I want to share my current exercise obsession: Single leg deadlift with a knee bend.
Uncreatively (but aptly) named, the SLDL + knee bend is exactly what it sounds like. You do a single leg deadlift, and you bend your knee.
But before I say more about how and why to do this exercise, check out the video below, and give it a try.
So… Did you try it? That was the complete (7ish min) clip of the demo of this exercise from my Movement and Strength Training Foundations class a few weeks ago.
WHY AM I SO OBSESSED?
Quick back-story, my foot has been hurtin’ since feb 18th and I haven’t been able to stand and walk comfortably since then (a journey I’ve been documenting on the Instagramz if you fancy a look).
This exercise brought my awareness to some key mechanics that my right hip struggles to perform, and now I’m walking again. Slowly, but walking. Booyah!
Many folks, myself included, struggle to cleanly flex their hips. One main benefit of the SLDL + knee bend is that it helps awaken dem posterior chain muscles (glutes and hamstrings) by systematically accessing your bestest hip flexion, on one leg.
The knee bend add-on is an amazing way to challenge yourself to maintain and deepen your hip flexion, without cheating it by rounding your back.
All-around great exercise for strengthening and improving your hip and knee flexion, and your awareness of any asymmetries right and left.
You can totally stop reading now with no FOMO, but, me being me, I couldn’t stop writing here. There’s more!
THE STEP-BY-STEP CUES:
Hinge at your hips from two feet (send your butt back to 6 o’clock). You should feel your hamstrings go on stretch. Slight pelvis anterior tilt (tailbone pointing out like J Lo, no tucking).
Shift your weight all the way onto one leg without losing your hip hinge (tucking under), or twisting your pelvis.
Reach your other leg behind you. Your toes can stay in contact with the floor for balance, or lift your whole foot off, if you’re feeling dangerous.
Keep spine completely still (don’t round), and bend your standing knee, reaching your hands to the floor. See if you can touch the floor.
I repeat: DON’T round your spine or tuck under (posterior tilt) your pelvis to touch the floor- All the bending is from your hip and knee joints. Make your leg do the work.
Straighten your standing leg back towards the start position, and stand up on one leg (with grace…)
Repeat, and enjoy the glute and hamstring burn.
As I expressed in the video clip, I didn’t think I would even be able to do this exercise on my right leg. But in the class I was like, “Oh what the heck, let’s try standing on my right foot”.
And oh man am I ever glad I tried. The rest of the day, my foot felt about 50% better.
The following day, I was actually able to walk around with minimal pain (in 5x slow motion, mind you, but still… Big success).
What is the magical power of the SLDL + knee bend? Its not magic… It’s just biomechanics accessed cleanly. But magical things happen when you unlock your missing biomechanics.
SLDL + KNEE BEND KEY MECHANICS
Ok, here’s the part where I liberate the movement nerd in me. In the SLDL + knee bend, your body needs to be able to:
Flex your hip and anterior tilt your pelvis (the hip hinge part).
Adduct your hip (the get your weight entirely onto one leg part)
Internally rotate your standing hip with a relatively balanced foot tripod (i.e. not rolling all the way to the inside or outside of your foot, or losing your heel contact)
Flex deeper at your hip when you add in the knee bend (differentiating your hip and knee from spinal motion. I think that’s what people call “core stability”?).
The reason I suspect the combination of those three hip motions (flexion, adduction, internal rotation) were so beneficial for my foot is how they contribute to opening the space where the sciatic nerve comes through in the sacral/hip area.
Look at that big green thing.
Sciatic nerve in green.
FOOT-HIP CONNECTION VIA SCIATIC NERVE
My working theory is that my foot pain (nervy, burny, tingly, throbby sensation in my heel and sole of foot) is at least in part related to entrapment and/or tension at different parts along the sciatic nerve, as it weaves its way from lumbar spine, through the hip, down to the foot.
Yup, sciatic nerve extends all the way down to your foot, changing names a few times along the way, just like in my Toronto neighbourhood, Rosedale, where street names change randomly part way down the street, making it confusing and annoying to navigate…
For me, one area of entrapment seems to be at my posterior hip joint, i.e. under my butt.
Here, the sciatic nerve can get easily squished by the hamstrings (biceps femoris) and the piriformis muscle, unless the hip can flex and internally rotate well enough to open up some space and move those muscles. Things my right hip sucks at.
Nerves don’t like when they don’t have space to slide and glide because they are squished by reduced joint spaces and muscles getting in the way.
Using the SLDL + knee bend to access hip flexion and internal rotation in particular seem to help open space for my sciatic nerve to move through, and eccentrically load (lengthen) the muscles surrounding the nerve, so it can slide and glide more freely.
CONCLUSIONS?
You should try this exercise. Just kidding. Do what you want. It’s your life, your body, don’t let me tell you what to do with it.
Disclaimer: I’m not saying that this is THE exercise to fix issues with YOUR sciatic nerve. It’s not. If you suspect you have problems related to your sciatic nerve (or any nerves) you should always be properly assessed by a movement/therapy professional before diagnosing yourself on Google and making up DIY solutions.
However, for me, the SLDL + knee bend was a big AH-HA moment. Not because it “fixed” me, but as I fumbled with the technique, I was able to observe the differences between my right and left sides.
And it was illuminating how stark the difference was… (I’m so glad I caught it live on camera).
I’ve been practicing a modified, smaller scale version of this exercise everyday, several times a day, and now, two weeks later, my foot is virtually pain free. Not 100% better, but I’m grateful that I can walk again and stand long enough to wash my dishes. My kitchen was becoming a hazardous area…
Thank you SLDL + knee bend. My butt and hamstrings have new life. And my foot doesn’t feel like a wet rag anymore.
I’m not old, but as I get older, my attitude towards exercise is changing. Having been sitting on my butt not doing anything exercisey at all for the past 2 months, I’ve had a lot of time to rethink my intention for exercise.
Yes, strength is important. Challenging our muscles intensely at times is important. But the SLDL + knee bend is not just a strength builder. Done slowly, with awareness, it is also an opportunity to observe and optimize movement mechanics.
In fact, any exercise is an opportunity to observe and optimize. And I think this is a lovely philosophy to apply to any movement practice to make it more meaningful, enjoyable, sustainable, and healthy (read more about that HERE).
Give the SLDL + knee bend a try. Go slow. Notice if you are doing cheats like me that work-around your hips actually moving cleanly. If it feels bad, or unsafe, don’t do it, and seek help to undestand what’s happening. Let me know how it goes, and if your butt loves you (or hates you) for it 🙂
FYI, the class in which I showed this exercise was of the April 2022 theme: I Get Knocked Down (But I get Up Again). We spent the month working on exercises with the intention to develop/maintain the ability to move up and down from the floor with ease and grace. Being able to deeply flex the hip and knee are a part of that.
If you enjoyed today’s snippet, and want to try a full M&S class, you can try one for free here: www.monikavolkmar.com/free-class, or get access to all weekly classes and the complete archive of everything I do online HERE, in my monthly membership.
Fitness goals…The only good reason to have them is so you can stop having them.
Why not skip to the part where you just stop having goals?
Trust me. I’m a fitness professional 😉
This January, while everyone else is making resolutions, doing some version of a “kickstart-being-healthy-in-30-days-fitness-challenge”, would you like to join me in my Anti-Fitness Challenge?
Free yourself from the expectation of getting fitter and healthier. And discover the joy of honest movement. Free from “shoulds”, and “have-tos”, and “I’m-bad-if-I-don’ts”.
Reclaim permission to move without needing it to be intense exercise. Without needing to get something out of it.
Reclaim movement free from utilitarian function.
What would that feel like?
Welcome to anti-fitness livin’.
But without fitness goals won’t I become an unhealthy slob?
I’m not saying become a blob.
I’m inviting you to become more aware of your unconscious motives for exercise.
Having goals for your body can be useful in that they can set a direction. But what if you’re going the wrong direction? Are your fitness goals ones that You came to on your own, that are meaningful for You?
I’d much rather people have no clear goal at all than to have blindly adopted a goal that was someone elses’ idea.
Not goals you picked up from Mom. Or your evil ballet teacher. Or the bullies you thought were your friends in highschool. (Oops I’m talking about myself…)
Remember that the person pursuing the goal has more value than the goal itself. In the process of working towards the goal, the goal setter ought to exist. The goal shouldn’t stifle your existence.
It’s quite possible that most of your fitness goals got accidentally chosen for you, without you knowing it. Think about that…
Can you think of one goal you had/have for your body that came uniquely from You? Or has every goal you’ve had for what your body should be able to do, feel like, and look like come from an external source?
Your parents. Friends. Social media influencers who really do care about you living your best life (as long as you’re wearing their clothing line…).
