Thank you for the Bigger Cup
Before the week of my wedding, I was a much smaller cup. And inside my cup was water. Now this water was not at its best. It had been a long summer. A summer of preparing for a wedding (mental stress) and destroying my body (White Claw Summer). However, joy was on the way, because my wedding was going to be awesome (and it was).
Unfortunately, the week of my wedding, the joy of getting married, fell apart. A ton of salt got dropped into my cup of water. Because just two days before my wedding, I found out that one of the women who raised me was seriously ill.
And just like that, instead of my water getting purer and tasting better, because I was getting married, I felt the pain (salt) of possibly losing someone so close to me and I didn’t know how to handle it. And the salt in my cup was literally destroying the taste of my life.
And no matter how much I tried, I could not get the salt (pain) out of me. I was tasked with trying to stop the pain, stop the suffering, stop feeling that which I did not want to feel. Despite knowing that feelings are just subject to my perception of events in my life, this salt was not going away. And I had a hard time figuring out how to fix it - or rather, how to get all this salt out of my water. But as many of you know, getting salt out of saltwater is much easier said than done.
After trying and trying and trying, I found that I could not eliminate the salt out of my water. So, I had to look for other solutions. I decided to cover it up - a classic solution to many problems in life. So, I thought… what goes good with salty water? Tequila. So now, instead of this stupid useless salty water, I just made myself a fucking drink. Made sense to me. Worked before.
But I knew this wasn’t sustainable. Mostly because I still fucking hate saltwater. Even though there was tequila in it, it was still SALT and WATER. And there was still a lot of fucking salt. The idea is to use up all the salt water, not to try toconvince myself that I love saltwater because, after all, nothing is further from the truth. And, while I was drunk and thought I was having a good time, in reality, I was even further from happiness.
But there was another solution... one that I could never have accomplished on my own... one crystalized by my therapist in one of our last sessions. The one I’m here to thank you all for. Giving me a Bigger Cup.
My therapist taught me that some salt just does not go away… ever. That's because we do not always control what happens in life that causes salt to be poured into our water. And in those times, the only way we can truly return to ourselves and heal is to become a Bigger Cup. In other words, don’t try to kill yourself getting rid of the salt, but make yourself a bigger vessel to increase the water (life) within your cup. By doing that, the saltiness is diluted and eventually, becomes irrelevant to the taste of your water and the quality of your life. Because of you all, I grew from a small cup into an Olympic size pool and while the pain and saltiness of one of the most stressful and depressing times of my life is still there, my life no longer tastes salty.
When the most joyous and exciting time of my life (my wedding week) turned to ash in my mouth (finding out one of people who raised me was seriously ill), I was in the worst state of my life. My mind was not right place, my body was not right, and while my soul was dramatically improving and I was able to open my third eye, that still did not actually help me.
Increasing the spiritual side of yourself does not mean you do not feel pain, or you do not get sad. It just gives you a higher perspective than you had before because it increases your senses and awareness. In other words, it didn’t make me numb to the salt or take away the salt, but in fact, it made me taste the salt even more. Because opening your third eye increases the love you have in your heart for everyone, especially your family and especially those who helped you becoming the person you are.
So, that is where I was mentally, physically, and spiritually when a ton of salt entered my life. And I am here to thank all those who helped directly or indirectly by giving me the time I needed to heal my mind, my body, and my soul. By becoming a Bigger Cup.
I want to thank my coworkers, my friends, and my family for being there for me when I needed them. Thank you for giving me the time and understanding I needed to get my mind in order. Thank you to my job for being understanding and allowing me to take time away so I could shift my focus towards my family, which gave me the time I needed to heal my mind.
With that extra time, and the help of my wife, gym friends, and my Gym (CrossFit Queens), I went about the process of getting my body right again. Lucky for me, the CrossFit Open 2020 also was about to start which helped add more water into my cup and distract me from the things that were making life taste salty and helped me focus on getting my body correct. Everyone knows that a strong body leads to a strong mind. And as I started feeling myself again, physically, I was able to then take control of the mental salt that I was dealing with by better understanding what was happening to my family and myself and limiting its negative effects. In other words, it allowed me to further decrease the effects of the salt by increasing my ability to contain more water as a Bigger Cup.
Once my mind and body got correct, they became aligned with my higher state of conscious (my soul). And this is where I am now. I feel good, mentally, physically, and spiritually. And I know I would not be here without the love and support from everyone in my life. So from the bottom of my heart.... thank you. Thank you for the Bigger Cup. I needed it.
Now its time to go back to work.
Thanks,
Eugene Toussaint
