Author: admin

Apparently I’m not a blogger.  If you’ve been following along and patiently waiting for this latest blog entry, then you know that. Amazing patience, by the way. It’s not that I don’t write.  I do, in fact, write almost daily. However, it’s not publishable material.  Or maybe it is and I just suffer from severe imposter syndrome and I’ve been wasting my life away when all along I could have been the next Charles Dickens (or perhaps more Edgar Allen Poe since I have a tendency towards doom, gloom and melancholy at times). Either way, I have not blogged for a long time.  4 years.

“What have you been up to, Amanda?” you might ask.  Thanks for asking.  A lot. And yet nothing at the exact same time.  My soul has been on quite the journey. Lots and lots of personal growth and Ka-Blam mind blowing realizations.  And yet here I am, still in the exact same place as I was four years ago. I feel like I am immobile. Motionless and not having moved at all. Let me pause and attempt to bring it to life for you – I feel like I am perched just on the edge of greatness.  Something so great I can feel its energy pulsing into and through my heart, lifting my feet gently off the ground; my chest is lifted and open and I feel like I am ONE with whatever that greatness is that is just out of reach.  I can SEE it, and FEEL it for brief moments, but it is not within my grasp. It sits and waits for me, just out of reach.  Far off in the distance I can look “over there” at the greatness that awaits me, but I have no actual way of getting to it. And so, I pause, and I sit, and I wait. Working hard to just be still and accept that what is meant for me will find me. I try to “be ok” with feeling the energy from afar and trust the process; stop trying to control life.  Do you have any idea what it feels like to live just on the edge of greatness?! And I’m not meaning this in an egotistical way. I do firmly believe that I am destined for greatness. But, to clarify, I don’t think that that means I am going to BE a great person, but rather that my life will FEEL great to me. I know, I know, most of you out there are thinking to yourselves ‘your life is already great, you just need to be content and stop searching for more. Why can’t people just be happy with what they have?!’ This I know. You might very well be correct, and I am open to that. I am not actively fighting against that idea. I am just not there yet on my journey. I am trying not to search; to push; to reach; to make things happen to get me to that greatness. But it is very frustrating to feel that pulse calling to your heart and just accept or let things be as they may.

Anyways, as I sit here feeling that constant pulsing energy of greatness yet still am not moving towards it, here are my current (albeit it grand and quite spectacularly random) beliefs about life and balance.

1. The more you learn and think you know, the more you realize that you actually know nothing at all. Honestly, we’re all still like newborns when it comes to understanding the vastness, the infinite that is beyond the little bubble we have metaphorically wrapped ourselves in.
2. Everything in life happens in polarity. There is an equal and opposite ‘side’ to everything. That is how the world stays in balance.
3. Because there is an equal and opposite side to everything, everything also has its own spectrum. Nothing/No-one can be completely on one side or the other of each and every thing that comes our way. Most of the time we will fall somewhere in the middle.
4. We are ALL struggling with the EXACT same thing – just with different perspectives because of where we fall on the limitless number of spectrums of polarity in front of us. But really, we are all struggling with being human as we attempt to live on a big ball shooting through space.  It’s been said a million times, I know, but really there is no other way to say it.  Our struggles are “different” but in the grand scheme of things it just comes down to struggling with being human.

What more can I say? I no longer see balance as “make sure to exercise” or “make sure not to give up the you things.”  Those are all well and valid and important.  But in the grand scheme of things, those are all the pieces that are required to understanding your humanness and accepting that we will never actually know all of the things that we need to know in order to stop our struggling as a human. That is why life is about the journey, not the destination, I guess. 

I’ve known that I needed to update the website for a while now, but I’ve been putting it off. I didn’t know what to say or where to even start. 2018 was, quite literally, a lifetime ago.

