Living with Intention

The first identifier I was given in this life was “strong willed”; a strong willed child, my parents, primarily my stay-at-home mother, would call me. The second, probably unsurprisingly, was “stubborn”. But as a woman in a world that was built to take advantage of me and my fellow females, having the term strong-willed spoken over me consistently throughout my childhood was an unexpected boon as I grew into an adult.

That strong will helped me say no to peer pressure as a teenager and a college student because I knew my own mind and I operated in that confidence. One of the greatest compliments I received from a teacher in high school was from my eleventh grade English teacher, who said that I didn’t compromise myself to make people like me. It meant so much to me that she noticed that about me after only a few months in her classroom.

Esoterically, or spiritually, a person’s will is their power. Will is what supports intention. Because of this, as I’ve gotten older, the descriptor from my family started to change from strong-willed to intense.

This change interestingly coincided with a personal journey where I found myself examining my personality through different “tests” like the Enneagram or my astrological chart or my Gene Keys profile. It didn’t matter how old or new the test was, my results were consistent across the board; I am intense.

This does seem to account for the tension headaches that have plagued me my entire life…

But there is a reason that my family began to recognize this, even when I was living across the country and only saw them two weeks out of the year; my intensity had grown to the point that it was undeniable. Even though I didn’t recognize the cause as it began to happen, they were increasingly aware of my intensity because it was getting worse.

Of course, by getting worse, I mean I was getting better. Over the years, since the beginning of my marriage, I was slowly finding myself on a wellness journey. I married the love of my life, a man who patiently pursued me through friendship and authenticity, but I wasn’t as happy as I’d thought I would be and I wasn’t content to stay that way.

In an effort to understand why, I began to examine my entire life. I kept a chart for every day, tracking my emotions, my activities, my physical health, my sex life…everything, for two full months. I also kept a record of everything that I ate to determine which foods were bothering me at the time.

This was the genesis of a journey that I have been on since, and I’m still on. It won’t end until this life does; I always want to be experiencing and learning and growing until my lungs stop breathing. I am close to nine years into it at this point. Examining my day to day activities, without realizing it at the time, was the first step to eventually understanding that, whether I realize it or not, there is intentionality behind everything that I do. And not realizing it can be incredibly detrimental; that was why I was struggling when I knew I should have been happy, why the honeymoon phase of my marriage was far more difficult than the subsequent years have been.

See, the most consistent struggle of my life has been with my weight; I’ve always had extra, if you will. Growing up in the 1990’s as a chunky child was an experience that has defined so much of my thought life about myself for the vast majority of my thirty-six years. No matter how incorrect, through movies and television and magazines, I developed the deep conviction that I would never be loved because of how I looked, because I was “fat”.

This deep conviction led me to make decisions about my life under the assumption that I would be single my entire life, or, more importantly, I would never be able to live the life that I wanted to live due to my weight. So I decided to pursue a career that could fill the voids in my life caused by my weight. Only, I chose military life. I wanted to be a Naval Intelligence Officer and be married to the job, so to speak, but there was this pesky little thing called a weight limit for military service.

Once again, life was reinforcing the idea that I would never be successful due to my weight. Throughout school, life had seemed to reinforce the idea that I would never be loved due to not being “thin and beautiful”; I was never asked to a dance or on a date until I was twenty-years-old…after I had lost a significant amount of weight.

To be clear, I wasn’t complacent in my struggle. Once I decided to pursue a military career, I began running and counting calories, 1200 per day, and I lost weight. Not enough for my military goal, but enough to attract the attention of a boy in my honor society in college. There it was again, the reinforcement that my weight was the millstone around my neck, holding me back from the life I wanted, and I would only succeed when I was the "correct" weight.

It was reinforced further when the seemingly happy relationship led to me regaining most of the weight that I’d lost, due, in part, to eating his special, gluten free diet, and his treatment toward me changed. He pressured me to go to the gym, he would say he didn’t like it when my stomach touched him, and there was barely any reciprocity when it came to intimacy. He decimated my self-esteem, making me feel disgusting in my own skin just because there was a little extra fat underneath it.

After I ended that relationship, the sine wave of the weight struggle continued. I doubled down on my efforts to lose weight for the Navy during my final year of college, after getting a head start while studying abroad in Russia and enjoying their less processed, less poisonous diet and walking culture. I started running again, and I added high intensity interval training (HIIT) to my running regime and renewed my practice of calorie counting.

Again, it worked. I lost even more weight, getting down to a size 12 for the first time in my life. I ran three half marathons (13.1 miles), improving my time from my first to my second race, in addition to many 5ks. I was incredibly proud of myself; I was called an athlete for the first time in my life and I had worked so very hard to gain the title.

