My body and I have gotten along better since I stopped thinking it was me, all of me, and nothing more of me. 
After 67 years of living and decades of healing I now think of my body as a space suit. It’s what I gotta have on to be in this world. 
My body is a creation of this world. Transient, mortal, helped along by survival instincts the human body is eminently suitable for this world. 

As my body ages, I’m more and more aware that my consciousness hasn’t. My consciousness (how I occur to myself, who I am for myself) is 25, even though my body is 67 and pretty beat up (life does that). 

I’m too old to dismiss the temporary nature of this body. It gives me daily reminders. I remember when I could just not think about life being transient. That is called 25.

But I must also say that I am very happy despite the chronic physical pain and the progressive decline of some of my body parts and systems. 

Used to get me down. Thankfully I’ve made progress with my mind. I choose happiness and self-agency every chance I get, every time I can. 

With practice the happiness has long since become my baseline. Now that’s something to be happy about. I have so much to be happy about. 

It’s not luck. 

It’s a choice. My maker endowed me with free will, not so I would be good, but so I would be powerful in the face of so many challenges and setbacks common in this life. 

I stand up taller,  I stress and suffer far less when I have a choice, even if it isn’t total and absolute choice over absolutely everything. I look for choice and welcome it even when its scope does not change a physicality. 

Subjectively my experience of life is qualitatively better, much better when I am “at choice.” Cheers me up even when it’s not objectively true. 

My mind is often a brat, frightened, lazy and indifferent, argumentative. I had to discipline my mind first. Nor am I done. 

But I’ve learned I can talk it into just about anything. So I create affirmations and repeat them over and over again. Meanwhile my mind is annoyed and incredulous at worst and at first,  and at best amused. 

In the end, my mind yields to my insistence. It bends to my will, my patience and my persistence. And when that moment comes, when my mind believes the words it is reciting, why then it’s just true. 

Say Hallelujah 

Say Amen