Those of you that know, know, and those of you that didn’t know at that time, well, now you will. 2018 was the year that I left my husband. Our lives had completely shifted and it wasn’t working anymore. I got my own apartment and really felt like I stepped into myself. I wish I could say that everything stayed bright and sun-shiney and “wow, look at how beautiful my life has turned out.” Unfortunately that’s now how things go when you’ve given up a large portion of yourself and you have to rediscover or recreate an entire new way of being. Life didn’t follow a brightly lit path; things got messy. I had a lot of shifting and growing that was happening on the inside that I told very few people about. Maybe one day those darker bits of my story will get told; but maybe not.

Either way, many lessons were learnt about people, my place amongst them, my core values and beliefs. Everything was created new again – for me and by me. I had a lot of work to do, discovering exactly who I was and where I wanted to go. This is a very different path to balance than expected when I originally started the Pembina Valley Wellness Studio. I am so so happy about where I am currently headed. It just feels so good to be growing; in the ways that I now am. I do realize that I just skimmed over almost 4 years of my life and gave only the briefest of comments. I do not apologize for that. If and when more about that part of my story needs to be told, I will share it. But right now, it’s just not necessary. That story will get told if/when it’s meant to. What I will share, though, is my latest thoughts on what balance means for me. These are some of the lessons that I am learning:

1. Life has seasons. Accept that. There will be good and there will be bad; you can’t truly appreciate the good without the bad. I have a tendency to want to ‘fix’ things in the hope that one day I will ‘get there.’ That there is a happily every after just waiting for me somewhere. That once I reach it, then I will have arrived and life will be good. Reality is, that we are human and we are constantly growing and changing. That’s a good thing. I will never have ‘arrived.’ There is no end other then when we die. So just keep flowing with life as it happens. Try your best to enjoy the journey as it unfolds.
2. Do not give up the self things. Ever. Our relationship with ourselves is the building block for everything else in our lives. Without a loving relationship with ourselves, we can be swayed by outside influences. It is never a good thing when we give other people power over us and lose sight of our truth for them or to make them happy.
3. Always strive to be authentic. I am still working on this every day. This doesn’t mean you have to be loud and “y’all are just haters” (but it can be when it needs to be). Speak your truth! If you feel like at some point you haven’t, make sure you take the time to ask yourself why that happened.
4. The people that matter don’t care; the people that care don’t matter. The people that care about how clean your house is, how well you did something – in the grand scheme of things, they don’t matter. The people that truly matter in life are the ones constantly in your corner that don’t care one iota about how clean your house is or if you’re wearing the same hoodie two days in a row.
5. Give yourself grace. You are human. Just keep growing each day – that is all anyone can do. No, not every day will you be able to hit all of your goals 100%. What’s important is that you keep moving forward. It’s when we stop moving that we start to lose ourselves.
6. Move your body. Exercise and movement are important. Your goal might not be to lose weight or get super toned, but some form of movement that stretches or strengthens your body is important. A dance party in the kitchen is movement. Doing yoga is movement. Lifting really heavy weights is movement. Anything works. Don’t stop moving. Find what works for you.

Living this human life is quite the journey. Reflecting back to 2018 made me feel some feelings and remember some things I had put behind me. But sometimes in order to move forward, we have to look back at where we have been. I am looking forward to where the Pembina Valley Wellness Studio is going. I absolutely love what I am creating! I love that it is organically growing where it needs to grow even amongst a pandemic and major segregation in the world. Everything about this business comes from my heart to yours.

Stay true.

Lots of love,

Amanda

This post is important.  It’s important because who I am is directly related to the foundations that the Pembina Valley Wellness Studio is built on.  It is, in fact, why I created the Pembina Valley Wellness Studio in the first place.