Everyone’s got “fitness shoulds” they believe and preach. But shoulds and goals are not the same.
You should be X% bodyfat to be healthy.
You should work on mobility with this or that trendy stretching routine.
You should build muscle mass, especially your butt.
And you should wear a particular shoe (or no shoes) while doing it all…
How do you know these “should-ers” aren’t just propagating the fitness goals (i.e. shoulds) THEY originally bought into, which gave them a sense of control by manipulating one teeny variable in the ever-increasing entropy of existence?
If you’ve ever felt out of control because you gained 5 pounds and can’t bear to face the world out of fear of being judged as a failure, you know exactly what I mean.
This January 2022… Just. Stop. Fitness. Goals.
And discover who is this You that keeps making fitness goals?
Screw that “new year new you” crap. This year, remember You. The original You. Untarnished by the opinions of others.
Everyone is trying to convince everyone else to care about the things they care about, which might not actually be the thing You care about.
And then we feel bad for not caring about the things that we feel we’re expected to care about. And then we feel worse for failing to to accomplish goals we don’t actually care about. Ironic, isn’t it?
Just admit you don’t care.
In the words of my spirit animal, Richard Feynman:
“You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you want to accomplish. The others’ expectation of you is their mistake, not your failing.”
What if every fitness goal we’ve ever had is based on a learned moral judgement that isn’t true? “If X is right and Y is wrong, I need to get to X because I don’t want to look wrong”. That says nothing about whether it is healthy for you.
But what if trying to be “right” and “healthy” is making you unhealthy and sad?
What if my “healthy” decision is actually your “wrong” decision? What if my “wrong” decision is the best thing YOUcould ever do for yourself?
For example, I read a book recently that advised to eat a lot more vegetables (among other things). I already eat a lot of vegetables. But I started believing I needed more instead of asking if it was true. It kind of hurt my guts, but I kept going with it. I got more and more obsessive and orthorexic. I started avoiding social situations in which I couldn’t follow the author’s specific (unreasonable) guidelines, because I bought into his version of “healthy”.
But for someone else, getting a little more interested in eating vegetables might be the switch they need.
Can you see how we just can’t compare ourselves with eachother?
No one can tell you what is best for you. We have to figure out our unique version of health, fitness, and whatever else, or we can get swept away in the flood of shoulds and expectations and comparison.
What hidden motives lurk in your background?
The first point in the Anti-Fitness challenge is to consider that every fitness goal you think You came up with on your own might actually something you picked up (like that particular virus that shall not be named).
The second point is to look into whether your fitness goals actually have nothing to do with fitness, but you’re telling yourself, and everyone else that they are?
That’s called confabulation. And we’re all doing it.
I’ll illlustrate this fitness-confabulation-theory using myself as an example (I’ve been an expert confabulator all my life).
Until age 25, I don’t think I made one single self-aware, self-sovereign choice for what to do with my body. (I’m still not sure I’m able to think for myself, but I’m working on it.)
Here’s a short list of the things I did and the hidden motives I had for them:
When I was a wee lass, my parents put me into gymanstics, soccer, swimming, dance. None of it was my original choice. In the end I stuck with dance, but not because I loved it. I wanted to quit when I was 14. I stuck with it because I felt guilty about being a quitter. (that said, I do appreciate and feel very fortunate for being exposed to a variety of movement forms. Thanks, for realz, mom and dad.)
Then, in highscool, I felt pressure to join the curling team because on of my best friends was the skip (look it up) and I wanted to be worthy to be her friend. And I feared that any time I spent not around her was time she would forget about me and make other friends, and I would be all alone… Ahh teenage angst. So I pretended to like curling, but it wasn’t MY self-sovereign choice. It was a choice based on fear of abandonment and moulding mysefling into who I thought she wanted me to be..
I picked up guitar (a thing you do with your body, even if not “exercise”) because I wanted to look cool. People who play guitar are cool, right? It wasn’t MY choice. I picked up the belief that being cool is important. But I actually found the lessons stressful because I didn’t deep down want to play guitar. The body positioning also flared up shoulder pain. So why would I keep doing something stressful and painful? Looking cool is important. Obviously.
I joined the weightlifting club in grade 9 because I felt I had something to prove. I wanted to be “different”. Turns out weightlifting is actually pretty boring and no one cares.
I joined the cross-country running club because there were some popular people in the club and I thought I could be popular, too, by association (but I didn’t inherently enjoy runnning. I’m no Helen Hall…).
Later in university, I started running againto prevent myself from getting fat. Running what I used to was to make up for all the crap I was eating, to calm my anxiety about being “too fat” to be a dancer.
Then I started high intensity interval training (HIIT) when running didn’t “work”, because I read in a book that “women should do treadmill sprints, not lift weights, to achieve their best physique, because squats and deadlifts build too much unsightly muscle bulk”. The book was written by a man… So I adopted some random man’s expectation for what I should look like and do with my body. And then I pulled my hamstring. Doh.
After university, after quitting dance, I started powerlifting because I wanted to be perceived as someone powerful and capable of success to compensate for years of feeling weak, and “failing” at my dance career. It had nothing to do with “fitness”.
Then when I started learning about corrective exercise for pain, I naiively bought into everything I was told would “fix” my pain: You need to stabilize your core. You need stronger glutes. You need to stretch your hip flexors. I did it blindly and rationalized it was working (even though I still felt shitty). I became an advocate for neutral spine and glute activation drills, but in reality I was trying to find a sense of control.
Worse, I wanted to convince everyone else to care about being in control, too. Because that made me feel more in control when everyone adhered to my definition of control and life could be predictable and stable.
Kind of like being in prison…
Guilt. Worthiness. Needing to look a particular way… Do any of those sound like joyful reasons to move?
Not ONE single thing on this list is something I did for ME, uninfluenced.
Not one thing was for the joy of movement. Or was linked to something that genuinely fulfilled me. It was all about meeting expectations. Control. Appearences.
This is NOT the kind of state one ought to be making goals from.
I don’t know about you, but I’m no longer comfortable making goals drenched in expectation.
Any goal set out of expectation or shame will eventually lead to duress. Injuries. Deep fatigue. Sadness and depression. A sense of being lost and confused…
And I am sharing this with you today because when I realized the extent to which I had given up my right to choose for my own body, and convinced myself so thoroughly that I even liked it that way, it came as a shock.
It felt… gross, to recognize that lack of self-respect. To realize that I couldn’t identify ONE thing I’d done with my body that was for Me, by Me.
The movement practice I developed based on AiM isn’t something I do to please anyone. Not as an exhibition to post about on social media. Not to control my weight. I do it because it makes my body feel good. It satisfies my soul’s curiosity for learning about movement and anatomy. I am genuinely a nerd about it.
In fact, in my early days of exploring AiM people said that what I’m doing is weird, and that I should stop.
One colleague actually went out of his way to sit me down privately and tell me that people don’t understand what I’m doing and it is off-putting so I should consider just doing what everyone else is doing in the gym, and stop doing this AiM stuff so that I’ll fit in.
And he claimed to be saying this because HE CARED ABOUT ME.
I don’t know what he actually cared about, but if he truly cared about Me– the being who wants to explore and learn- he wouldn’t have tried to place his goal of fitting in with everyone else onto me.
So you know what I said? Thank you and fuck that.
THAT’S when I knew I had found something that was mine to explore for Me.
And I’m not sharing this because I think YOU should do AiM, or care about moving efficiently. I’m not trying to sell you on any movement form or value system or eating more vegetables.
I’m trying to sell you on YOU.
That’s what the Anti-Fitness Challenge is all about.
How would you move if it wasn’t about exercise or fitness or how your body looks?
What fitness goals are leftover when you drop all expectations?
Do you have a hunch about what that might look like?
I once asked this question to a client and she started crying. The idea that movement could be something enjoyable, non-utlitarian, wasn’t something she’d felt since she was a kid. Me too…
I think rediscovering the joy of movement is something we are deep down longing for permission to do, but there’s so much fear that moving for the sake of moving is a waste of time. Why would you move if there was no external goal? If there’s nothing to get out of it?
Maybe because you love yourself. How about that part?
On that note, if it vibes with you, I invite you to my life’s mission: A commitment to an awareness of when I feel an outward expectation for what I should do with my body- How it “should” look, move, be. And just say… Fuck that.
Pause, and before going for that run, picking up that weight, kicking up into that handstand, ask:
Is this Meaningful?
Is this Enjoyable?
Is this Sustainable?
Is this Healthy?
And make a self-empowered choice for Me, by Me.
