Engage your Core Some More

Zip it up. Engage your core. However you say it in pilates, those interior muscles which are hidden from view need to be tensing and strengthening so they can take the stress.

Tricky. Very tricky.

I am struggling to achieve some success in this elusive form of exercise, because I believe that if I can strengthen that inner core, I will be much better equipped to withstand any twists or jerks or turns which might otherwise result in slipped disks or other muscular injuries, especially to the back.

The back is so central to every move we make, and even to our resting positions. I have learned painfully over this last year how integral it is to every move I make, and every resting posture I choose. If the back is sore, pretty much everything hurts.

Spiritually I am also trying to engage my core. Exercising my faith through reading the Bible, praying, reading spiritual books and discussing them with friends. Identifying and recognising what my core values are as a Christian. Very tricky as well. Hard to see progress, just like with pilates. But also just like with pilates, if I don’t have a strong spiritual core I am in danger of serious injury. Emotional stress may result in spiritual pulled muscles or slipped disks.

Mentally I am trying to engage my core, by embarking on learning a new language. To learn Russian, I first need to learn a new alphabet, so I am still at that basic, infant position, trying hard to master the strange symbols and make the foreign guttural sounds. Keeping the brain active and challenged and learning new things is important, we are told, for future mental agility.

So, 2015 is the year of engagement of my core. Cores. Only by the grace of God can I strengthen all those muscles – physical, spiritual, and mental, but that is my goal. 

Watch this space...

Do Not Enter

Chatting to a new acquaintance at a supper party over the holidays, she asked me why I hadn’t pursued some of my writing ambitions. I floundered. I prevaricated. I stammered out that there were so many distractions, so much to do.

Lame.

This morning therefore I took a walk with the Lord, and asked him to identify the blockages. I quickly understood that it isn’t so much the physical distractions which I allow to eat up the time. It’s the mental distractions. The concerns which I meditate on rather than meditating on God. The anxieties for those I love which pop back into my head over and over again until I am ruminating on them. 

At least when a cow ruminates on her cud, it becomes digestible and does her body some good. When I ruminate on worries, they expand and I dig deeper ruts to ensnare my thoughts.

Each concern becomes a cul de sac which leads me back to where I started from and accomplishes nothing. 

God directed my thinking that if I will only take these concerns to God once and leave them with him, trusting that he does have the answer and is actually working in the situations, I can put up a Do Not Enter sign at the opening to the cul de sac of thoughts and then obey that sign.

Hard to do. I found that as I continued my walk my thoughts kept zeroing in on those old familiar cul de sacs, so I had to admit defeat – ‘I can’t do it, Lord. I need your help. Please remind me every time I start to head into a cul de sac that the Do Not Enter sign is still there and relevant. 

Once I’ve asked you to do something, I can just skim over it in prayer – hey, don’t forget about that situation, Lord, lying down that cul de sac in X’s life. 

Then eventually my brain will be freed up to think creatively again, to focus on the writing ambitions I’ve still got. 

I can head down a road less travelled rather than encircling my familiar mental suburbs again and again. 2015, here I come!