Week 8

Just finished up a yoga session, and it’s amazing how much my practice has been impacted by the mindset I’ve been in lately. When my head isn’t in the right space I find it much harder to keep balanced (both literally and figuratively), and I end up toppling over on many of the poses. Because of this, I cut my session short and decided to pick it up again next week in the hopes that I’ll have less stress going on in my life over the next seven days.

It’s been a rough week, to say the least, which includes a major snafu in my financial plan. To start, I ended up with a 3-day stomach flu resulting in loss of work on Monday and having to cancel seven patients. This majorly hampers my income for this week and I wasn’t pleased to have to call these folks to reschedule. On top of this, I found out that I owe a significant amount of money for taxes from 2017, as well as seeing an increase in my quarterly estimates and payroll taxes for 2018. This means I had to deplete my savings as well as rely on my credit card to ensure that it got paid. I could have possibly set up a payment plan, but the amount of the increase would have meant playing “catch up” for over a year and everything would have ended up being late. Although it sickened me to have to do it, knowing that the taxes will all be paid in full and on time is such a relief to my mind. With the new plan I have drawn up to get the cards paid off, it doesn’t look like the tax situation is going to set me back too far - a little extra a month on one, plus two months additional payments on another, won’t be too much of a burden overall.

March as a whole has had its ups and downs in regards to this challenge as well as daily life overall. I feel like I haven’t been in a very good headspace for some reason, and I opted out of both the Anthem 5k and Rodes City Run 10k this month – two of the three races of the Triple Crown. I’ve done these races every year for more than a decade now, so to back out of both of them in the same year is unlike me. Despite increasing my meditation and social time this month – things that typically improve my mood, I haven’t seen a change in my apathetic (and sometimes downright blue) mood. Maybe it’s the unpredictable weather? Maybe it’s not been that bad overall and the events of this past week are foreshadowing all the good? Whatever it is, I’m ready for it to be over so that I can get back to feeling content and on-track with my goals.

Next week marks the end of month 2 of the GIVE IT UP challenge, and I’ll be recapping the numbers from all of my goals. Some were met, others were not. Some I went above and beyond and blew out of the water. Which ones were they, you ask? Well – with another six days remaining in the month we’ll both just have to wait to find out.