Fodder for the Fight

The heading for this blog may bring to mind a fight you are having with someone in your life. But we’ve come to realize that all fights begin with the one we are having with ourselves.

Around this time of year, news and the newsfeed on most phones is chock full of items that address what most people have an interest in – assessing how they did last year while vowing to do better in the year ahead. To that end, there is an emphasis on diet and exercise, on sleep patterns and strategies to live longer while staving off dementia and disease. They also address success in the coming year and analyze our shortcoming and failures. Do you read any of these types of articles? Are they informative or are they fodder for the fight?

It’s so easy to read an article that suggests healthy foods, for instance, or gives tips on how to have better sleep, and then find yourself binge eating or having a sleepless night because you are fighting with yourself – being right about how you are doing your life wrong. When you’re locked in a change modality, where you are endlessly working on yourself to be a better you, then even new information or new ideas get ground up then served as a sausage full of proof that you are lacking.

There is another possibility, one that allows you to notice things, learn things, see things all while bypassing the internal struggle to be better. In this scenario, “better” happens on its own, rather than as desired result somewhere in the future. This possibility is called Instantaneous Transformation, where you simply notice how you are and where you are without judging what you see. Simple? Yes. Challenging? Yes, also. If you start noticing what you are eating, how you are sleeping and what you are producing, the knee jerk reaction is to judge yourself. So what! With practice you can develop the skill-set of not judging yourself for judging yourself, and before you know it, you are likely to be fight free.

Welcome to 2025. An opportunity to truly be yourself.