Friday, December 24, 2010

Happy Holidays! A RARE and Special Gift from Me to You :)

Sunday, December 5, 2010

Finding Balance: Love Versus Life

Sometimes when we find love, we lose ourselves.   We meet that amazing individual and before we even know what hit us we have suddenly disappeared inside of a serious relationship.  We disappear because we have begun to neglect our friends, our professional business, our family and often times even our health.  Ladies, think about your last long term relationship?  How did it affect your weight?  I know for me, I tend to gain ten to forty extra pounds when I settle down because we spend so much time eating and laying around enjoying each others company that any focus on fitness seems to fly out of the window. Ultimately, we get to a point where we struggle to find a balance between the love and living a healthy and productive life as an individual.

 I’ve always had a hard time with this, but I came to realize that much of the problem was that I hadn’t taken a good enough amount of time to know, love and commit to myself.  As a result, it was easy to pour all of my love into someone else.  Now that I have taken the time to love me first, I’ve found that I love others in a far more health way.  Even still, a new challenge has risen to the surface.  In an effort to avoid backtracking or resorting to my old ways, I found myself avoiding relationships altogether.  I tried to convince myself that I just wanted to be single so that I wouldn’t risk falling into that same unbalanced pattern again.  Just when all of these jumbled and confusing thoughts threatened to overwhelm and consume me, I took a break from my hectic existence to watch the movie, “Eat Pray Love.”

In the movie, based on the book by the same name, a woman my age finds herself in the midst of a marriage and a life that is no longer fulfilling. In an attempt to find her joy, she leaves all that she knows for a year and takes a journey of self-discovery.  On that journey she focuses on learning and loving herself by placing herself in new environments with new people and spending a lot of time in prayer and meditation.  As she nears the end of her journey, love finds her and initially she runs from it feeling that it might cause her to lose that balance that she worked so hard to attain.

Just when she is prepared to walk away from the love, a wise teacher that she met along the way reminds her that "losing balance for love is a part of living a balanced life." In all of our struggles to get it all right and to have it all figured out,... let's not lose sight of what's really important…Love.