Are You Chasing Fulfillment?

Wellness has a different meaning for everyone. Searching for quotes and thoughts on the subject, the results usually point to health and fitness. In other words, the most popular perspective and understanding seems to be that wellness and physical fitness are synonymous.

My view differs from that. Yes, I have been known to say that I am allergic to exercise of a physical nature. As a child and well into my youth, the general assumption was that my future would lie in some athletic endeavour. I quickly disabused people of that notion and my daughter, who is a bit taller than I am, followed suit.

Together we have done our fair share contributing to the profits of gyms, athletic shoe stores and various media entities pushing fitness DVDs. Even recently, we began a squat challenge with one of her childhood friends in South Carolina. The goal was to get up to 200 squats a day. Each of us would record our routine and upload it via Glide for the rest of the group's comic relief.

Suffice it to say, that experiment ended at 100 squats a day. Abigail's knee gave out and my heart followed suit in sympathy. Any excuse not to physically exert myself is acceptable! I have long accepted that "wellness" will never equate to "fitness' in my life.

Yet, I consider myself extremely well.

Wellness in my experience began with an intentional internal journey. Up until my 45th birthday, happiness and a sense of fulfillment were not things that I could honestly say I knew.

Great education, home ownership, good cars - even new ones, nice furnishing and all the other trappings of a "good life," were mine. Yet that deep feeling of joy, a prevailing contentment eluded me.

There was always something to fear, something else to attain, another relationship to enter in or a promotion to get before I would be fulfilled.

When we bought the house and furnished it, I was still not feeling it. Then I got the job of a young lifetime, more money flowing in, travelling across the Caribbean region monthly and fulfilled was not what I felt.

I went to church - a different type of fellowship but while my mind opened to a new perspective on God, life and well being - fulfillment remained elusive.

We migrated in pursuit of fulfillment and it emigrated. My then partner and I searched for it as we charted new careers and educational courses. Both of us thought that once the culinary and theological studies were over, fulfillment will come bundled inside of the diploma and degrees.

Years later, single, distraught and chronically depressed, I gave up and accepted my failure to find happiness and fulfillment. I acknowledged that my search led me to all the wrong places.

Where they really though - the wrong places?

"That hunt for you is life!" Abraham Hicks

I have much to be thankful for in the work of Esther Hicks. Many discount her as a charlatan or a snake oil dealer when they are being kind. For the most part, naysayers ridicule her work as that of a delusional split-personality psychotic demon-ridden cult leader.

Well, it may be that and more but those words expressed through her - "That hunt for you is life" clarified my search for meaning.

Never to be found in the latest diet or exercise fad, certainly absent in intimate relationships, lost in the multitude of "stuff,' fulfillment is an inside job.

What came clearly home to me as I relaxed in the "littleness" of stuff in my life, the deliciousness of the single life, the enjoyment of employment for a cause and the love of real family and friends, is that wellness begins when the heart is fulfilled.

Yesterday, I went to see my doctor and his words to me would have some in utter panic. I am not.

My bank account does not have a seven-digit balance but what is there pleases me.

The stereotype of black women with big booty does not match me whatsoever. That matters not to me. I will not squat one day longer.

Fulfilled, however, is what I finally am.

"The key to ultimate happiness and fulfillment lies within our own transformation. The more we learn and grow and evolve as individuals, the more we will find happiness and satisfaction in relationships, work and life." Kristina Bowman

I have found that key and so can you. Write to me, join my list and let us deepen and widen this circle of wellness.

Namaste. 

Some photo source: pinterest,com