Monday, 15 February 2016

Check-In: 2016-02-15 (Monday)

Diet: lots of vegetables and balanced meals, relatively low added sugar
Exercise: walking, yoga, chi kung, (swimming recently & later today)
Sleep: good hours, sometimes late to bed but returned to a reasonable hour today
Mindfulness: yoga, chi kung, meditation
Spirit: friends, running with a dog, walking in nature, love & acceptance exercises, Star Wars

New format again! This time incorporating a lot of an old format, but with some tweaks. I find I really like breaking things down like this because each of these elements are such an important role in my well-being. As for tweaks, I've first of all taken away the judgmental pass/fail element, since that seems to turn into an exercise in guilt, which isn't helpful. Instead, I'm just listing things I have done recently that contribute to the category, emphasizing the positive, because I really liked that aspect of the old format.

I have also changed "love and support" to "spirit" because I have been contemplating things of a pseudo-spiritual nature a lot lately and I want somewhere to track it, and I think this overlaps nicely with the positive feelings I get from social connection.

The pseudo-spiritual things I have been contemplating are generally of an intuitive nature. For example, it is apparently quite good for our mental health to walk in nature, especially when there are trees, and I find that my intuition is aware of this. That is, if I go out into the woods here and meditate a little bit, I can tell that the presence of the trees is pleasurable and stimulating yet calming. Similarly, Mark talks metaphorically about "house spirits". For example, when the fire is going and Karen and I are reading near it while the dog is curled up on the carpet chewing on a bone, he says that this makes the house spirits happy. Basically, I think we have a long evolutionary history of things that feel good emotionally, such as family, friends, warmth, trees, fresh air, clean kitchens... whatever. This all fits under the category of Spirit in this case (in the previous check-in I believe I called it Magic--which means I probably keep re-explaining these ideas... let's call that "drill").

As for what I've been doing, the walking has continued, of course. I'm still doing 15,000 steps a day, which is a nice pace for me. I could do more, but 15k feels balanced along with the other exercise and my other interests. The swimming has been continuing, though we only attend Monday to Thursday.

I've also been doing "sympathy yoga" so that when Mark is at pilates, I'm doing some exercise as well. I'm not batting 100% on that, but then it isn't necessary to--it's important for me to exercise the amount that I need, not the amount that Mark needs. Having said that, I am enjoying the chance to play with yoga and chi kung again.

I had an interesting experience the other day with my lungs. I did some stairs the other night in an attempt to get 50 "staircases" (my new Fitbit can measure vertical distances). I only got to 49 before midnight came and the target reset. In the attempt, however, I activated my exercise-induced asthma, which manifests as a feeling like my lungs have been lightly seared in a frying pan. As an experiment, I tried doing some chi kung breathing exercises, including lifting the sky and carrying the moon. I found that the symptoms very rapidly disappeared, and also that I felt great in general, from nose stuffiness to body aches going away as well. Since then, I've been practicing those exercises a lot more, and I have fallen in love with them again.

On Friday night Mark, Karen, and I met with Leslie and Bruce for dinner. Leslie is a prof from when Mark and I were at Macewan, and Bruce is her partner. Leslie is here for a year on sabbatical, living in a boat at the harbor and writing a book. They are both odd people, in a good way, the way that smart people can be delightfully odd. We are going to visit bookstores and bakeries on Wednesday.

On Saturday I went to the Café Croissant put on by L'Alliance Française, listened to some conversation in French (I didn't have the ability to participate much, but I could keep up with most of it just listening), then walked downtown to a restaurant called Floyd's Diner for some food and to read some Astérix, then walked to a movie theatre to watch Star Wars: The Force Awakens. My thoughts on this are somewhat complicated, but generally speaking I really enjoyed it. Nice to see that the Star Wars franchise is making Star Wars movies again, instead of poorly written Muppet Show movies.

Anyway, Mark is going to pilates soon, so I will go prepare for some sympathy yoga.

No comments:

Post a Comment