Thankful for my Health

Group Bet was assigned this task:

The Assignment: Take a moment this Shabbat to first and foremost consider your health. How are you feeling? Where are you at? When and where do you feel your best? What makes you feel healthiest? We encourage you to think not only in terms of physical health, but mental, emotional, and spiritual health, as well. After considering your health, we invite you to do something to nurture it. Maybe it's taking a walk with a family member, or going to a pilates class, or it's taking some time to cook a nice, healthy meal (here is a Sukkot themed suggestion). Maybe it's prayer, or singing, or sitting and talking with a friend you haven't talked to in a while. Maybe it's just laying on your bed listening to music or flexing your brain muscles while playing Sudoku.

Last week I was searching how I could achieve this task differently than I already go about my normal week. I exercise regularly and when I’m not eating the pizza and kosher chicken at Hillel I’m usually a pretty health conscious eater, but I was looking for something that would stand out and make this Shabbat special. I ended up going to a yoga class on Friday afternoon because the office was closed for Sukkot and I really enjoyed the class when I went on second day of Rosh Hashanah, which was also a Friday afternoon.

Out assignment for group Bet was to consider your health and really think about how you are doing in all aspects of the word. During the yoga class I tried to think of how I was going to experience this on Shabbat and where I would go or what I would eat to create a healthy task, at the very end of the yoga class we had a few minutes of silence laying on our mats, which I usually count down the seconds for it to be over, but I ended up thinking about my body and being really thankful to God for my body and everything it can do that is truly magnificent. I started at my toes and thought about how amazing each toes is, worked up my legs thinking about how much my muscles stretch from the beginning of the class to the end of the class, then I got to my stomach and thought about the scratch I had gotten the two days prior cutting down skach for the sukkah and how my body will make that scratch heal after just a few days. That is truly amazing to me. I thought about the skin on my hands and how when I was a kid I would play with the wrinkles on my grandmothers hands and how my skin is still so young and how much I appreciate that. By the end of the silence I realized that I had actually done the task during the yoga session. It was a really nice experience to take a moment and just thank God for my body and all the wonders of the human body.