It's Been Two Moons Since I Died.
Taking inventory of my life to finish the race.
I talk pretty slow when I’m in flow, so if you know you don’t have a lot of patience, listen at 1.5x or 1.75x. Or you can just read what I’ve written.
Learning to walk again is difficult but fun. Every transformation requires learning to walk again because every single one is a new birth. The moon is becoming a guiding light for me in this time because it has given me a cyclical subject to measure my inner world by, so that I can know when to get up and try to take steps that I previously may not have been able to take. To attempt to move with the moon requires me to check my emotional tides on a regular basis and make sure that I am keeping myself moving through the low tides with extra effort.
First began my prayer life. A non-negotiable task every day, prayer is not a thing I can skip. What I’m really working on is doing it earlier in the day. Before sunrise, which is about 5:45am around here these days, I need to be up and beginning my 30 minutes to 1 hour of prayer. So I know that I need to step it up there. It’s difficult because I’m so used to staying up late writing. So I found a balance and scheduled in my daily calendar to wake up on certain days at certain times.
On workout days, I pray at my ancestral cell towers (trees) near the gym. Sometimes I feel people walking the trail are wondering what I’m doing, but I really don’t care at this point. On non-workout days, I’m praying either with my shrines at home or with my ancestral cell towers closer to the house. Aside from that, I have the consistency down. I am truly proud of myself. It’s been a challenge for me all my life to celebrate myself, so I’m seeking to do more of that when I feel I have accomplished something.
I realize just how much I had regressed over the years in terms of prayer. Always a big priority, but my execution was not always the best. I’m just glad I can say I’m no longer there. So then became the time of building on top of what was reliable and what was reliable was my prayer life. But what do I build on prayer? At that point I figured it was time to move to my body.
I started out lifting for 15 min 3x a week. I’m now to where I’m currently doing roughly a 30-min to 1 hour of lifting. My goal was to feel better in my clothes and to feel more confident when I see myself in the mirror. Oh, and I wanted to gain like 15lbs. But I just had to decide to start walking (sometimes jogging) at least 3 miles (the max I’ve done being 6), so my metabolism has been faster too. I have actually lost 3-5lbs yet I’m still gaining muscle. If you know me, you know I’m already a slim guy, but man… my abs are back on 6 pack, my arms are much stronger, bigger, and more defined, and my chest is growing. My calves almost look like when I used to play basketball, and I definitely feel better about my hips and thighs.
I look better in my clothes. I feel stronger. I feel like I can push myself further than ever. I find myself so dedicated to it and I never thought something like that would happen for me when it came to fitness. But here I am.
Now comes the next step, which is the mind. I had to release some mental cache so that I had bandwidth for more information. New information. A lot of that cache was those 4 pieces entitled “The Purge” that I released during the last full moon. I had to make room for reading and receiving and I’m still making room, honestly. But this has to be just as non-negotiable. I need new paradigms. New ideas. New thought processes. New ways of thinking. To be a new person, I must think like a new person. So, I am reading again, and I am contemplating quite a lot of what I’m reading. I am allowing my well to be filled so that when people come to draw water, I will have some to give.
It’s the home stretch now. Time to dive into self-improvement like never before. I realize what this is. This is the incubator. This is the cocoon. This is the chrysalis. Now that I have concretized my spiritual discipline and my physical discipline, I now push to concretize my mental discipline (reading) as well as my emotional discipline (feeling & expression).
I die daily to birth the new me that I am being introduced to, and every death feels like a joy. I have written down a goal of all the books I want to finish in the next month. I have 6 books I want to finish in that time. With a total of 1077 pages, it’s going to take me roughly 70 pages a day to finish them in that period of time. Strangely enough, that’s not hard at all. It just takes focus on the right details. Not being moved off of my discipline. Dedication to the time I allot to that. I have placed limits on the things that distract. I have opened up my inner space to realize the things that are on the list.
I will come out of this incubator brand new. This is the “boring” but also the necessary part. And I’m excited about it. It’s just a matter of effort and time now.
— Egunesin aka Korotha Kofe