A Beautiful Life
Season 1
by Abby Shaye Maroko
Do you feel lost and confused when you ponder your pathway in life? Do you feel disconnected from your goals and disoriented from the work/play you do? Do you feel empty and unenthused when you think about what you are after these days? Do you feel slave to the habit of starting things and not finishing them? Or perhaps it's come to the point where you simply do not feel the fuel to get up and take action. Don't fret. I gotchu. In today's episode, I'll give you the single question you need to ask yourself for lifelong energy in any pursuits you choose. WHY? Be as robustly and relentlessly curious as a little kid in asking this question within. Regardless of your goals--which will change with time, you must begin with anchoring to your intimately personal, deep WHY. We all have incredibly personal reasons for what we do--and while often rooted in pain, they can be transmuted into power. Yes, that power being your Why. Your unique why will change over time, yet a strong knowledge of your Vitamin P (Purpose) will galvanize your spirit and energize your body into action. Skipping this hard-but-rewarding exploration will lead you further into pockets of confusion and pits of doubt; tackling it *today* will give you the spiritual insurance you need to tackle any pursuit of your choice with confidence. +1: Practice of the Pod (POP): Get out a pen and a journal. Focus on your breath for 1-10 minutes. Then answer this deep inquiry: 'what is my why?" ... Tune out of the non-sense and tune into your inner sense of brilliance. Please leave a 5-star rating and positive review, and share with fellow human beings who you have the inkling will benefit. With Love, Abbs -------------- IG: @abby_maroko abbymarokofitness.com
Do you want to feel more alive? If so, this episode is for YOU. ... Spirituality can be uniquely defined by each individual, yet we can all agree that it is connection to some larger force, essence, or entity. Spirituality is a FEELING. Which is why it can be so challenging to express in words! Yet, it is non-negotiable to experience the essence of Spirit in our lives...if we want to live a more fully relished and inspired Life, that is. This begs the question: How can we access that super sweet feeling of aliveness more frequently? I gotchu. ... You can access a remarkably ecstatic, enthusiastic, effervescent vibration called Life Force (some call it Chi, Prana, Mana, Nyama, Chu'lel, Shekinah, Tummo) when you consciously choose to animate the life within each of your flesh-bound vessels. And it can begin in your next workout. In this episode, I detail five practices you can begin in this moment to elevate your next workout into a mechanical expression into a visit into a delightfully majestic movement universe. The How: Practice #1: Perform six cycles of box breathing before your workout. Bringing your attention to your breaths--where the air is flowing and going, and concentrating on harmonizing a particular strength + length of breath that helps bring you into an even tone of parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system states, will prime your body and brain for more focused performance and sensitized engagement with your surroundings. Bonus Tip: breathe in and out of your nostrils, which limits your breathing to the belly. Belly breathing stimulates the vagus nerve and activates your relaxation response. Practice #2: Match your inhales and exhales to the load and explode portions of your lifts, respectively. Called "biomechanical breath pairing," this technique guides you into the most ergonomically efficient and natural pattern of breathing while resistance training. You will inhale and fill up with oxygen on the loading phase of a movement (i.e. lowering body in a pushup, squat, deadlift and exhale on the exploding phase of your movement (i.e. pressing up to high plank and standing). Practice #3: Prior to your workout, return to your why. Invest a handful of breaths in connecting to your intention for the movement session on deck. Make it your own ("to feel powerful," "to generate love," "to embody my calm,"). As discussed in Episode 001 of the pod, your deep why is the deep cavern of fuel you can tap when you feel tired or amotivated. So your intention from workout to workout will spring from this clear desire/set of desires. Please return to this episode if you missed it, as it will be key for your fitness journey. Bonus Tip: To arrive at your unique intention, ask yourself: "what do I want to express?" and "how do I want to feel?" Practice #4: Ask your Spirit what it needs to feel more alive, then pull from your movement toolbox to nourish it. What movement would make you come more alive? What pace, shape, amount of resistance, amount of balance? You are involved a process of physical expression from your spiritual center! Another way of Open up your Spirit, y'all, and give it a voice. The more trained you are in various movement patterns and resistance training techniques/principles, the more intuitive this practice can become. Practice #5: Visualize and embody--so you may next cultivate, the peak feeling you'd like to experience. This is a no-holds-barred practice. You don't have to stop at happy and strong--why not ecstatic and fucking invincible? I challenge you to take whatever answer you first come up with and multiply it by 100, 1,000, then 1 million.
"Let It Go." What do you feel when you hear this refrain? Looser? More relaxed? Serene? Clenched? Contracted? Constipated? Personally, I hold on tighter when someone tells me to "let go." I feel unseen and unmet. I feel misunderstood. Perhaps you can relate. The things that we cling to most in our lives stem from the belief that we need them to survive. This may have been very true at some point in our lives, though it may no longer stand true or beneficial to You. It's so easy to inhale and exhale, we don't even have to think about it and we will continue to breathe. Yet, we struggle so much to exhale the 3 B's (Beliefs, Buddies, and Boundaries) which no longer serve us. I just had this experience of needing to soften wax in my right ear in order to restore my hearing and flow of vibrations in and out of the ear canal. When the wax was finally removed, and the channel opened, I felt free again. When we keep shoving beliefs, buddies, and boundaries into our life where there is no longer room for them, and/or where there is no longer alignment, we feel under mounting pressure and truly unnecessarily trapped, just like an inhale would feel if we never exhaled. Another term for exhalation is "expiration." On this episode of The AB Life Pod, I guide you on a journey in breath and in the moving (as well as removing) the unnecessary Resistance you may still be clinging to that has already expired. This season of Fall is an especially apt time to notice where we are clinging and what we are feeding that no longer serves us. Notice what has expired for you. Notice what is holding you back. And take my permission to let it go. You are Infinite. You are Here and Now. I believe in You. ... Tune out of the non-sense and tune into your inner sense of brilliance. Please leave a 5-star rating and positive review, and share with fellow human beings who you have the inkling will benefit. With Love, Abbs -------------- IG: @abby_maroko abbymarokofitness.com