One of my habits is to set a daily intention. A word or two to get my head in the game for the day ahead. And GREASE is the word that pops up most frequently when it comes to my intentions…
I’m a big fan of setting intentions. Affirmations, not so much.
For me, an intention is like a bridge between where I currently am and where I want to be at any given time. They are a goal state.
On the other hand, affirmations are declarations that something is already true. And my deeply cynical brain always seems to want to second-guess affirmations. I always question the validity of affirmations. More often than not, they end up pissing me off.
Kind of the opposite of how they are intended to work, really. I’ll stick with my intentions, then.
But, what is this word GREASE?
“It’s got groove it’s got meaning
Grease is the time, is the place, is the motion
Now, grease is the way we are feeling” – Barry Gibb
The short version
portmanteau – a word blending the sounds and combining the meanings of two others
I started out setting an intention of ‘grace and ease’. My partner came up with the idea of combining the two to ‘GREASE’. And, since I like words and playing with them, it stuck. #greaseistheword.
Simple!
The longer version
When I first started playing around with this health caper, I had no idea that AIP would become a way of life for me. I genuinely believed I’d give the elimination diet a red-hot go and then, regardless of whether I experienced any health wins (and I wasn’t particularly optimistic about that at the time), I’d go back to living my life the way I always had.
Oh, how wrong could a girl be?
Along with the wins of improved health, this AIP caper has been a process of building self-awareness, engagement and resilience for me. It has literally become a way of life.
Along the way, this idea of GREASE became a central theme
I used to be a prodigious worrier (that’s wOrrier, as opposed to wArrior). I was a stress head of impressive proportions. And I was so good at putting a brave face to the world I even managed to hide it from myself. I lived the duck-on-the-water analogy. You know the one I mean – on the surface, all is calm, yet underneath, you frantically paddle away to keep yourself afloat?
And, if AIP is my touchstone, the idea of grace and ease has become the manifestation of all I have put in place to calm myself the f*ck down, to be more present in my life, to actively participate.
GREASE is:
- a way to deal with the overwhelm that life throws at you
- a strategy for releasing perfectionistic tendencies
- aligning with your personal values
- getting rid of comparisonitis
- practising MUCH more self-compassion
- personalising your health caper
- giving yourself permission to prioritise healthy habits
Should we integrate the idea of GREASE into the AIP lexicon?
I’m a lover of words.
Back in the dark ages (1988), I even took a paper on linguistics at university. When I was in my first year, I was away with some university friends for a weekend. A couple of us – both with an interest in the evolution of language – got into a bit of a discussion about fashionable words and how they evolve. Words or phrases that become popular or trendy for a period – think words like ‘adulting’, or ‘FOMO’ (or the more recent ‘JOMO’), or ‘lit’ or ‘woke’. For a bit of fun, we decided to see if we could introduce a new word into common usage at the University of Auckland.
Cut a long story short, we managed to (very briefly!) have some success at doing just this. Our chosen word was ‘bionic’. As in, “We had the most bionic time last weekend.” We managed to get fellow uni’ students actively using the word bionic to describe experiences they had had.
It was surprisingly easy to do, and kind of fun, too.
Should we do the same with GREASE? Integrate GREASE into the AIP lexicon?
#greaseistheword