Just some thoughts today 🙂
The Anti-Fitness Challenge might be something I formally put together. But mostly, its for me. Because i need it. If you’d like to do it with me, shoot me an email and maybe I’ll put some structure to it. Could be fun? (probably not…)
This is chapter 1 of The Movement Detective Manifesto, the “textbook” I’m creating for Movement Detective School. Want a PDF version of this blog post? GO HERE. Print it out or put it on your e-reader, because eye strain due to screen-time sucks!
Here’s an obvious and undeniable fact about life: You’re going to feel pain and that will suck.
But don’t let that depressing introductory sentence get you down (please keep reading, it gets better, I promise) 🙂
In fact, pain is an amazing mechanism that has kept me alive long enough to write this, and you to read it. Imagine not being able to feel pain. As delightful as that initially sounds, think of how easy it would be to die.
Congenital insensitivity to pain is just that. While extremely rare, sadly, many individuals stricken with it tend not to survive the bonks, burns, and boops of childhood. In this regard, pain is actually our ally. We shouldn’t want to live completely numb from it.
This brings me to the topic for today, and my biggest, burningest question for the past 10 years: How does one get out of pain?
At age 22 I was quite sure I was on the fast track to getting a hip replacement in my 40s, and I wanted to know what to do to prevent that future from becoming my life. I just wanted to enjoy walking again.
And you know what, I succeeded. Walking is my greatest, simplest joy. I’m pretty sure my right hip will last the rest of (or at least most of) my life. How did I do it?
Is there a “get out of pain” X-factor?
Why do some people succeed at getting out of pain, while others don’t? Why are some people crippled by it ’till the end of their days, while others make “miraculous” transformations, bouncing back stronger, fitter, better than before?
Take Tiger Woods for example. He’s faced multiple serious, career-threatening injuries, and then came back to totally crush his competition. What makes him so special? (hint, it is not because he’s a wealthy celebrity).
There are obviously a mind-breaking number of factors involved. Some we can control, many we can’t.
But the “x” factor, so to speak, is one that we all actually have power over: How we consciously respond to our pain.
This is where I think things get interesting. And tedious. And nuanced.
For example, most commonly, folks will respond by trying to ignore their pain. Why? Lots of reasons.
Maybe because they genuinely don’t have the resources (which was once my case as a poor student). Or perhaps because they are afraid that acknowledging the issue makes it too real (and reality is a drag, I know). Or because “I don’t have the time for this I’ll deal with it later” (and if I wait long enough maybe the problem will resolve on it’s own?).
But ignoring pain has a cost. Like, an actual costs-you-money cost.
“…total financial cost of pain to society, which combines the health care cost estimates and the three productivity estimates, ranges from $560 to $635 billion... the annual cost of pain was greater than the annual costs in 2010 dollars of heart disease ($309 billion), cancer ($243 billion), and diabetes ($188 billion) and nearly 30 percent higher than the combined cost of cancer and diabetes.”
Yikes. That’s fine for the folks who do have liberal amounts of cash to throw at their pain. And there is no shortage of therapies, surgeries, and drugs promising relief (which may or may not relieve anything).
Sadly, less affluent, desperate people can go into massive debt paying for pain solutions. Some people will develop debilitating drug dependencies, out of no fault of their own (which costs them even more later in the arena of mental health support).
Then there are the DIY-minded types of people who, rather than spend all their money (like a sucker), search the web for low-hanging fruit: Generic exercises on Youtube for x, y, and z. Consumer-grade gadgets like lasers and massage tools. They might even deep dive into what specific foods to eat to fix their pain (an anti-inflammatory, fish-oil-based, gluten-free, dairy-free, zero-fun diet).
But here’s a cautionary tale: A gentleman I met on a course watched a video on Youtube about how one’s ankle can get “stuck” and cause problems for the whole body. So he got the bright idea to DIY it, and used a sledge hammer to “knock his ankle free”. Needless to say, that made things worse. DIY is admirable, but not always effective…
The frustrating thing is that despite all these efforts, clever tactics, and dollars spent, none of the above can guarantee you’ll actually even get out of pain. Why the heck is that?
Here’s a weird question that I think neatly states the point of this manifesto…
Is Elton John the kind of person who can get out of pain?
On the morning that I’m writing this, I saw this post from Elton John (age 74!) reshared on Facebook:
“At the end of my summer break I fell awkwardly on a hard surface and have been in considerable pain and discomfort in my hip ever since. Despite intensive physio and specialist treatment, the pain has continued to get worse and is leading to increasing difficulties moving. I have been advised to have an operation as soon as possible to get me back to full fitness and make sure there are no long-term complications. I will be undertaking a program of intensive physiotherapy that will ensure a full recovery and a return to full mobility without pain..”
Read that last sentence again: “will ensure a full recovery and return to full mobility without pain”.
Those are confident words. What do you think makes Sir Elton so sure of his success?
Think of another 74-year-old you know- Your lovely, retired, elderly neighbour, Gina. What if Gina fell and needed hip surgery? Are her chances higher or lower than Elton’s to “return to original performance” in two years? (and by the way, 2 years is a period of time considered to be a minimum standard for completing a healing process, in some therapeutic communities.)
First, let’s state the obvious. Elton John’s got the cash, and really should have no excuse to fail from the “buy-pain-away” perspective.
He can clearly afford the most expensive, highly qualified rehab team in the world. He isn’t shackled to a blue-collar day job, so he can dedicate every minute of each day, and all his natural physical resources towards rest and recovery. He has a team of people who can do things for him so he can let his body heal.
So what hope is there for Gina next door, living on a wee school-teacher’s pension? Or even yourself- What chance do you have if you don’t have the financial, temporal, or physiological resources to get well?
Well I have a potentially bold statement to make: Having wealth as vast as Elton John cannot guarantee you will heal from pain. In fact, it might even get in your way unless you are the kind of person who can heal.
Elton John is obviously a crazy talented, successful musician with near-infinite resources to devote to getting out of pain but is he the kind of person who can do it? I guess we’ll find out in 2023 (and I personally think he is, for reasons you’ll read about further along).
I argue that low economic status is not a good enough excuse for being stuck in pain. I’ve witnessed people in meager financial situations get well, without spending even 0.0001% of Elton’s budget. And I’ve witnessed wealthy people spend far too much money on therapies and get zero relief, but keep spending anyway, simply because they can.
In his book Behave, Robert Sapolski investigates the correlation between low socio-economic status (SES) and poor health.
Summarizing the SES/health gradient situation, he writes:
“…the ‘socioeconomic status/health gradient’, in culture after culture, the poorer you are, the worse your health, the higher the incidence and impact of numerous diseases, and the shorter your life expectancy”
But how does one explain this phenomenon? I think what Sapolski writes next is interesting and empowering:
“…it’s not so much being poor that predicts poor health. It’s feeling poor- someone’s subjective SES (e.g. the answer to ‘How do you feel financially when you compare yourself with other people?’) is at least as good a predictor of health as is objective SES.”
Whoah. So could it be that how you feel about your ability to get your body out of pain is the “x-factor”? Not money? Not education? Not access to healthcare?
Could it be that what it really takes to get out of chronic pain isn’t something you can buy: It’s how you are.
Meet Person 1 and Person 2
There are two kinds of people (regardless of socio-economic status):
Person 1: Wants to stop feeling their pain, right now.
Person 2: Want to become the type of person who can get themselves out of pain, now, and in the future.
As the cliche goes, Person 1 just wants the fish. Person 2 is willing to learn to catch their own fish, even though they might have to start with a stick with a string tied around it, DIY-rod humble beginnings.
Person 1 is into immediate gratification and fast results without considering long-term consequences.
Person 2 accepts the need to make changes to their most fundamental lifestyle habits and belief systems. And in my humble observation, Person 2 is the one who succeeds in freeing themselves from chronic pain in the long-game, where Person 1 fails to accomplish anything sustainable or healthy.
Ironically, Person 2, while less likely to have vast amounts of cash to inject into the problem, is more likely to solve it. Why? Because they have no other choice. They can’t fall back on money to fix something money can’t actually fix: Who they are.
The irony is that having lots of money gets in the way of healing because Person 1 can feel very productive throwing money at their body’s problems, but they are still Person 1 with the sole focus on not feeling pain (i.e. distracting oneself).
Person 1 will almost always live with a degree of pain because they haven’t learned the skills and characteristics, or put in the effort required to truly liberate their body. And no, being very good at ignoring something is not the same as freedom from it.
Person 2 is an empowered, independent person, with a DIY spirit. I call person 2 the movement detective.
This manifesto is an invitation to discover, cultivate, and master the inner discipline it takes to become a movement detective in your own right, and take ownership of your path out of pain.
I hope to empower you to consider the value of this path, regardless of economic or educational status.
