I Didn’t Want to do Body Thrive

I didn’t want to go on a health journey.

I didn’t want to focus on my food, sleep, self care, or morning routine.

I didn’t want to do Body Thrive.

I caught on to Cate Stillman in the early days of Covid shutdown, just after I quit my job and had a back injury. I saw it all as an opportunity – what do I want to learn that I have never taken the time to? I had already started studying in a coaching program and sensed some form of pivot was in my future.

I wanted to jump into Master of You, I loved learning about the elements in our lives and I badly wanted to sort out what my purpose was. It felt bigger than what I had been allowing and I had been noticing the trend of feeling limited when I was managed by others.

I wanted to shift lanes from one purpose driven lifestyle of adventures in serving others and traveling in the wilderness, to the next Instagram worthy journey of meaningful work. I switched jobs and the novelty fueled my fire as did the move to a new town and the change in routine. When I was totally depleted and emotional in that work I quit again and my energy sparked again. It was so easy to believe it was circumstances that had me tired, day after day, and on the verge of tears more often than not.

I didn’t want to tend to those smoldering embers, to the out of control emotions, the lingering fatigue, or the tendency to get injured and be slow to heal. I didn’t want to have a health journey.

I wanted to look at the map, find another cool destination and plot a course to get there with some neat wilderness trips along the way. I could keep driving hard the way I had, my whole career as a wilderness guide, keep pushing toward the finish, the to-do lists. Keep expanding my capacity for efficiency and leadership. Keep showing up day after day.

Until I couldn’t. I felt broken and sad, I was tired and lost. You could say it was the bottom, but I had bottomed-out 4 or 5 times already. I had to get stuck there for a bit to realize that there were things in my life that once had been good enough but no longer were, like my health. Once I noticed that burnout and depletion are some of my health conditions, I could no longer consider myself the ‘picture of health’. As much as I wanted to jump straight into Master of You and to evolve my purpose and have a big adventure, I was too deeply tired. Not only tired but quick to overwhelm and bogged down by brain fog. Everything seemed too hard, too far away and I felt like I was making no progress at anything. I needed to start with Body Thrive, to organize my daily habits in a way that would give me an abundance of energy, heal that which I was ignoring and put me on a path to be healthier each day. I didn’t need to go to the hospital, it wasn’t the obvious kind of emergency health care that I needed, what I needed was to tune into myself and listen to the subtle signs and the deep wisdom of my own body and of myself.

I didn’t want a health journey, but really I was asking for one. I was asking to have the energy to not only take care of myself but others as well, enough energy to change the world. I wanted it to be easy, to just will it into existence and drive forcefully at it until it was true. But neither of those things work, and now I know that health comes first, and that we are all on health journeys of some kind, whether we like it or not. Some are obvious: the show stopping, game changing, “scare you to death” kind of obvious, and others are more subtle. The slow depletion of energy, the increased prevalence of illness and injury, and the slow recovery time that perhaps never comes to full completion. I didn’t want to do Body Thrive to get what I wanted, but the world demands it. Honing in daily habits around food, sleep, self care and exercise, that’s not as glamorous as the resiliency I once thought I had, and now I am slowly paying back the debt I borrowed from tomorrow. I didn’t want to do Body Thrive, but I’m glad I did. Now I can’t stop.