Thursday, March 25, 2021
Willpower is nothing more than a struggle to overcome the cognitive dissonance between your body and your mind. It’s almost always associated with weight loss. But controlling conditioned, addictive behaviors is impossible for many people. Willpower gets you nowhere but frustrated, it makes you self-critical, and it often ends in feelings of defeat. But there is a better way, it’s called willingness.
Willingness feels different from willpower. It’s a sensation of letting go, of not clamping down on a particular “result.” Willingness allows you to do what what you need to, rather than an obligatory feeling of what you have to, especially when your health “asks” for it. Willingness is open to abandoning the pleasures of addition to junk food, watching too much television, being sedentary, and so on. Willingness is an openness to change. Willingness listens, willpower just talks. Caring for your mind, your body, and your soul isn’t about willpower at all. It’s about respect for the temporary nature of your life. When you truly respect yourself, you can transcend gratuitous pleasure. Willingness is accepting yourself, caring for yourself, and loving yourself, respectfully and reasonably. With regards to eating healthily, Will Smith puts it this way to himself, “I love you too much to let you eat that.” You love yourself too much to destroy the one and only body, and life that you have. Willingness works because it knows that life is about thriving, excelling, and soaring above the pleasures of the ego! Willpower is only a fight, a resistance to knowing who you really are. Be willing to explore who you are and become willing to do what you need to to improve. Stop fighting and allow yourself something better than struggling with your mind. If not now, when?