Making the transition to a healthy lifestyle

I am a personal trainer, not a writer or a psychologist.  I don’t have the salesmanship to convince you that deciding to get fit and healthy is the best decision you will ever make.    I borrowed this passage from a book and it echoes my sentiments on the topic.  Read on……  

"Sometimes I feel like my life is a series of trapeze swings.  I’m either hanging on to the trapeze bar swinging along, or a few moments of my life, I’m hurtling across the space between them.

Most of the time, I spend my life hanging on for dear life to my trapeze–bar–of-the moment.  It carries me along at a certain steady rate of swing and I have the feeling that I have control of my life.  I know most of the right questions and even some of the right answers.  But once in a while, as I’m merrily (or not so merrily)swinging along, I look out ahead of me at the distance, and what do I see?  I see another trapeze bar swinging toward me.  It’s empty, and I know, in that place in me that knows, that this new bar has my name on it.  It is my next step, my growth, my aliveness coming to get me.

 In my heart-of hearts I know that for me to grow, I must release my grip on the present, well-known bar to move to the new one.  Each time it happens to me, I hope that I won’t have to grab the new trapeze bar.  But in my knowing place, I know that I must totally release my grasp on the old one.  Each time I am filled with terror.  It doesn’t matter that in all my previous hurtles across the void of unknowing I have always made it.

 Each time I am afraid that I will miss, that I will be crushed on the unseen rocks in the bottomless chasm.  But I do it anyway.  Perhaps this is the essence of what the mystics call the faith experience.  No guarantees, no net, no insurance policy, but you do it anyway because somehow, to keep hanging on to the old trapeze bar is longer on the list of alternatives.  And so for an eternity that can last a microsecond or a thousand lifetimes, I soar across the dark void of “the past is gone, the future is not here yet.”  It’s called transition.  I have come to believe that transition is the only place where real change occurs.

 The transition zones in our lives are incredibly rich places.  They should be honored, even savored.  In spite of the pain and fear and feelings of being out-of-control that can accompany transitions, they are still the most alive, most growth-filled, passionate, expansive moments in our lives.  Transforming our need to grab the new trapeze bar is allowing ourselves to dwell in the only place where significant change happens.  It can be terrifying.  It can be enlightening.

 Hurtling through the void, we may just learn how to fly….

That next trapeze bar is coming your way.  It is time to make a change and get healthy!"

Modified from:  The Essence Book of Days, by Darran Parry, 1995