Sunday Freewrite

Fifteen minutes and counting!

I love freewrites, but I have not been very good at them lately. My life is FULL and FULFILLING! When I told George that I would not be teaching at OSU this fall and wondered what I would do, he said, "I have no doubt that you will figure out what to do with your time, Carol." 

And he would be right. :) Well, one thing is that my spiritual direction (companionship really) ministry has really taken off, and I LOVE IT! I meet with 18 people regularly, either once or twice a month (the ones going through the Exercises meet twice and a couple of others who want to meet twice who are doing regular spiritual direction). I have 1-2 meetings a day, and that is about all I can handle as I spend time in prayer before and after. I LOVE IT (of dear, I already said that) because it really more like being in prayer the whole time as I listen to God and listen to people at the same time. So, because I am not teaching Pilates, I have had more time to devote to this budding ministry (www.bodyandsoulcompanion.com).

Well, when I say "not teaching Pilates," it was an illusion because I found out that the paperwork was not filed in time. So, I owe my boss 30 hours of work (my time had been reduced from 60 hours for the term to 30 hours with the lower enrollment, but then they decided to cancel the class all together and put my students in with the other Pilates classes that were not filled), but the paperwork didn't get filed. So, I found out in November, after half the term was over that I need to make a bunch of videos. I could not start until this week because of the healing of my bottom biopsy for melanoma. It was good that I did not have this hanging over my head while I was adding more and more directees. Now I am sailing with all of them (I think I am at max capacity now), and I made my first two videos over the Thanksgiving extended weekend, and I had SO MUCH FUN! I think I have missed teaching. These videos will be for the faculty and staff, but I will use them for my students in the future too, and I will be able to add them to my www.bodyandsoulcompanion.com collection. Eventually, I want to add Prayer and Praise Pilates videos, but these are the basic building block Pilates videos that people need to learn before they can go on with the routines. So it is all good.

All that said, I feel like the extra time I had also helped me to devote more time to the care of my own body. When I get busy with setting up my classes in the fall, it is more stressful and I tend to not do as much cardio (Pilates burns about 120 calories an hour, and walking burns about 400 per hour). So I can sometimes pack on the pounds during the fall. Then I head into Christmas and add a little more. It is my typical pattern. This fall, I definitely got the word to focus on my eating, and I lost 10% of my body weight. I was only "technically" 4 lbs overweight for my height, but I got down to where I am most comfortable. So I head into the holidays with a balance between body and soul! (Practicing what I preach).

I continue to love doing Centering Prayer with Mercy Center, Burlingame every Sunday and Thursday. In fact, I just finished with them before this freewrite. I seem to do much better with accountability. 

I am looking forward to doing a six-day Advent Retreat with the Ignatian Spirituality Center starting tomorrow night. I cleared my whole schedule (one thing that I could not clear was moved to a week later - that was cool to see God clear the way). I will meet with a director for 30 minutes each day during the retreat. That will also be very nice. 

Well, I thought it was about 15 minutes, and I looked at the timer, and I had 30 seconds which just ended right now.