Its not about the things, its the person
Most people in the movement and therapy world aren’t talking about the inner discipline required to get out of pain. Most people are touting their specific things: Exercises, modalities, gadgets, pills, surgeries, orthotic devices, courses, and diets.
Most people are blaming external things like their mattress, job, and non-ergonomic chair, instead of putting the onus on the person laying on that mattress, working that job, and sitting in that chair.
Yes, all of the above matter, but the tool will only work in the hands of the person who knows how to use it. No one thing is guaranteed to work, unless you are the kind of person that thing will work for.
And that’s not something you can buy, thus I have nothing to sell you but on the power you have within yourself. Or maybe one day I’ll endorse a chair…
I’ll wrap this chapter up by saying that this manifesto is for you if you’re curious to learn what this process of learning how to trust Yourself to look after You looks like. To cultivate a state of sovereignty. Maturity. Physical mastery. A realization that how You are is the only way your body (and your life) can be.
So what about Elton John? I personally think he is Person 2- a movement detective. He just seems like a man with a vision, doesn’t he?
Stay tuned for chapter 2 in which I’ll unpack what it means to be a movement detective, share some practical strategies, and tell some stories I think will convince you that movement detectivery is a worthy, fulfilling path.
PS What’s Movement Detective School? It’s where I hope to empower you to learn how to use gait-based exercises as part of a holistic, individualized, healing movement practice, so you can rely less on other practitioners to “fix” you.
I had faith that strength training would cure my pain.
Me, 2013ish. Total strength training nerd. Also, this photo somehow ended up in a T-Nation article about single leg deadlifts, without my permission. I took it as a compliment, but no one ever replied back to me about it…
What do you think? What role does strength training play in healing from injuries and chronic pain?
I don’t necessarily have answers, but I have some humble thoughts.
When I first started working (customer service) at a gym in my early 20s I heard all kinds of things from trainers like:
“Your core is weak, that’s why your back hurts.”
“Your butt is weak, that’s why your hips are tight.”
“Your knees hurt because they are too unstable.”
Naive and impressionable, riddled with acute injuries and chronic symptoms from my dance training, I translated this to “I am in pain because I am weak, therefore getting strong and stable will fix my body”.
Long story short, I was wrong (and I will elaborate on the long story in this blog post).
The strength-healing fallacy
I think there is a logical fallacy here we can observe:
Training to become stronger will not necessarily result in healing, but physical strength is inevitably a by-product of a healing process.
I have an acquaintance that lives this fallacy out perfectly, to whom I will give the gender ambiguous name, Frankie.
Frankie thinks their 20+ years of chronic back pain is related to being weak. Because their back is in pain, they can’t workout to build muscle and strength like they used to. However, Frankie also thinks that a direct cause of their back pain is because of not working out and losing muscles and strength- Two panaceas for pain.
Frankie fears that losing strength and muscles will make their pain worse, therefore going to the gym to workout is the solution. Then Frankie is astonished when it doesn’t make things feel better. Worse, in fact.
I’ve done this, too! Been there, done that. How about you?
What if strength and health have an asymmetrical relationship? One supports the other, but the other doesn’t necessarily support it back.
The actual definition of strength:The capacity of an object or substance to withstand great force or pressure.
Think of strength as a quality or a state ofpotential one can develop when one is already in a state of well-being, not necessarily an act that will produce wellness.
Frankie was convinced that strength would produce healing and health, instead of seeing that first becoming well would allow him to restore his strength.
Now, what is healing?
“Healthy” is a BIG word and I think the definition is a little different for each of us. I won’t even try to tackle it right now.
The old English root of the word “heal” is actually “whole”.
My sense is that healing and well-being have more to do with the state of our system moving towards “wholeness” and integration, not as simple as being strong or weak.
Having access to our whole body must precede trying to strengthen it. Bodybuliders know this- You can’t stregnthen something you don’t have a neural connection with. The first 6 weeks of a strength training program is more about strengthening neurological pathways to our muscles than actually building them up in size and contractile ability.
We cannot strengthen what we cannot access.
So the 64000$ questions is: What has caused us to lose access to our bodies?
Injuies. Accidents. Periods of chronic pain. Learned movement skills, deeply ingrained. Habitual ways of moving (or not moving). That weird ear infection after which nothing felt the same again…
Could real healing be a process of reclaiming access to the individual parts we ignored, neglected, or never rescued from harm? And then a process of integrating them into context with each other, to work together as a whole?
And then in a whole, more structurally balanced state, there will be less pressure and strain from our bodies getting pulled asymmetrically to one side. Muscles that were stuck short get permission to lengthen, and visa versa. Joint spaces that were closed can begin to open and allow blood flow where previously it was impeded. The narrow pathways through which nerves must travel can deliver their signals can do so with less structural roadblocks.
So is access and integration are important for healing, how do we do this, if not by strengthening things?
It takes a real duration, weeks to months, for tissues to repair from mechanical damage, but that doesn’t imply completion of a whole process (involving the whole body).
Time elapsed doesn’t mean anything happened in the space of that time. It’s like a teacher saying, “you’ll need to study for 5 hours for this exam”, so you stare at the textbook for 5 hours thinking you’re engaged in the right action required for learning.
Are you engaged in the right action required for healing?
If I’m being honest, I’m still engaged in a process of healing my left hamstring. The injury happened 10 years ago. I’m quite sure I’ll be worthing with it for another 10 years, at least. There are so many factors impacting on this… Stories for another time 😉
After tissue repair, access to that body part needs to be reclaimed and integrated with the whole body again, as close to original instructions as possible. If we don’t attempt to do so, our body learns to move with a “dis-integrated” body part, disconnected. Mechanically attached, but not truly belonging to us like it used to.
And then we (and I am referring to myself) decide to lift some heavy-ass weights… Can you see a problem?
So could the real question be…
What’s preventing our bodies from healing?
Could it be… Us?
Could we be blocking our own capacity to heal by imposing a greater stress -strength training, upon it before we are ready, because of some idea we have- like the one I picked up at the gym about strength, but convinced we are making our system more resilient?
Could the effort of strength training actually be an output blocking our bodies’ innate healing processes? And why are we doing that?
Personally, the aggressive manner in which I attended to getting stronger (more on that story below) only served to reinforce the wonky mechanics and false beliefs that were keeping me stuck with pain. Yeah, the number of pounds I could lift showed I was objectively pretty dang strong… However, I was not very healthy, and still in a lot of pain.
So, what do we make of this? Theorizing aside for now, I’d like to offer my story and lived experience, for whatever it is worth…
Getting strong felt really great (until it felt worse)
I remember the exact moment I realized I was stronger.
I was 21 ish. One day I bent down to get something from the bottom shelf of my fridge (probably a tub of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, because I was addicted to that stuff. I’d mix it with pure white sugar and eat it with a spoon…), and when I stood up, I actually felt some oomph in my legs I’d never noticed before.
If Fabio eats it, it must be healthy
Whoah. What the… Am I getting stronger? This feels amazing! What if… Maybe… Could it be… that how I feel in my body is more important than how it looks??
“Strong” was a weird, new sensation for a person intent on making herself smaller, who had formerly, distortedly, associated weakness with success (that’s what a calorie deficit feels like- Profound, inner weakness).
This feeling of power in my body was an important reminder: That perhpas reclaiming my personal power was more important than fitting an unreasonable physical standard- What a body should look like.
But I ruined this beautiful insight by rationalizing that getting stronger could be the new correction of everything I believed was wrong with Me.
And if weakness is the problem, and being strong feels good, then logically absolute strength is the solution.
What’s the most linnear path to absolute strength? Powerlifting. Anyone who can lift 225lbs off the floor can’t possibly be in pain. Right??
Hmmm… Not really.
Here I am, 2014 I thihnk, lifting 225lbs, and I still have problems (I just can’t feel them). Ignore the Five Finger shoes… 😉
Did getting strong help with my pain? Yes… For a while, but only because I forgot my pain was there.
And then… things started to crumble.
My lower back pain began to flare up after back squats. Pushups would exacerbate my back and shoulder pain. Something as seemingly innocuous as a single leg deadlift, without any weight, produced deep, grindy pain in my right hip and SI joint.
Gradually, I was left with a smaller and smaller pool of exercises that I could actually do pain-free (sort of):
Hip bridges and planks felt OK (and by “OK” I mean didn’t make things worse).
My upper body could only tolerate rows and horizontal pulling (but to be honest, still hurt my shoulders, just not in an existentially threatening way. And the internet said “rows are good for shoulder health”, so I kept at it).
But despite all actual evidence otherwise, I still had faith that strength would set me free. Why?
Strength: An amazing tool to ignore life’s problems
I remember a meditation teacher once said to our class that being busy with something unimportant that feels productive is a form of laziness. Laziness not being limited to simply sitting on one’s butt, but using something as a distraction from what is actually important.
