My Plan to Flourish!

This week, we were asked to Blog our assignment, however I felt mine was a bit personal, not to mention brutally long for making you all have to read.  So, instead I will summarize!  :) You can thank me later.

Basically the idea was to  assess ourselves and set some goals.  We have assessed ourselves in the past.  I was a bit more gentle in the past than I was with this actual paper.  I assess my physical, psychological, and spiritual aspects of life, and here is what I came up with.

Physically I gave myself a 6.  I'm incredibly active and love everything fitness related.  Physical activity is a part of my daily life, and so all my points come from that.  I deducted points because I still have pretty bad eating habits.  I know that by eating cleaner, I not only become healthier, but I have the potential to really take my fitness levels higher.  Seems like a no brainer, but I struggle with it all the time.  I never really had to worry about what I eat from a weight point of view, and since it seems as if everything is about weight, I never cared about the other benefits of eating healthy.  Now, that I know those benefits, I want to do it, but hard habits are harder to break.  My plan is to use printed meal plans from clean eating resources.  I feel this will help get me on the right path to better food choices.

Psychologically, I am a mess, and only gave myself a 3.  I have self-esteem issues, self-worth issues, anger issues.  I've been hurt by those who are supposed to love me the most, and left feeling pretty lonely.  Before I throw myself into a full pity party, I am also blessed in many ways, but this is about what I need to improve upon, not what's already fantastic.  I feel that the meditation exercises that we have learned in class such as the subtle mind and the loving-kindness practices will be very beneficial to me.  The subtle mind really helps me find a sense of calm when I need it most, and the loving-kindness helps me focus not only on thoughts for others, but for myself as well, which is where I really need it right now.  I also found the visualization exercise regarding "A Taste of Human Flourishing" to be very beneficial.  My ultimate goal here would be to let all the good things in life be in primary control of my thoughts as opposed to the chaotic ones that tend to naturally take over. 

Spiritually, I once scored myself relatively high, but after much consideration I realized that I was wrong.  I believe my original score came from the idea that "well, I'm doing everything right".  Meaning I read my Bible every night, I pray every day, I read my devotions every day, I go to church every week, and I volunteer teach a kids fitness class at the church once a week.  However, I currently feel like I'm just going through the actions, but not really living the spiritual life that I would like to be living.  Some of the issues come back to not believing that I'm good enough to be a Christian.  I struggle with anger issues ultimately with myself, but try to blame God instead.  I struggle even more with control issues, and try to fix things myself instead of turning to God first.  Needless to say, these things leave me falling on knees begging for forgiveness more than I would like to admit.  My goal is to close this gap I have made between me and God, no matter how far out of my comfort zone I must get.  I think prayer and meditation are going to work best for me. 

This is a very chopped up version of my paper, but hopefully you get the idea.  I ended the paper with  "This is my plan, and I will flourish".  I truly believe that and I believe you all will too!