Yet again, it wasn’t enough to fulfill my military goals, to utilize my bachelor’s degree in security and intelligence and Russian studies, but it was enough to gain the attention of, thankfully, a man. The man. The one who was patient and genuine, who listened to my stories of hurt from my previous relationship and told me that I didn’t deserve to be treated that way.

However, as much as I hate to categorize my dear, sweet love this way, it was, at first, yet another reinforcement that I would only get to live the life I wanted if I was the “correct” weight. Lose weight, get the boy; gain weight, lose the boy.

But this time, my man had different intentions, the best intentions, toward me. It’s impossible for me to count how many times my husband has said that my weight has no bearing on his feelings for me or his attraction to me. He has loved me at my lightest and my heaviest and, after a decade of beautiful consistency, I believe him to the core of my being.

Unfortunately, that reassurance didn’t heal the wound in my heart; it didn’t stop the dysfunctional thoughts from telling me that I was unworthy of such love. And it didn’t stop the cycle. Living in my own house with my husband for the first time, and being the cooks and foodies that we are, we both gained weight to the point that I was the heaviest I have been to date.

In 2018, my husband and I made the decision to move from Ohio to Colorado, after falling in love with the Rocky Mountain State on our honeymoon. Unbeknownst to us, we were headed into one of the darkest periods of our relationship. Interestingly, it was also the period in which we were the most financially secure, which was another lesson. I had a typical 8 to 5 job at a national bank while my husband worked nights for one of the most relentless (iykyk) and inhumane employers in the United States currently; let’s just say that smile should be turned upside down.

For about a year and half, I saw the most important person in my life for only a few hours a week. I would get up at 4 AM in order to go out on a date to a 24-hour diner or he would stay up for 36 hours to go on an early morning hike with me after his grueling ten-hour shift. To add insult to injury, his manager was a misandrist (man-hater) who wouldn’t give him a break from nights, despite his (female) day time counterpart offering to make such a swap every few months.

I call this period of my life a “dark night of the soul”. As unpleasant as it was to go through, I am grateful for this time because it was the proverbial poke that I needed from the universe to make changes that I desperately needed. I was in my early thirties but I had heartburn everyday, borderline blood pressure, pain in my lower back, hips and my feet, in addition to completely unacknowledged and untreated anxiety and ADHD.

These emotional and physical problems were having a negative impact on my marriage when life was already making things hard for us. Due to my deep, life long conviction that my body was disgusting, not to mention hearing sex be so vilified during my conservative upbringing, my sex life with my husband had suffered from the beginning, and my faithful husband had patiently suffered as a result.

And I hated that. The man that I loved was being immensely impacted by my actions and reactions, by my sensitivity and my fear of my sexuality. At this point, it had been years since I had taken the time to review my actions and how they affected my well-being. It had been years since I’d considered my well-being period.

Then something completely unexpected happened; in 2020, the world shut down. With my husband finally back on a similar shift as mine, the year started with promise and then it drastically shifted as we flew to Florida to say goodbye to his dying grandmother and we returned home to Colorado amidst growing concern over the novel coronavirus.

The pandemic was here.

Suddenly, I was working from home instead of commuting to the office, with hours returned to my day and the freedom to watch or listen to whatever I wanted to as I worked. I had more time with my husband than I’d had in too long and, although I was overjoyed by the change, it made the problems with our sex life even more obvious. I couldn’t get past the idea that I was repulsive and that sex was icky–and that I was icky for wanting it.

After a move to our preferred city in Colorado and the continuation of my work from home status in my job, I had the space in my life to start to do something about the aspects of it that I didn’t like. Because of my very patient partner, it was becoming more and more difficult to believe the pernicious pieces of my psyche that told me that I wasn’t worthy of the love that I was receiving anyway.

Because of my beautifully genuine husband, I had lost the intention of shame that had always plagued and permeated all of my previous efforts to improve my physical health. For the first time, as I began to get serious about my physical health, I simply wanted to feel better. I didn’t want to lose weight to soothe the self-defeating satan of my thoughts, I wanted my body to feel better.

More importantly, I wanted to get into cowgirl. I’m completely serious about that. After years of running combined with years at a desk job, my hips were so tight that I couldn’t get on top of my husband. My emotional issues surrounding sex had done enough damage, but my body’s lack of flexibility was holding me back from improving our sex life in the ways that I wanted to.

This led to one of the most impactful changes I’ve made in my life; I started practicing yoga. At first I only focused on my hip flexibility, but after noticeable improvement in my hip flexibility, I expanded my practice to the rest of my body. Even though it was difficult, and there were many poses that I was convinced that I would never be able to achieve (wrong!), I kept going.

