What does it mean to be present? Many self-development books, TV shows, and people are talking about it, however how is it applicable to the healthy metabolism conversation? As we are constantly making choices about how to live our lives, our body is making choices how to sustain this life by providing constant chemical reactions in order to create biologically essential components and to break down organic matter. So it is all about choices we make, because our mind and body are inseparable and always in synch. If they get out of synch we might develop physical or emotional illness.
Therefore our choices about everyday life directly affect how our body functions process everything we feed it with – whether it is a physical substance or the mental thought. Staying consciously present means paying attention to every choice we are facing and deciding on the action to take about this choice. Often in life we are acting out of habit choosing the path of less resistance – eating this doughnut, drinking this extra cup of coffee, gossiping about the neighbor, obsessing about that conversation… It is important to realize that all of it is a material for our body to process and make a decision what to do with it. Our body is smart, it will do the best it can with what it got, however way too often we supply it with the material difficult to digest. And we do it because way too often we run on the autopilot not paying attention on the signals our body is constantly sending us.
Sometimes right before doing something I ask myself “Is it going to give me pleasure or happiness?†And if the answer is “pleasure†I think twice about doing it. Staying present, listening to my body, evaluating my surrounding and my situation. How this choice will benefit me as a person, how it will affect my life? I might choose†pleasure†after all, but it will be my conscious choice at that specific time and space.
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