Starting to trust my own gut instincts more

I have decided that I need to trust myself and my gut instincts a lot more than I have in the past, as my gut instinct never leads me astray.

The gut feeling is that sense where you know instinctively that something "feels" right or good for you, or it doesn't. It may be that the situation or person that your gut feeling is telling you about, is providing you clues about the status of your interaction (positive or negative for you), but because it's not anything definite or tangible, it can be sometimes difficult to justify following the gut feeling through. Of course, you learn afterwards, that the gut feeling was right, spot on and you know then (after the fact), that you never should have gone in that direction, or conversely, you should have gone in the direction. When you start to intellectualise what you're sensing in your gut feelings, it's never going to lead you in the right direction, because you'll then justify to and convince yourself that your intellect and rational thinking is more correct and besides which, if the gut feelings are telling you to stay away from someone or something you have invested yourself in, it's difficult to listen because you want the opposite to be true.

Every time I get a "gut feeling" about anything or anyone, it has always been 100% right and spot on. I have never had a gut feeling that was wrong. I have instead, felt the consequences when I have not followed through on my gut feeling. For example, I had a very strong gut feeling about an ex-boyfriend before I even met him, that he looked like a user, someone who would take total advantage of me. So what did I do? Of course I ignored that gut feeling and of course the guy turned out to be a total user who took total advantage of me and my good nature. He used me and then cast me aside like I didn't matter to him when things started to get too complicated. He was not prepared to have a serious relationship with me even before he got together with me, but still he pursued me and still I allowed it!

I have so many examples of where I didn't follow through with how my gut feeling was directing me, much to my later-felt chagrin. I have sometimes followed it, but it's been more of a haphazard application, not consistently. I now realise I must always go with my gut feeling to make sure that I am not led astray and am always following the right path, for myself (to make sure that I am happy)!

Reading affirmations helped me to reach a major epiphany

For about a week prior to my major realisations of last week, I had been reading quite a lot of articles on positive affirmations and mindfulness. These articles were all about telling yourself that you are a perfect human being, that you are wonderful and that you need to truly accept and love yourself.

I guess by reading these articles, they imbued my subconsciousness to such an extent that I had the profound realisation that I didn't really accept or love myself, that I was really hard on myself and that I wasn't kind to myself. And all of this made me think about why this was the case. While I did ponder on some of this consciously, I think it mostly occurred subconsciously. And then the answers to my unanswered subconscious questions did come to me consciously.

I think what happened was that subconsciously, I was thinking about my life, my parents, my relationships with other people - basically basically everything that got me to be the person I am today and to the point where I am in my life.

All of this information coagulated together in my subconsciousness to provide me the basis of understanding myself better and if I understand myself I can make myself feel better too. I realised that the reason I do not love myself and do not treat myself kindly and accept less than I deserve from people is because that is what I have been taught to accept by my parents and then by life in general. My parents have taught me that I am unlovable and unworthy of being loved (and unworthy, full stop) through everything they have said and done to me over the years and how they continue to treat me this way now. They cant help it. And what I have been doing is to accept everything negative they have been telling me about myself as true.

The thing is, I have accepted unacceptable behaviour by friends and boyfriends, simply because that is what I know and have been taught to accept. I have felt that it wasn't right and when I have said something, these people pushed back harder on me (they were meaner and tried to "put me back in my place") and when I didn't accept it, they didn't want to be friends with me or didn't want to go out with me any more.  Sometimes I removed myself from them after trying to make them see that their behaviour and conditions on me were not acceptable to me and they continued to try to subjugate me and to try to make me to continue to accept the status quo.  It was hard on me and all the time I thought it was my fault anyway and felt guilty if I didn't do what they wanted me to do, because that is the message I have always heard from my family and accepted as true.

Truly, it is amazing that I have managed to carry on as much as I have, given the poor upbringing I have had. But at least now, I am starting to see things a little differently and am starting to realise that I am not a bad person, it is not my fault, I am worthy and I am lovable. I really am.

I need to start telling myself this every day, until I really start to believe it and feel better about myself. Improve my own self-worth and self-esteem so that I feel whole again.

Very sore back muscles

The last 2-3 days I have had such sore back muscles around the middle of the back on the right hand side. So sore that I cant turn to my right without wincing in pain. I don't have full movement to my right and my whole right side feels very painful and sore.

My back is so sore that it hurts to breathe and sneezing, forget it! As soon as my lungs get filled up that much, it puts pressure on my back muscles and hurt so bad that mid-sneeze, my body gives up on it. This also means I cant breathe in too deeply because that also puts pressure on my back muscles and starts to hurt too.

The image here shows the exact muscle which is sore - serratus posterior. As you can see in the photo here, it attaches to the ribs at the back, which is why, when I breathe, it hurts. When you breathe in, your ribs expand to accommodate the expanding lungs and anything attached to the ribs also gets affected, so it hurts to breathe in.

It only really hurts when I try to do certain things that cause me to put pressure on that muscle, such as breathing in deeply, sneezing and even reaching around to my right hand side to do anything. Needless to say, I have been trying not to do the aforementioned, in order to prevent the pangs of pain. If I am just sitting there, not trying to breathe too deeply, it does not hurt much.

This happened because I had used several pillows and a v-shaped pillow to lie on so that my head could be elevated higher than my chest area, to help me breathe more easily, mainly due to the bronchitis, but also because of the pharyngitis, sinusitis and post-nasal drip.

During the night, while sleeping propped up on all these pillows, I must have twisted that particular back muscle somehow to cause the pain.  It happened a few weeks ago, due to the same reason (propped up pillows) and only dissipated when I started to do some stretching exercises.

I have been doing some stretching exercises today and yesterday to try to stretch that particular muscle (and surrounding muscles), to try to reduce the pain and make it better. It should be okay within the next few days, I think, as long as I continue the stretching exercises.