Because for the first time, I actually felt good after my “work out”. I had been, and I still am, proud of myself for completing the races that I have and transforming myself from a sedentary smarty pants into an athlete, but running and HIIT workouts had kept me in a constant state of muscle soreness, not to mention being exhausted at the end of my exercises, but yoga was the opposite; I felt limber and relaxed and calm at the end of my practice.

I traded HIIT for yoga and running for walks in nature, around the lake at the park next to our apartment, while simultaneously making changes to my diet. Again, I chose a different path than I had before with regard to my diet. Instead of focusing on calories and how my food would affect my weight, I started to consider micro-nutrients and avoid processed foods, treating food like medicine and fuel instead of just a stomach filler with taste. I knew that the wrong food could make me feel worse, so I wondered if the right food could make me feel better.

In the end, after listening to a detailed podcast about the science behind intermittent fasting, I experimented and found out that it was the right choice for me. By being disciplined and only eating within a certain window, I was allowing my body to have long periods of time where it wasn’t digesting food, which is a process that reallocates one's blood flow and energy to the Gastro-Intestinal tract, taking that energy away from the body's other tasks, like healing. I slept better, I had more energy during my day…I felt better.

For the very first time in my life, after combining and sustaining all of my life changes, I lost weight as a side effect of my effort to feel better! I could barely believe it! After working so hard just to lose a pound or two for so much of my life, it was almost unbelievable that I could do things that just made me feel better and lose weight as a result-as an unintentional side effect. It seemed to go against almost everything I’d been taught about health and fitness.

Unexpectedly, I got an answer as to how this was happening. It’s important to note that while I was improving my emotional life, I also began to develop my mediumship abilities through meditation, allowing myself to talk to my deceased loved ones.

On a spring day, while walking around the lake next to my apartment and wearing my late grandmother’s windbreaker, I decided to ask my grandma about something that had confused me for some years. See, my grandma had been health conscious her entire life; she read health magazines, paid attention to the ingredients in her food and ensured that she was physically active, mostly by going for nature walks. Despite this, she died of cancer at seventy-six, after battling the vicious disease for multiple decades.

So, using my new mediumship abilities, I asked her what had gone wrong and she answered me in a big way. The answer itself wasn’t long or complicated; in fact, it was just one word, but it was one word that changed my entire outlook on my health. She said; it was fear.

Knowing about my grandmother’s life, this made complete sense to me. Having been born directly after the one child in fifteen births who didn’t survive infancy, my grandmother had fear for her health instilled in her quite literally from the first day of her life. One of the clearest sentences I can hear in her voice in my memory is “go warsh your hands” because her parents had been told that their unwashed hands had been the cause of their infant’s death and they were sure to never make that mistake again.

For her entire life, she had been afraid for her health. All of her efforts, her nature walks and attention to ingredients, were motivated by fear and, according to her, that fear manifested in her body as the cancer that eventually claimed her life.

And that was when I finally got it; my albatross was shame. Shame was the reason that, no matter how strict I was with my calories and my workouts, I hadn’t been able to get to the weight I needed to reach. The intention that I had towards myself, and the energy that I had been taking into all of my fitness efforts, was shame. When I changed my intentions from shame to self-care, it changed the outcome.

After experiencing the difference that good intentions had made in my physical health, it made me begin to examine the intentions I had behind everything I did. I took the time to not only understand my intentions, but to understand myself better as well. This examination ended up paving the way for immense healing in my life as I began to peel back the layers of my subconscious intentionality.

It’s interesting to me that we can have this idea interwoven into our language and yet not be aware of it on a conscious level. For example, the phrase made with love, or the secret ingredient is love is how we explain why grandma’s cookies somehow taste better than everyone else’s. The intention of love behind that baking, especially if the baker also loves the act of baking itself, does seem to make a tangible difference in the outcome.

Having been a baker most of my life, this idea of love being the ingredient has been with me for as long as I can remember. And my own love for baking seemed to be obvious in the final products that I would share with my friends, family, and coworkers. I can honestly say I’ve never heard a bad word about my baking, and I’ve shared a lot of baked goods in my many years in an office environment. Yes, the skills are important, especially with baking, but the love of the process is what drove me to build the skills and the energy of my love of the process is imbued in my food.

With this understanding deeply ingrained now, I treat myself with better intentions. If my positive intentions in baking could impact the flavor, then perhaps improving my intentions toward myself could improve the flavor of my life. I could, perhaps, be less bitter if I stopped telling myself that I wasn’t worthy of being a professional baker or freelance writer, and more sweet if I started to tell myself that I was worthy of living my dreams.

I spent a very impactful week listening to a free, online seminar given by the self-help giant Tony Robbins and during that week, he would say “Change your story, change your life” and, unsurprisingly, he was right. Changing your intentions, changes your story. And that will change your life.

Photo: Glacier National Park, Montana, United States, 2014. Taken by Heidi Hahe.