Why are you here? What questions do you have in your life that you came here searching for answers? Are you here for yourself? Are you here for somebody else? If you are here for somebody else, you cannot answer the question for them. Mental Wellness is not a gift that can be given, it is something that must be earned. Perhaps you do not know what the questions are yet. Perhaps that is why you are here, you are looking for your questions. No matter where we come from this is where we all start.
You may want to exercise, make more money, and be healthier for your family. You may want to enhance performance and control anxiety. You may be looking for ways to adapt to a mental health diagnosis, or recover from trauma. That question, why are you here, that is your seed. That seed contains your experiences, resources, your support networks, but more importantly it contains all of your potential. I quite like using seed as a metaphor, it makes a great acronym too, success explored exposes development. New endeavors are all so diverse and have unique needs. They each require a great deal of different things in order to grow.
Now we have our seed, to stay with our analogy, and we need to look and see where we are going to plant it. If you work, commute, have children, a spouse, maybe some, maybe none, and then have to manage to consistently keep everybody alive, you will have to be creative about how you find time. I like to set minimum goals, we will talk more about why in next week’s post. A minimum goal is the absolute minimum time you know you will be able to devote. It is how much you have to do in order to know that you are making consistent progress, and challenging yourself. We can always do more. I give myself virtual achievement points for each yoga class over three I take a week, when I started it was one class a week.
This is where we begin to build our foundation, on consistent progress. It is from here that we can gauge how to plan for our next phase. Imagine now jumping ahead in time, your seed is grown, what does that look like, feel like, try to make it as vivid as possible, using all of your senses. Now jump ahead in time again, it is three years later, imagine how it has changed. Try to experience as much detail as your imagination will let you. How do you feel about your imagined path now that you are back at the beginning?