concrete and attainable. There are a ton of little steps that are accountable and concrete that will get me there.

So as a quick rephrasing before I head out for today, having the year of my best body and mind is my 2016 plan. That sounds a bit better.

Today is my birthday. A day I look forward to all year. And I thought it would be the perfect occasion to write this post of the 30 day writing challenge: a short biography, real or imagined, or your mother.

I have my mother who has raised me, and I thought I could write about her, but it seems very factual. Another post soon will deal with my parents, but I thought the bigger, and more challenging post would be about my birth mother.

When I was younger, I had a more pessimistic idea of my birth mother. I felt betrayed and left alone. I felt unwanted and wondered if anything I ever did would ever make me feel enough or wanted. More than that I had questions and wondered why. Why I was ever abandoned?

So today I’ll write about a more optimistic, perhaps idealistic, version. More sophisticated, more understanding, more mature, but also equally as fictional.

Whatever story I write will always be a story, never more than that and I shouldn’t delude myself into believing my own tapestry of a story.

So I’ll start my story with this:

Perhaps one day my birth mother found out she was pregnant. Perhaps she had other children. So she decided to give birth to the baby, not to terminate it. Perhaps she was worried and scared, afraid of being caught, but also having to give up her child. Perhaps she told the father and they decided together to keep it. Perhaps the father was not in the picture and keeping the baby was not an option. But she gave birth to a baby girl. She took care of this baby girl until she couldn’t conceal the baby anymore and then dropped it in a way that the baby would be found, taken, and cared for. Perhaps she cried. Perhaps she waited and watched to make sure the baby was found. Perhaps she even thinks about the baby now.

If she does, did, will, then I would hope to send this message out to her: I am doing well, and giving me up was a strong decision that resulted in a better future for me. And if you wanted or felt you needed my forgiveness, you have it.

I am older, wiser, and more mature now, more understanding of people’s limitations and faults. Realizing that decisions are gray, never black and white, that people have to make horrible decisions. That sometimes you have to do something that hurts.

What truly marks this birthday is that I have changed. Each year I become more and more who I think I was meant to be.

I have grown up, one more year older, and more understanding and forgiving of her than I ever was before.

 

Day one’s mantra was: I Accept.

One word, accept, but such a challenging word. Two things stuck out to me today. One was her stressing of trusting the video. It is a process, but one has to trust the process, accept the journey we are on. And there is the concept of acceptance again.

Today was about accepting where we are now, our bodies, our mentality and realizing that while we may be focused on our future bodies or mind, it is important to accept where we are first. We should be present and patient. Accepting of who we are, our shortcomings, our past.

What matters is our decision to practice, to continue and to choose to spend the time on our bodies and mental health.

We should be more accepting, and in general I think. I know I could use a lot more of that from myself (my harshest critic).

So what will I take from this? Acceptance of course, but how?

This is not a promise I make, I love the idea of a mantra (which you say throughout the practice).

I accept where I am now. I accept that I don’t have many things sorted, a definite plan for the future, or a feeling of knowing I am on the right path.

But I also accept that I am a strong person, and will find it. I will find what I am looking for and grow as a human. I accept this process will have bumps, be hard, and test my limits.

I accept that I have limits, am impatient, driven by lists, and anxiety prone. I accept that where I am is only the starting point and by repeating this mantra every day I can move forward.

I want to accept me where I am now. Not just a vision of who I want to be in the future. Acceptance doesn’t start then, it starts now. Acceptance starts today and every day. It’s a continuous choice to accept oneself and both accept and appreciate the journey.

Music makes me feel like liquid. I feel fluid and I feel flexible. I feel brave and I feel untouchable. I feel powerful and I feel elegant.

I can move however I like and I use that power, the power I get just from being me in my most essential form. I feel like I could move anyway I want. I am brave enough to dance the moves that haunt my dreams. I am brave enough to try anything. I feel untouchable. I feel like I can dodge, I feel like I can move. I feel powerful. I feel elegant, in touch with my body, feeling its own beauty.

I feel free.

If I had to pick a spirit animal, I would be a cat. I wouldn’t have to pick one, I would be one. No questions.

I don’t enjoy getting wet. I like being pet. I can be very particular. There are times I don’t want attention, and times I do (you will know when these times are). Sometimes I have the urge to do something crazy just because I want to (knock over something, say something wild, but don’t because that’s not acceptable).