Paradoxically, my laziness manifested as strength training, and it was an amazing way to distract me from facing some of the uncomfortable facts about how I was living my life.
Here’s a few ways I learned that strength training can be used to ignore my body’s (and life’s) problems:
First, when strength is a novel stimuli, it will take center stage.
It’s how our nervous systems are wired. The new physical strength I was building, manifesting as the pleasant body-feeling of power, was so novel as a sensory experience that I was able to push all my noisy joint (and life) pain into the wings.
Too, the novel and productive pain of DOMS (delayed onset muscle soreness) was a sensation that distracted me from the more subtle, nauseating feeling in my solar plexus. You know, that visceral senes that something’s wrong, but you can ignore it if you keep busy enough?
If my body was tightly gripped in a neuromuscular stress reaction 24 hours a day, I couldn’t tell, because my muscles were constantly sore from working out and I felt powerful. It felt useful.
The pain of building strength was a pain I chose to endure. A pain I can put myself through is preferable to a pain I cannot control, like the pain I had in my spine, hips, and SI joint, to which I felt like a helpless victim.
I’d willingly suffer the micro-trauma to my muscles, rep after rep, knowing that the by-product would be a pleasant, empowering body feeling that could temporarily numb the pain in my joints.
During the grueling, physical exertion itself, endorphins- our natural pain-soothing peptides, circulating into my bloodstream, helped me to numb out the unpleasant feelings in my body.
Strength- building it and languishing in its nice-feeling by-products, was a good diversion from my pain signals. The consequence, however, is that I became disconnected from the afferent signals my body was sending up to my brain about the actual state of affairs: “Monika, you’re just a few steps from self-destruction…”
Second, it felt very productive to occupy myself with learning about how to get strong.
Having let go of my identity as a “dancer”, I craved to replace it with something else. I chose “lifter”. This meant filling my mind with as much information as possible on the subject so I could talk the walk.
Reinforcing an identity feels very productive, doesn’t it? And feeling productive, I discovered, was another great way to ignore that awful feeling in my gut that I was on the wrong path.
So I immersed myself in a pth of intellectual conquest. I read the fitness “literature”. I took courses. I spent countless hours on Youtube becoming indoctrinated with not only WHAT exercises to do, but WHY being strong would make me a better person.
A strong butt, in particular, was directly correlated with a higher moral state. The video below is a good example of this. Why YOU NEED strong glutes:
Beware oversimplifications like this, which cam, ironically, come accross as incredibly complicated. Glutes are no more or less important than any other muscle, unless we place that importance upon them.
Third, through powerlifting I found a sense of acceptance from gym people.
I loved having a supportive crew of powerlifting pals, but if I’m being honest, my lifting crew was enabling me further to use training as an escape from my life.
The trap was that it felt so positive and inspiring. We were each others’ cheerleaders. “Add 5 lbs more!”, “You can do one more rep!”. It all felt very uplifting. But it wasn’t helping me face my facts.
The fact was, unbeknownst to these people I considered my friends, they weren’t actually interacting with Me, they were talking to a sleepwalking representation of who I wanted you to see.
They were talking to a robot with a body moulded to look and perform like a lifter. The conversational content limited to information I’d accumulated about lifting. And by that representation alone I thought friendship could be forged.
The fact is, underneath the image of heavy-ass-weight-lifting person, I had no real social skills- I’d been avoiding developing them by building up this “acceptable” appearance that could compensate for it. And I had no idea.
They could not have known that underneath the persona of lifter, there was nothing even there to interact with. Try to have a conversation with Me, not the lifter, and I would have had nothing to say.
If I look like someone you’d like, isn’t that the same as Being someone you’d like? I don’t have to work at being a friend if I can just look like a person you’d want to be friends with.
They could not have known my hidden motives. It is even possible they were doing it, too.
And lastly, to actually become strong requires discipline, control, and manipulation, which can be addictive
Control and structure feel very productive.
In my addiction to control, I poured all my energy into manipulating every facet of my life that would support my identity of power-lifter, and telling everyone about it:
Keeping a strict training schedule
A strict, “healthy” nutritional plan (aka orthorexia in disguise)
Fine tuned sleep schedule
Avoiding social events that would expose me to “bad” food
Taking supplements
Reading, learning, studying all things to do with strength development.
Sounds all good and healthy, right? Not if you knew it was all a compensation to avoid honestly looking at Me. And the consequences were that I became numb in a new way. Isolated. Out of touch with reality.
The consequence was that I became completely disconnected from my body’s natural state of well-being. I wasn’t healing. I was forcing myself into a persona that wasn’t Me, thinking it would fix me. Becoming more and more split. More numb to my pain.
And in a numbed-out state, any action that feeds an identity is likely to only reinforce becoming more and more numb through that identity.
Today, I’d rather feel my pain and face my facts than be “strong” and numb. But that’s a state that took a long time to accept. And is still a work in progress that takes daily committment.
I’ll end the story here for today. There is more to share another time.
Can you relate?
Have you ever used a movement practice or form of exercise as a distraction from pain, and misinterpreted that distraction as a solution for it?
Have you ever used a solution for your body’s pain as a fix for your life’s problems?
Working for a physical quality: Strength, flexibility, even becoming more “relaxed” using meditation and breathing techniques, can be an escape. A means to feel in control. A way to numb out from the body sensations that are communicating to us that something’s not right.
For example, what if one says “I need to exercise for my mental health!” This may be true…
But perhaps more clarity could come from asking, “What is causing my mental health to suffer and I feel the need to use exercise to correct?” i.e. compensate for.
(Which is not to say that there isn’t evidence supporting exercises’ role in brain health- The book Spark by John Ratey is an excellent book about just that- Just that we ought to be clear on our intentions and honest with ourselves about it).
But we ought to question, is exercise the escape from seeing the root of the problem? The attempt to correct a problem that originally had nothing to do with exercise? A problem that has ntohing to do with being strong or weak or fit in any way? And if you attended to that, would you still feel the need to exercise?
And how does one become grounded in the actual experience of our bodies, without using exercise as a way of pretending to have already attained to that?
These questions, among others, are ones I think I might explore for the rest of my life.
I have more to write on this topic, but that’s another post, for another day. I’d love to hear your thoughts and answers to the above questions, if you’re open to creating this space for honest discussion around our relationships with exercise, and our bodies.
Please leave a comment below! Or shoot me an email! Or follow me on the IG (@monvolkmar), if you’d like to keep this conversation rolling 🙂
When I was in my late teens/early 20s I started “exercising” and decided it was the cure for all my body’s (and life’s) problems.
I believed I was too fat (I wasn’t), and this major flaw needed correcting. In my narrow world view (inspired by the dance world) thin people were happier, more successful, and more popular: HSP.
So I created a problem (fatness) that didn’t need fixing (losing weight), and it felt very productive.
But I was unable to ever attain a size small enough that felt closer to HSP.
Where do you go after size 0? 00? 000? How many zeros does happiness have (and I suppose one could say the same about money…)? Every pound lost only led to disappointment that I wasn’t any more happier, succesfful, or popular than before.
My existence had become little more than the correction of my body’s size. My fulfillment was reduced to a hypothetical number. If I can control that number, I can control my life. If I can fix my body, I can fix my life.
As I already wrote about in this post, I’d developed a problem with eating (that is, not doing enough of it), which I can see now as a result of the subtle bullying I was exposed to in my dance training. However, deep down in my bones, I knew there would be terrible long term consequences to my extreme eating restrictions, like, actually dying of starvation. That realization smartened me up enough to change. Sort of…
However, like many eating disordered individuals, I cleverly reasoned that, at one end of the spectrum, if less calories IN was a solution to fatness, more calories OUT was another viable solution at the other extreme. So I turned my strategy 180 degrees: I decided to start using exercise to burn calories. HSP would be mine.
Then, to my dopamine-saturated (or deprived?) brain’s delight, I realized that exercise had an additional benefit starvation did not: I could present an image that the world would accept as “healthy”. I nearly convinced myself of it, too.
Addicted to control
Through exercise, I could control my body. Through my body, I could control peoples’ perception of me.
Jogging was my natural entry point for exercise: Low cost, and you can do it anywhere (even with no shoes, if you’re a little crazy). I adopted the noble persona of “jogger”, and this became my primary method to make myself suffer for my sins of fatness under the clever guise of health.
And people believed it, too. “Look at Monika being healthy and doing exercise! Exercise is good!” they said… I shudder and hope that no one was inspired to copy my “noble and disciplined” ways.
One summer (I must have been about 20) I started training for a triathlon and I fooled everyone, including myself, into thinking it was an authentic expression of a healthy lifestyle. No… It was a clever disguise.
