You Are How You Use Your Energy

Paddling Out At Sunrise

It’s in these moments of flow that life really makes sense.

I had one of these special moment just for me in my last week in El Tunco.

I had spent many years working in bars and mistreating my body and soul in general. Smoking too much, drinking too much, going to bed too late, procrastinating, ruining friendships, it wasn’t pretty.

I emptied my life of everything it used to hold and took off from Montreal about 6 months before this incident, and had tried to do a lot to turn my life around.

Most recently and notably I’d quit smoking, severely cut down my drinking, and started going to bed at a reasonable hour so I could get up early enough to go surf with the sunrise. There were other changes, but we’ll talk about those at a later date.

Imagine this scene while I’m paddling out one morning:

The sun hasn’t yet peaked its brilliant head over the horizon, the water is silver and glassy, I’m completely alone, flying fish are jumping a few feet away from me, migratory birds are flying high overhead, the few clouds that are in the sky are the most intense shade of fuchsia i’ve ever seen, the sky pale blue.

In this incredibly beautiful moment I realized I was healthy and the world around me was magical.

In this one moment I realized I had completely changed everything.

This is my Maktub.

I went from a cold, dark, grey place in my mind, where the whole world was unjust and cruel, to this.

I realized in that moment that you are how you use your energy. Instead of destroying my body and mind I had slowly started treating myself with love and respect, and love is now what I was projecting onto the world, and love was what I was getting back.

You choose to destroy or create yourself.

The realization really came down to that one simple sentence.

Yeah, life hadn’t been easy, but in comparison to potentially much worst alternatives, I’d had it pretty good.

Besides, it’s not a comparison with others, but rather a comparison to my potential.

It didn’t matter if I was the richest or poorest person in the world, it didn’t matter if life had thrown me more lemons than others or not, what mattered was that I used to suck at life, and now I didn’t.

I used to literally eat myself from the inside out with a plethora of negative emotions, filling the holes with band-aids, like cigarettes, alcohol, and superficial relationships.

Now I was shining from the inside, with energy to spare.

How had I gotten here?

How you treat your body affects your mind.

I had started by quitting to abuse my body.

I had started a sport which I did for 6 hours a day, waking up every single cell in there.

They were so happy. It was like they had been neglected and ignored.. they’d been sitting on their proverbial little couches numbing themselves with little proverbial televisions waiting for some attention, and now they had attention and they couldn’t wait for the next surf session.

Skin cells stimulated by the flow of water, muscles cells by being stretched and contracted.

Joints started moving again, joints I had forgotten could even move.

It was like I’d started a dynamo, just like the light on your bike when you pedal, getting the gears churning turned the light on upstairs.

It wasn’t just exercise though, it was SURF.

I wasn’t mindlessly running on a treadmill 6 hours a day, I was communing with nature, trying to understand its rhythm so we could play together.

How you treat your mind affects your body.

I had awakened my physical body, which in turn had awakened my mind (and soul i’ll add) which no longer needed the band-aid solutions to feel good, which meant I didn’t have to abuse my body anymore.

It was a holistic upward spiral to health. A perpetual motion machine.

All I had to do was give it that initial nudge which got the engine pumping and the gears turning and it started a cascade.

To me it felt like a helicopter starting its engine.

At first it was slow and heavy and took so much effort to get those propellers spinning, to counteract inertia; but spin they did, and faster and faster.

At first you hear the wooooosh of each heavy blade passing, and the hiss of the motor working to get those heavy blades moving. But soon enough, the RPM reaches optimal speed and those blades not only hold themselves up, they lift the whole helicopter.

Except a helicopter still needs external fuel. I didn’t. Not anymore. The fire was inside, all I had to do was quit trying to put it out.

In Conclusion:

Surfing indirectly taught me that the way I perceive the world is a just a reflection of my inner being.

If I’m being a sour-puss, the whole world looks like lemons, and if I’m being cheerful, the whole world looks like pom-poms and firecrackers.

Just like propellers starting:

If I just change my mood and stop feeding myself poison, eventually, I can’t help but feel great.

When I feel great I take care of myself, when I take care of myself I feel great,

When I feel great I take care of myself, when I take care of myself I feel great,

I feel great I take care of myself, I take care of myself I feel great,

feel great take care of myself, take care of myself feel great,

feel great take care, take care feel great,Delete Cache

great care, care great,

great, great,

great,

great,

great…..

Sometimes something throws sticks in my wheels and the propellers just stop. Then I get frustrated, and that leads to nothing good. More on next weeks’ episode of 10 life lessons I learned from surfing.