I have never had a cat, so I can only speak from the stereotypes of cats and the videos on the internet.

But I cannot even imagine myself as any other spirit animal. I have always had a fascination with them, I got cat ears, I was a cat for Halloween. I like whiskers on my face, not from a cat, the look of them on my face. I like a form of makeup dubbed the cat eye.

I can’t deny the truth anymore. Nor would I.

This will make it the first week, to my knowledge of posting every day. I am pretty on top of the posting schedule (I have to be because of my anxiety and scheduling). When I am ahead I am more relaxed about my schedule and my writing is better. It’s better for everyone around basically, readers and writers alike. I just can’t push posts out when I am anxious or feeling stressed. So because of this, I know that I have a post out every day of this week, the normal MWF and on Tuesday and Thursday. Lucky! It won’t happen every week (so if these feel like too much emails or posts, don’t worry! Stick in there!)

I wanted to update you all on a 30 day challenge I am taking on. I am still continuing the writing one. It’s for writing prompts mostly when I want a change of something.

But look out for, in the future a lot more of these posts. I have a few in the works now that I am really excited about and I hope you will be too.

For reference, and planning sake, I will have the writing prompts, this daily yoga reflections, and a question/answer calendar responses (based on a gift I gave).  I am pretty excited and I hope you all can be too!

Anyway I have been trying to get into yoga the whole past year. I participated in a class my last semester of college and loved it. I dabbled on and off since then. But this yoga month is designed to encourage daily practice (videos consisting of about 30 minutes) and is not only physical awareness and fitness, but also mental awareness. It is about changing perspective and body health. For reference, it is the Yoga Camp with Adrienne. I hope this encourages me not only to practice yoga daily (from earlier this week on, since I arrived from Munich), but also to change my mentality.

Due to all these exciting things happening, I have more post ideas and things to talk about. And with my posting the quality of the posts shouldn’t change. If anything, maybe this will give people an even better way to get to know me, if the past 270 or so posts didn’t!

When I was younger I dreamed of smelling nice, not that I didn’t smell nice, but with a specific scent. A scent that was all my own, unique, luxurious, and beautiful. It seemed to me that adults wore perfume. But my mom is allergic to perfume scents. So it was something that I looked upon with envy.

I did experiment with floral scents, all preapproved, that faded quite quickly and were purchased at Bath and Body Works.

But as soon as I went to college, I bought a perfume. It was, and is, a DKNY Golden Apple. My best friend had a series of these apples and I smelled one and thought, this. This is fruity and fun and it comes in an apple. What other questions could I have?

But now that I’m more mature and mellow, I find myself thinking, it’s not always what I want to smell like a golden apple. I want to find something more mature, more deep.

So I am on a scent hunt, a hunt to find my new scent. One that I can identify more with as I am older, and realize that, while I love apples, I want some more complexity, new notes, differing concentrations.

I want it to be sophisticated, complicated, sweet, but also spicy. I want to smell it and fall in love with myself every time I smell it. I want to be excited to wear it.

I want my perfume to reflect the person I am, not the person I want to be.

My jet lag has been better than most. The first day I took a few naps (having slept not at all on the plane). Then I was able to sleep around midnight here and wake up at 10. The following day I was forced to take a nap during the day.

But my body is actively rebelling against me. I have had a fever since I got here and almost a constant headache…except right after I wake up. It’s like my body has high hopes, then realizes how wrong it is for the time, and then immediately starts to protest throwing just enough feelings at me that it is uncomfortable to be anywhere vertical or with my eyes closed (since opening them is physically painful).

So plus side? I am more or less time wise, doing well. Con? I feel pretty terrible.

But I am hoping every day I get a bit better and more adjusted and my body stops throwing chaos at me.

That’d be nice.

I can be angry unreasonably, like most right? I can be angry for many reasons, some more valid than others. So I’ve decided to compile an anger checklist. A checklist I will try to run through when I’m angry.

1. Are you hungry?
2. Are you sleepy?
3. Are you stressed about something? Are you anxious? – Can you do something about it?
4. Do you feel guilty about something?
5. Do you feel like it’s your fault?

Hopefully this simple checklist will keep my anger in check and make sure when I am upset, it’s for an upset reason.