HSP…
As I reflect on my younger self, I see that I was little more than a living confabulation. A walking (jogging) pretension. And seeing this has taught me to never assume that someone’s motive for engaging in a “healthy” behaviour- diet, exercise, etc., is actually to attain greater health.
“Being healthy” is a great way to camoflauge a deep lack of well-being by pretending to want it, or to already have it.
Eventually, my jogging addiction started to hurt my joints (I was in the habit of going out for compulsive midnight jogs to make up for eating “bad” food).
Let me rephrase that. Jogging wasn’t hurting my joints. Jogging isn’t an inherently melevolant entity out for personal revenge. I was still Me, afterall. And this Me believed that my size was a moral issue requiring correction. I was hurting my joints.
Don’t blame the exercise, blame the exercisER.
But I was like a junkie, addicted to using exercise to manipulate my reality. Take the edge off. I felt powerless to change who I was. But I did have the power to change the drug. Bye bye jogging. I never understood that “runner’s high” thing, anyway.
What new drug did I choose? I’ll get back to that. But first, let’s talk about addiction.
The acceptable addict
In his book, In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts, author Dr. Gabor Mate shares stories from his time in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (an area notorious for it’s high levels of drug use/overdose, homelessness, and a range of other problems of social inequlity), working with individuals gripped by drug addiction.
Individuals that could be placed on the far end of an “addict-spectrum”- Physically destructive habits that are definitely not socially acceptable.
In his book, Mate also describes his own struggle with an addiction of a different kind- Compulsively buying classical music.
Benign as that may sound, he compares himself to the alcoholics and substance abusers he worked with. He makes the case that, in the biological sense of the word, he is just as much an addict, ruled by the exact same biochemical patterns in the brain.
The difference? We don’t judge the eccentric lover of classical music in the same way we do the eccentric lover of fentanyl. Maybe we even think it’s cute. Mayeb we even wish we had this quirky affinity for Bach, Tchaikosvky, and Chopin, because isn’t classical music something that smart, sophisticated, “well-adjusted” members of society enjoy?
But an addiction is an addiction is an addiction, at the level of our neuroanatomy
In THIS interview, Dr. Mate describes that addictive behaviour can manifest as anything “...that a person finds temporary pleasure or relief in and therefore craves, suffers negative consequences from, and has trouble giving up”.
You may find it preposterous that an “extreme affinity” for classical music could be remotely comparable to a heroin addict’s plight… But I instantly connected with what he was saying: Holy shit. I’M an addict, too.
I am an addict that our cultural values system enables
Because exercise is healthy and good, right?
People perceived my exercise addiction as “good behaviour”, and I felt justified that I’d found the solution for my HSP problem. But I was merely an addict trapped in a compulsive dopamine-driven behavioural loop.
Behavioural addictions that are less biologically destructive and more societally acceptable than opiates, for example, like Dr. Mate’s classical music addiction, or my exercise addiction, are harder to spot, and have an impact of a different kind.
First, there is a wilting of the soul of an individual who knows that every time they “use” they are letting themselves down in a way that hurts like a punch in the gut. That gut-punch-feeling is the visceral sense of failing to take responsibility for onesself. It’s very natural to want to take the edge off it…
The visceral feeling of failure, and shame of failure, prompts further failure-esque behaviour, like the failure to show up for others- as a friend, partner, parent, employee, etc- because we don’t want others to see this sunken state. This increases the sense of distance from the all-important goal of HSP, and creates more “bad” feelings in the body, which can, again, be immediately relieved by “using” more (exercise, music, productivity… name your drug).
I was stuck in a loop like this, failing to see what gave my life real meaning and purpose beyond the illusive quest for HSP. Each day’s fulfillment was built around “When, where, and how will I get my next hit?”.
As one might predict, continuously sacrificing my well-being to fit in with an idea of who believed I needed to be, eventually manifested in physical symptoms. For me, joint pain, hyper-emotionality, and deep-to-the-bone fatigue.
Plus, a contsant fear that I’d be found out as a fraud that made me sick to my stomach (but at least I had exercise to numb those bad feelings out).
If you knew me at this time in my life, you weren’t really meeting Me. You were meeting my costume. I feel a deep need to apologize for the lack of awareness and destruction I inevitably brought to most of these relationships.
Such is the life of a junky…
What’s an addict with knee pain to do?
So to pick the story back up… Here I was, an exercise addict with knee pain. What do I do next?
I could change Me. I could look at why I felt so ruled by the constant need to be happy, successful, and popular. And where I’d learned that my body was the tool for this.
Or I could change drugs. Jogging isn’t doing it for me anymore. What else is out there?
Lacking the perspective, integrity, and support to learn how to go about changing Me (not to mention my incompletely developed pre-frontal cortex… I was only 20!) I chose a new drug.
What new drug could help me correct and forget my life’s (and body’s) problems without hurting my knees? Strength training.
Lifting weights, powerlifting, and all things gym, became my new persona. My new escape. My new costume. HSP will surely be mine…
But I’ll pick that story up in the next blog post. It’s rather long. There is a lot I learned in that new phase of my exercise addiction that I’d like to put into words, and a small chance it may be useful for somebody (you? maybe…) to read.
Would you inquire?
Until next time, perhaps you would like to inquire: Are you like me? Have you, are you, using exercise as a drug?
Could you accept the title of “addict”? Without shame, just as a fact with consequences that need to be observed.
What do you get as a side-effect of exercise? I wasn’t really exercising to be thin, I was seeking what I thought thinness would give me: Happiness. Success. Popularity.
Do you truly love to exercise, or are you using it to feel productive and in control? An escape? A distraction from investigating what’s really important to you? If you think about stopping, do you feel your skin crawling, anxiety building, identity crumbling (that’s withdrawal…)?
Are you fooling yourself, and everyone around you, that your motive for, and outcome of exercise is “health”?
Exercise and play
Am I still an addict? In some ways, yes. But there is a relief in being honest about it. I still use it out of compulsion at times. But now I see it for what it is, and that clarity has been a liberation.
And if I remember what I loved about my body, before I learned to think of it as too big, was that my body was my vessel for physical play.
Before exercise, my body was this awesome, capable, energetic vehicle through which I could play with my friends, and that’s what mattered most. Dig holes in the dirt. Play tag. Build snow forts. Play badminton, frisbee, and frollick in the ocean waves…
But after addiction, my body was a tool to manipulate others into believing I was somebody worthy of their friendship.
And that distinction takes courage to see. Courage I am still building.
On the go? Listen to the audio-only version while you’re washing the dishes, saving the world’s bee population, waiting for your dog to take a poop, or whatever you do while listening to podcasts/radio/audiobooks.
What is moving honestly?
First, don’t feel bad… Not moving honestly doesn’t make you a bad person. It’s not a moral judgement. Simply a lack of awareness. And it’s OK, we’ve all got blind spots.
But, to quote Mark Manson’s PSA to millenials from his book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck: “It’s not your fault, but it is your responsibility”.
I really enjoyed this book when I read it as a 20-something year old…
Now that you know moving honestly is a thing, it’s your responsibility to be aware of it. Sorry (not sorry), to burst your bubble.
Professor Google defines honest as: “Free of deceit and untruthfulness; sincere.” (Although I’d argue that honesty has a quality inherent to it that can’t be defined by the lack of something. Similarly to how “health” is more than simply the lack of illness… )
How can movement be insincere or deceitful? (again, I’m not implying you’re trying to deceive to people with movement… Unless you’re actually telling lies via sign language, or playing an evil character in physical theatre)
When you can convince yourself that the current way of moving is all there is, the best way there is, and there’s nothing else to learn. Especially true when we’ve worked very hard to learn a skill, like ballet. Don’t ever tell a ballet dancer that they’re allowed to turn their legs in 😉 Just kidding…
When your body has adopted a compensatory way of moving that you don’t even realize you’re doing– You think you’re moving the thing you’re trying to move, but you’re not…
When you willingly compromise quality and accuracy of a movement to achieve an aesthetic, a fitness result, or an athletic goal, without considering the long-term implications. A client of mine who is a dance teacher really related to this. She reported that her students have no qualms sacrificing the alignment of their hips to make it look and feel like they are more flexible than they reallly are.
My definition of moving honestly: Moving in such a way that what your perception of what your body is doing is in alignment with what you’re actually doing, why you’re doing it, and you’re not denying that your current way of moving isn’t all that there is.
So it’s not moving “perfectly”. It’s about moving with awareness, as much self-objectivity as possible, and being open to what more could be available.
Perception vs. Reality
A good word to use is “actually”.
Profession Google defines actually as: “The truth or facts of a situation; really.”