I’ve always been mostly fit throughout my life.  Always fairly athletic, always active.  Even the ‘freshman 30’ that I put on during my first year of university wasn’t an issue.  I’ve always played sports, and always had a gym membership off-and-on throughout my adult life.  I made the same goals or resolutions that a lot of people make; every year I was going to get fitter.  Be healthier.  I’d do really well at the start, then ever so slowly decrease the number of days a week that I went to the gym, and eventually end up wasting a month of two of my membership by not going at all.  I was ok with that.  In another six months, I’d start the same cycle all over again.  It was a system that worked for me.  My metabolism must have been fairly high, or maybe good genes.  Whatever it was, I found a way that worked for me.  I didn’t know it at the time, but my struggle was not going to be my body shape, it was going to be my mind.

I was a horribly judgemental person; always judging myself and others. A bit of a procrastinator, but also a perfectionist. I’d constantly be comparing myself to others, and berating myself when I didn’t measure up. I wanted everybody to like me and say nice things about me. I was a people pleaser, a put everybody else first kind of person; an “oh, excuse the mess” kind of person if you entered my home, even after I had spent the last two hours before your arrival cleaning it. I did everything in my power to live the spotlight reel that I was seeing on social media, but was unable to be 100% successful at it. As my life changed, it kept getting harder to keep all the balls in play in the juggling game I was playing – the mom me, the wife me, the career woman me, the clean house me, the healthy eating/cook me, the Betty Crocker ‘make-bread-from-scratch’ me, the fit/exercising me – you name it, anything someone else was doing well, I had to do it too. I didn’t feel like I had to do it 100% amazingly well, but well enough to fake it so that everybody would think I was awesome.

This is usually the time when people insert a sad/scary/life changing moment into their story, where it was all suddenly clear to them that things had to change. No life altering moment for me where I woke up one day and suddenly decided to take back my life! In fact, there’s not even a happily-ever to my story. Yet. Because I’m still writing my story. I did get tired of trying so hard. I was tired of being tired. I questioned pretty much every aspect of my life; is this really how the rest of my life goes?! Let’s be real for a second – the thought of doing the same thing, being the same everyday, felt like I’d be living on repeat – routines done the same way, the same time. Every. Single. Day. I could not do it!

Fast forward to a few days, weeks, months, while I pondered life and the meaning of it all (including the deep question of our place in life in the grand scheme of things), to a day at work where I decided that some of the students would benefit from yoga; learning to be still and silent and be okay with spending time with just themselves for company. I had been doing yoga myself for a while (probably because at some point I had seen somebody else doing it well), so I emailed Sheena at Harmony Tree Studio to look into yoga teacher training. Skippy-Skip ahead through some more searching and questioning and I became a 200hr registered yoga teacher. But I couldn’t do the hard stuff. The hand stands, the arm balances; couldn’t do any of that. Fast forward some more and insert Devloo’s Gym, where I start to get serious about getting stronger. After being fit all of my life, imagine my surprise when I didn’t really know a single thing about building muscle, feeding my body to fuel it, rest, recover… there was just so much! After hours spent on the internet, sifting through correct and incorrect information held together with biased opinions and subtle advertising gimmicks, I decided it would be best to actually take classes on it. Classes on how the body is made and functions, how to build muscle correctly to reach specific desired results, and what-do-you-know, I started getting stronger myself.

Through yoga I have learned about letting life flow the way that it is meant to, to breathe through tough or stressful situations. Through strength training I learned about consistency, building on gains, how to target specific muscle groups to get stronger. And from both of them, I am learning what living a balanced life really means.

Here’s what I have learned so far on my own journey to balance:

1. Balance is not restricted eating programs of no sugar or no carbs.
2. Balance is not about hours of cardio.
3. Balance is not about always being perfect.
4. Balance is not about killing myself at work.
5. Balance is about me accepting my body where it is at.
6. Balance is about constantly growing.
7. Balance is about listening to my body.
8. Balance is about understanding when it’s time to do work things, when it’s time to do home things, and when it’s time to do self things.
9. Balance is about actually living my life, not just going though the motions.
10. Balance is about understanding that my balance is always going to be changing.

And with that in mind – I say HELLO to the next chapter in my search for balance!  I look forward to being on this journey with you!

Amanda