⏳ Erebus Growing | 0042 - Tenet 6: Honor your body

Welcome to Erebus Growing, a weekly email where I share little snippets of life to help you change and grow into your highest life.

It’s been a long week, but this week will be shorter! I have this coming Friday and the following Monday off from the 9-5 and the part-time.

And when I tell you that I’m excited.

It’s an understatement.

Namely because things are just busy and I haven’t had much time to genuinely just take a moment and breathe.

With the changes coming of leaving my current 9-5, moving, and all that comes with those things, I want to just breathe for a hot second.

So, this is a reminder to you, too. It’s okay to just breathe.

In fact, you really should.

👨🏻‍💻 Meditation

One of the biggest challenges I undertook in my life was over all of 2022.

I committed to rowing 2,154 miles on my water rower over the year.

It was approximately 3.5 million meters and worked out to just about 10,000 meters a day (which worked out to 50 minutes a day, give or take).

I did it partially on a whim, to be honest.

But it became a full commitment for me. One that I’m beyond proud to say I met just days before the year was over.

In August 2021, I discovered virtual challenges. There are a handful of different ones out there, but I’ve stuck with The Conqueror ever since then.

In short, you use an app to track the activity you’re doing (e.g., using Apple Fitness to track the steps/distance you make during a day) and then upload it to the app. I manually enter my rowing distances.

Complete the required number of miles and voila, you’ve completed the challenge without having to do it just on race day.

I have run a half-marathon before and would like to push myself to run a full marathon one day, but virtual challenges are a good in-between.

Something struck me about The Conqueror’s “Great Wall of China” virtual challenge and, having just gotten my rower in October so that I could keep going throughout the winter, I said, “what the hell, let’s do it.”

I sat down for over 330 days in 2022. I only had a handful of days where I didn’t row because I was away on trips for one reason or another.

Most days, it was for 50 minutes to row my 10,000 meters. A handful of days, it was to row 15,000 meters over the course of an hour and a half. And for exactly three days, it was almost three hours to row my longest distance ever at just over 25,000 meters (the approximate length of an extended edition Lord of the Rings movie, if you’re curious).

I did all of this because it’s important to honor your body.

Your body is the only thing that will accompany you from the day you were born to the day that you die.

No matter how much junk food, sugar, and bad crap you’ve put through it, it has most likely kept going for you.

No matter how you treat it, it always wakes you the next morning.

Humans, in times of great stress and need, have been known to commit superhuman acts.

We are wired with a need to survive.

And, all too often, we grow complacent.

I grew up overweight.

In fact, I lost over 100 pounds about a decade ago.

Then, I gained it all back and then some due to a sedintary lifestyle coupled with a full-time job.

I went for years not caring about my body.

It started to change in 2020.

I spent a long time falling in love with my body again.

The American lifestyle (sugary, bloated diets; obsessive need to be thin; quick-paced expectation of results) is not an easy one. And it takes an almost superhuman level of intentionality to break it.

But I’m working on it.

And falling back in love with my own body has been a core component of it.

Because falling in love with my body means that I want to take care of it.

I want to nourish it properly, make sure that it gets consistent movement and stretching, and that, every once in a while, I really push it and test the limits.

Honoring your body can look like so many things. For me, it follows three principles: healthy eating with a plant-forward diet, consistent care and maintenance with doctor’s visits and vitamins/supplements, and maintaining and pushing the limits with exercise and movement.

I’m still learning, as any person should be, but focusing on these three principles has already, in just three short years, changed the trajectory of my life.

I have a daily workout that, try as I might, I can’t miss or it doesn’t feel right. I have a better diet with less meat. And I visit the doctor routinely (whether physician or dentist or other doctor) to make sure that I take care of myself.

After all, I want to live a healthy and enjoyable life, seizing on everything this world has for me.

📚 Inspiration and Resources
Every week we all consume content and I share my favorites here.

Self-growth.
One of the core practices of my journey has been journaling. I’ve talked about it before in a couple of Erebus Growing editions, but now I’m coming close to filling up my current journal. For me, that journal has been an important book. Too many people acquire notebooks that they never use and they gather dust on a shelf away from sight. My favorite is an old journal from a friend of mine. After some research, I found it’s from the Eccolo World Traveler store. My new four-pack is arriving this week. Give it a go here.

Health.
Back in 2021, right after I started focusing on improving my physical health, I needed something to do in the winter months. After a lot of research, I landed on purchasing a water rower. Since then, it has been a core part of my life every single day. My choice of rower was an Ergatta water rower. It’s a beautiful wooden contruction that looks gorgeous in my living space. (One of my cats definitely avoids it.) Give it a look here.

Health.
I talked earlier about the virtual challenges. They’re a great way to inspire yourself, or someone else, to get started and motivated. The Conqueror has a number of different challenges, all with medals for completing them. If you’re looking for a way to get started (or help someone else get started), this could be a great example of where to pick up. Give it a try here.

📓 Journaling Prompt
Journaling is one of the most important things to do when exploring our own lives. A new prompt for you to use this week is below.

Do you honor your body?

Until next time, I wish you enough and send you off with love and a sense of urgency in your life.