Are you actually moving your spine or are you just shifting your weight around on your feet?
Are you actually rotating your shoulders externally or are you twisting out your forearms and wrists instead?
In the case of my client’s story, are you actually retracting your scapula or are you finding three other ways to do it that don’t remotely involve moving your scapula?
A little farther down in this post I’ll invite you to try the move-your-scaps-honestly challenge (as I described in the video… did you watch it to the end??). You might like to take a video of yourself, and check your perception vs. reality. What is your actual movement strategy?
How did we begin to move DIShonestly?
Why do we lie about anything? Because for some reason it served us.
We found a way to get what we wanted while conserving more energy: Taking short-cuts without understanding the repercussions.
Sometimes these are conscious choices. Sometimes a result of injury. Sometimes necessary for athletic performance.
As an example from my own life, the three most dishonest ways of moving I lived out:
Lots of passive stretching when my structure couldn’t actually tolerate it: Being insincere to my golgi tendon organs. Sitting in the splits for 30 minutes straight is not very smart.
Sorry, muscle spindles, for the years of thrashing
2. Lots of heavy deadlifts when I couldn’t actually flex my hips without lumbar extension: Failing to see my true biomechanical needs and abilities. I got pretty strong, but at a cost. Working with a coach earlier would have helped.
3. Lots of high intensity exercise when what I actually needed was to rest and recover from injuries, but I was scared by the dance-world’s focus on being thin: Not being true to me, and using exercise to control my appearance, based on how I thought the dance-world wanted me to look.
Do any of these resonate with you?
Moving dishonestly can range from a simple lack of awareness easily remediated with a technical cue, to a more severe, systemic issue in which our entire movement practice is out of congruence with our values, needs, and goals.
Biomechanical honesty
Biomechanical honesty refers to being able to move every bone and joint as per its original intructions, with awareness.
Movement based on the actual joint architecture. According to our anatomical set-up. The shape of the bones themselves dictate how they are able to move.
Dishonesty happens every time we lose an option to move as per our original instructions, and replace it with something else less precise, less pure, less “true”, without us knowing.
Or every time we put our faith in someone elses’ movement system that is not congruent with the actual movement possible based on the articulating surfaces of our bones, and the lines of pull of our muscles, because their biomechanical understanding is hazy.
For example, THIS representation of the gluteal muscles:
Face palm 🙁
So be careful who you learn from (even me…).
Speaking of glutes, I once believed that squeezing my glutes as I walked was a good way to “activate” them, because I heard someone say that, and started doing it. Not really how the body works, but my naive self didn’t know better at the time…
So what causes us to lose an option for honest movement?
Injuries not completely healed that we learn to adapt around
Trained movement skills (sports, yoga, etc)
Being told to stand and walk a particular way (don’t walk pigeon-toed, stand up straight)
Long periods of being mostly sedentary
Repetitive habits (like always sitting with one leg crossed)
Early childhood sensory-motor deprivation
Weird birth experiences
All of the above experiences can distort our perception of how we’re moving because they all will result in the distortion of our movement mechanics from its original instructions.
Not “bad”. Just not how we came in our original packaging.
You gotta step out of the original packaging to live your life… But at least try to remember what it was like!
Judgement and attachment in motion
Sometimes we get overly attached to particular ways of moving and deliberately avoid movements we were taught are “bad”.
As a ballet dancer, I believed for years that hip internal rotation was bad, and refused to consider otherwise. External rotation was a badge of honour, even if it was hurting me.
You might also have been told that slouching is bad, letting your pelvis hike in the frontal plane (sassy hips) is bad, or pronating your feet is the devil.
In fact, I had a client once tell me that as a yong woman, she was shamed for appearing “too sexual” by authorities in her Christian community for letting her pelvis hike while she waked. So she deliberately stopped doing it. Now, years later, our work together involves helping her re-experience this movement with the understanding that its actually crucial for shock absorption mechanics in gait. Oops…
Moving honestly, for her, means embracing, de-vilifying, and remembering her original instructions for pelvis movement.
The confabulating body
Confabulation is when we’re lying but we think we’re telling the truth. We don’t even know we’re being dishonest because we lack sufficient information to know any better!
Our bodies are excellent confabulators. And thank goodness they are!
Like my client who stopped hiking her pelvis, her clever body figured out multiple strategies to make up for it because our bodies are always 100% functional to keep us moving.
Threfore, the better you are at confabulating, it is a sign of just how functional your body is.
But there comes a tipping point at which the number of confabulations becomes too high and your body can’t keep up with the demand.
Like if you’ve ever tried to lie to 10 different people at once, each with a different story, and you lose track of your stories and eventually get caught and things blow up in your face…
So what happens when your body exceeds its capacity to confabulate? What if you run out of available body parts to subsitute with?
This is the law of compensation and adaptation: As long as compensation is possible, progression of the problem is imperceptable. It is when all the adaptive processes have been exhausted that the symptom suddenly appears. (from osteopath Jean-Pierre Barral’s Visceral Manipulation textbook)
The solution is to strip things back to their original instructions, so that body parts are both independednt and interdependent, not co-dependent, caught in eachothers’ web of lies.
This is challenging when multiple body parts are engaged in what Anatomy in Motion instructor Chris Sritharan calls a “negotiation”. How does one resolve a negotiation? Lots of honest, open, conversations…
Which isn’t fun and sexy… But rewarding, if you do the work.
The move-your-scaps-honestly challenge
Would you like to give this “honest movement” thing a try, and give your body a chance to have an honest conversation between its various parts?
In the video at the beginning of this post, I invited you to try the exercise I gave my client: To find pure, honest scapular retraction without using any confabulatory strategies.
Are you up for the move-your-scaps-honestly challenge?
Here’s a version of the exercise I gave my client to explore scapular retraction and protraction. Try it out and see if you can do it honestly 😉
As you go through the exercise, try to be aware of whether or not you are using any of the following strategies:
Elevation of your scapulae
Depression of your scapulae excessively
Rotating or bending your whole body to one side
Extending your lumbar spine excessively
Pulling your arms behind you
Probably other stuff!
Using a mirror or filming yourself might help to catch your blind spots.
Remember, it’s not about BIG movement. It’s about moving differently, accurately, purely.
This might mean moving througha smaller range of motion, but more purely and precisely, with the actual body part you intend to move.
Or maybe finding an entirely new pathway for movement that you didn’t know existed.
4 guidelines for moving honestly
As you do the honest scapular motion challenge, these four guiding principles for honest movement might help. They are very similar to Anat Baniel’s 9 guidelines from her book Move Into Life.
I really enjoyed reading thsi book, until I had to stop and remediate my book addiction.
4 Guidelines for Honest Movement Exploration
Move slowly. When you move quickly, all you can do is move the way you already know how. Slow. Down. Think milimeters per second, not miles per hour.
Move with moment to moment awareness. Pay attention to the bones and joints your’re trying to move. Can you visualize and feel them moving? What muscular sensations do you notice? How are you distributing your weight in your feet? Are you doing werid things with your neck? Are you clenching your jaw? What new sensation of your body in motion can you tune into today? What new detail about your body’s preferred movement strategies can you disccover?
Use external boundaries for feedback. Like I did for my client with my hands, it can be helpful to set up your environment with bumpers and boundaries for external feedback so that you can move honestly without hurting your brain. Chairs, walls, bands, etc. There are a ton of creative ways to create an environment condusive to honest movement, when you know it likes to confabulate 😉 This is also where a movement coach or guide can be of great assistance.
Move small and subtle. Much like moving quickly, when you move big, all you can hope to do is what you already CAN do, just bigger. Lasting freedom is unlocked milimeter by milimeter.
These four guidelines will help you reduce your tendency to use cheaty strategies, and confabulate, and help you to move more honestly.
Conclusions?
The more honestly you can move, the less strain there will be on your system, with each body part being able to do what it was originally designed to do, in isolation, and integrated with the whole bdoy.
Just like the chronic liar who gets caught in the stress of having to keep up with all the stories and webs of lies… Life is easier when we’re being honest. With ourselves, our bodies, and how we move.
Start by trying the move-your-scaps-honestly cahllenge a try, and let me know what you find.
Get help from a coach or movement professional when necessary.
And remember, it’s not a moral judgement, just a call for higher awareness, and to investigate if there could be a more useful way of moving.
Want more help moving honestly?
I’ve pretty much dedicated my life to practicing honest movement (a brutal, life-long process for me it appears…) So I created a workshop with that in mind 🙂
My workshop Liberated Body guides you through an exploration of your body’s movement mechanics based on what it ought to be able to do through the gait cycle (if you still had your original packaging).
The next 4 week workshop is coming up on November 23. You can learn more about it and register HERE.
