Not long ago I caught a snippet of a recent Jane Fonda interview.
Maybe it's because alcohol has played such a destructive role in my adult life or because, well, Jane Fonda is Jane Fonda, that I found something she said to be particularly poignant.“Even with one drink . . . I would be at half-mast tomorrow. . . . And I only have so many tomorrows left.
I don’t want to be at half-mast for any of them!”Jane Fonda is keeping it real for us, ladies
.Most of you are around my age, which means we are at least half-way through our one life.I'm not being morbid - it's just a fact.
And it's a sobering fact that can also be incredibly motivating.
I dip into that reality for fuel every day since my husband died at forty-four years of age.
I realize that I don't have forever, so I'm willing to do what it takes to turn my resistance inside out and make more powerful, more conscious choices.
My clients know this too, although they don't necessarily express it in those terms at the start. Instead, they feel a sense of urgency to act in service of their desires, but the choices they want to make feel pretty big and a little scary at the beginning.
That means that ANYTHING they do that undermines their desire is a form of resistance and self-sabotage.
Drinking wine, absolutely, is high up on that list for me; staying up too late; eating too much sugar. Yup. Yup. Yup.
It's not to say that we can't do or have these things (unless you can't), but what is absolutely crucial is that BEFORE we make the choice to pick up a drink on a Tuesday night, eat the brownies we bought "for our kids" at Trader Joe's, or watch re-runs of The Fixer Upper (is that just me?) until midnight -- WE WEIGH THE IMPACT of our choices.
I know with 100% certainty that I will be at "half-mast" on Wednesday if I have a glass of wine (or two . . .) on a Tuesday night out with the girls.
I know with 100% certainty, that if I stay up past 11pm, I'll be dragging in the morning when I have an exercise class or writing I want to do.
I know that eating 1/4 of a brownie-at-a-time throughout the evening will result in all of the brownies being eaten. (I am fooling no one).
We might be able to squeak by sabotaging ourselves because we think no one is looking - but that 'ol trick doesn't work very well because we can feel the friction of knowing that are choices are out of alignment with our desire and who we want to become.
AND we aren't the only casualties.
Our choices impact other people too, like our kids, our partners, our friends.I am currently participating a program to write and perform a "Big Talk."And in preparing I am listening to other women prepare their "Big Talks."One woman's talk deals with a radical change in diet that she developed to support her autistic daughter who had a mysterious gastrointestinal disorder.
In order to keep to her diet, she realized that she couldn't go out with her girlfriends as she had in the past.
They didn't support her radical commitment to wellbeing, and so she had to change not only her diet, but her friends too.
And guess what - she figured it out for her daughter and herself. She wrote a book about it. And now she is writing a "Big Talk."Big Impact.
Start with you commitment - what does a full-mast life look like to you?
Honoring a commitment to treat ourselves and our bodies with love means loving ourselves when we numb, distract and fall down too.
But it's important to declare our commitment to the life we desire so we can become a person who can fulfill our commitments.
Imagine the impact we can have when we make empowered choices to keep our sails unfurled?If we're lucky, we'll do some pretty brave and wonderful things for a long time to come.
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