Friday Reading Report: Find Your...

This is not going to be the usual kind of book post.  I do, unequivocally, think Alexis Rockley’s book Find Your Fuckyeah is worth reading.  It is funny and wise.  It has useful information in it.  I think Rockley has, like a perceptive massage therapist, found the exact right place to press on the tensed muscle of life in our current climate.

(This is the part where I put the disclaimers, although most of those are for people who stopped reading at the title of the book.)  Rockley is very cute.  She has a high-energy, breezy way of writing (and talking—I got this book at an author event and so heard her when I had only read the first 19 pages while awkwardly waiting around to see if I was going to know anyone in the crowd).  Objectively, she is younger than I am; subjectively, she feels a LOT younger and not just because of her preferred pop culture references.  She swears a lot.  These things may bother some people.  I found them charming, personally.

One of the topics the book touches on is WooWoo.  I’m from Berkeley, so I have a high tolerance for WooWoo (personal line between okay WooWoo and not okay WooWoo happens at people who think healing crystals are more than pretty rocks, but if healing crystals make you happy, you go nuts with them.).  This book came to me in a very WooWoo way.  For some time now, I’ve felt like my life has been getting ready to shift gears, but how was unclear.  I saw a post on Facebook about the author event, but couldn’t go because I would be working then.  And then a client canceled.  And then I didn’t just collapse on the couch, but got my butt in gear and went to hear Rockley speak.

Sometimes a book is the right book for the right person at the right time.  This is exactly the book I needed to read this week.  It has given me a whole bunch of stuff to chew on and chew over.  Not all of it is going to be easily digestible, I predict, because change can really suck, but it is inevitable, so I had better figure out how to suck it up.

This is how many markers I put in the book of things I want to copy out into my commonplace book or use in journaling or both:

So:  this may not be the right book for anyone else right now, but I have a suspicion that it might be.  My copy will be lendable eventually, but impatient people should buy their own.

Smashing ideas

I have issues with the self-care industry, as I have mentioned over and over.  Please note, this does not mean that I think we should not get massages, get pedicures, or light pretty candles if that’s what blows our skirts up.  The thing is, self-care does not have to take the form of spending money.  Here are five cheap or free real self-care things to do for those times when we need to feel better (and yes, feeling better is the point of all this fitness business.)

1.     Smash the white supremacist heteronormative capitalist imperialist patriarchy.  Okay, so that one might not be something we can finish in an afternoon, but we can start.  We can act out or speak up or both.

2.     Make connections.  Yes, this is just another method of doing that first item.  Separation sells stuff.  It creates war and depression and crime and misery.  Call a friend, make a friend, do a good deed, find a volunteer gig.  It will feel awesome.

3.     Move.  Of course I am in favor of moving.  It’s for good reason.  Moving is what makes our bodies happy and happy bodies help make happy minds.

4.     Have a snack.  Hungry people are rarely cheerful.  An apple or a couple of crackers or a handful of nuts can make the difference between personal Armageddon and all being right with the world.

5.     Take a nap.  Even fifteen minutes of rest can transform our attitudes.

We are all worthwhile humans.  We need to treat ourselves as such.

More change...

Yesterday I wrote about the fact that change is inevitable and about how we can choose some of the direction of our change.  Taking that overarching idea a little farther, we need to consider what we are doing in our workouts, what changes, if any, are resulting from those workouts, and what we might want to change to get the changes we might like better.

If we do the same thing over and over in the gym, we will not get the same results.  We will get progressively fewer gains from the same work as our bodies adapt to what we are doing.  (It is nice to know that there is some wiggle-room in the definition of insanity, though…)  What used to result in weight loss or muscle gain or both now barely helps us maintain our current condition.  This is why we have to change things up.

Change comes in many flavors.  We can switch activities, which will automatically cause us to recruit different muscles and brain cells.  We can increase the speed of what we are doing or the weight of what we’re lifting or the amount of time we work out or the number of repetitions or sets.  All of those things help, but it is also important not to choose the same switch every time.  We need to keep our brains and our bodies just a little off-balance for best results.

Go play.