Liberated Body is a little different than other movement workshops. The goal isn’t even to move “better”, but let your body decide for itself what “better” means, based on honest investigation into your current options for movement. What more is possible? Only one way to find out…
Two of my students, Garrett and Maggie, sent me deligftul videos describing the process they went through doing Liberated Body. And while they didn’t use the words “honest movement”, I think that’s exactly what they’re describing.
Check out their sucess stories, they really made me smile and blush:
That’s all for now folks. May you move inquisitively, honestly, and with ease 😉
I don’t usually write blog posts to romance one particular exercise, but today I need to confess my love for the forearm press.
The trouble with putting any exercise on a pedestal is that one person’s best exercise is another person’s worst. One person’s medicine is another’s poison. So take this all with a grain of salt 😉
Before I say more about why I love the forearm press, and why it’s a staple in my current movement practice, check out this quick tutorial by moi:
To the outside observer, this exercise looks like the most boring thing in the world. Internally, however, its very exciting.
Don’t be deceived by the simplicity or basic-ness of the forearm press!
As many of my clients will attest, this exercise is not just chilling-out on your forearms, its freakin’ intentional work. And the benefits are in the details.
So the rest of this blog post is allll about the details.
You can build shoulder health and strength simultaneously
In my own journey to shoulder health and strength, I did pretty much everything wrong.
I just wanted to be able to do pushups and chin ups and over-head pressing and one-armed handstands, but I didn’t even know what a shoulder was, nor was I doing anything useful to prepare my shoulders for the movement capacity and positional integrity those exercises require.
You can learn from my mistakes.
The forearm press is where I wish I started my arm-strength jounrye.
It is an awesome way to set that foundation and build a solid AF shoulder girdle so you can do all the upper body things.
So here’s the top 8 reasons why I’m loving the forearm press right now as a shoulder health and strength development exercise.
8 reasons why I love the forearm press
1. Get a “neck stretch” while you get stronger
This exercise builds mad shoulder strength while giving you a great upper back, upper trapezius, and neck stretch at the same time. In fact, feeling the neck and upper trap stretch is an indicator that you’re in a good position.
If you set up the forearm press corretctly, you should be able to feel a bit of stretch on the back of your neck and your upper traps. Isn’t that a great bonus?
In fact, in the forearm press, a lot of the work you will feel is coming from muscles working in a lengthened position- An eccentric muscle action.
Here are some of the muscles that are getting this lovely stretchy, worky opportunity in the forearm press, besides your neck and upper traps:
If you’d like to really nerd out, some muscles will be working in both a long and short position at the same time, in different planes of motion. Fun eh?
Let’s take the lats, for example: You should feel a bit of lat stretch by virtue of the scapular protraction and the fact that your arms are in front of your body (shoulder flexion). However, at the same time, your lats need to act concentrically to hold your shoulders down from your ears (scapular depression).
What I hope you can take away from that is that it is often more productive to cue yourself with joint movements (push the floor away, scaps towards your butt pockets) than muscle actions (engage your lats!).
If I say to you, “Use your lats!”, what joint action it that asking for? This muscle crosses multiple joints… Which joint are we even talking about?? Should you “use your lats” eccentrically or concentrically? (And now you know the answer is BOTH).
2. Scapular protraction strength: Push before you pull?
Note that the forearm press is a pushing exercise.
Pushing implies you DO NOT want to squeeze your shoulder blades together. The main joint action in the forearm press is scapular protraction, which you get by pushing the floor away to spread your scaps wider apart.
Contrary to what some folks think, shoulder blades back and down is not the epitome of shoulder health, stability, or “good posture”. In fact, in any arms supported work, we want to spread those scaps and push the floor down (protraction).
What about the 3:1 pull to push ratio?
I don’t know if this is a thing anymore, but when I first began working as a trainer I was taught that in an optimal training program, one should have a 3:1 ratio of upper body pulling to pushing exercises.
So for exmaple, for every push-up, there should be three rowing exercises.
I don’t know if I agree with this.
I feel that a lot of folks can get more out of initially working on pushing, rather than starting with pullling. But that doesn’t mean be silly like me and start with 26 different push-up exercises…
Here’s my main case for push first, and how the forearm press serves as an awesome pushing experience:
Muscles lengthen before they contract– Gary Ward‘s 2nd rule of movement.
This refers to how, in gait, muscles are stimulated to generate a contraction from their fully lengthened position. Like pulling back an elastic band in order to project it forward. Muscles load to explode.
While this is describing muscles in the context of gait, I think it also applies to strength training.
When we push, and protract the scapuale, the muslces of retraction (like the rhomboids, middle trapezius, and pals) lengthen, loading them eccentrically (like pulling back the slingshot).
So if we are strategically thinking ahead, we can prepare the muscles that retract the scaps (pictured above) by first training them to load eccentrically, using pushing movements that protract the scaps.
Give the rhomboids and traps no option but to contract, by first lengthening them.
It’s not about “stretching” them. The stretch is simply an indicator of scapulae that are actually protracting, giving the the muscles of retraction the stimulation to contract from a more lengthened position, ultimately improving their strength and function.
But what about developing rounded-forwards shoulders?
Many of us have been given and idea that to stand with “good posture” is to pull our shoulders back. And yet many folks have shoulder problems because of this.
I can recall two recent clients in particular with severely retracted scapulae who could barely budge them apart from each other, and had “shoulder and neck stiffness”.
Upon asking, one of them told me she was raised by nuns who demanded “shoulders back” all day long. The other is a lady in her 70s who was perpetually told by her mom not to slouch when she was a kid.
Got shoulder problems? Blame the church and your mom 😉 Just kidding…
Pushing exercises that demand scapular protraction, can help us find a more balanced, centered way, naturally, by showing our shoudler girdle to both ends of the the shoulder girdle protraction to retraction spectrum.
I like the forearm presss for this because it helps liberate both our mind and body from learned postural propaganda.
Here’s another little video clip on the topic of “good posture” (from one of my Movement Deep Dive sessions):
One of my online students actually remarked how it felt like her shoulders were in a more naturally “held back” position, even though the forearm press deliberated asks you NOT to squeeze your shoudlers together: Protraction, not REtraction.
Another friend/client of mine gave this feedback afte doing this exercise with me in one of my online classes:
So that is why I like to use pushing exercises before pulling (rows, chin-ups, etc). And the forearm press accomplishes this nicely.
3. Awesome preparation for more advanced upper body weight bearing exericses
Mastery of this position will build a foundation for anything else that requires weight-bearing into yours arms with a solid shoulder girdle.
For example:
Static beast and crawling progressions (for the Animal Flowists)
Plank and push-up variations
Dolphin, forearm stands, and headstand variation, and other arm balancing postures common in yoga, like crow and crane
Handstands (my current training obsession)
Other fun floor-based flowy movement stuff, a la Ido Portal, or Animal Flow.
4. Safe exercise for most folks with wrist complaints
Many of my in-person clients are women. Most of them are in their 50s/60s and are learning to support themselves on their arms for the first time ever. Back in the 1950s-70sish days, strength training wasn’t a thing many women were encouraged to do.
Well times are a changin’. And developing arm strength to hold onesself up off the floor is an uber empowering thing for all genders.
However, due to never actually training hand supported positions, many peoples’ wrists might not be comfortable in extension with their bodyweight loaded on top of them.
Being on the forearms makes weight-bearing through the arms possible even for people with cranky wrists, so they can start training their shoulder girdle position and strength without putting compressive strain on their wrists.
5. You get great feedback from the floor and no fancy equipment or expensive coach required
I love my daily floor time (the floor is actually one of my top 3 favourite tools for moving with more ease and less pain, I wrote about in my 3 Essential Tools PDF resource, have you read it yet?).
Putting our forearms or hands on the floor creates a closed-chain environment.
Closed-chain upper body exercises gives us amazing feedback about our body position, no coach or special equipment required.
In the forearm press, here’s a few ways the floor can give you great feedback to help execute the exercise with better quality and precision without someone like me hovering over you, yelling commands:
Deliberately push against the floor: The real work and intensity comes from pushing your forearms down into the floor really hard, like you’re pushing right to China. Or if you live in China, push your way to America (but not so hard you strain and hyperventilate…).
Notice your body position in relation to the floor : As you hold, get your position cues from the floor:
Do you see the floor moving closer to your face? This might mean your head is changing from it’s start position, drooping lower. Don’t let the floor get closer to your face.
Can you push your chest up higher from the floor- maintain the “press” part (scapular protraction)?
As you do the rocking forwards variation (did you watch the tutorial?), use the floor as something to aim your forehead for to gauge the distance you’re moving. Every time you practice, try to rock farther towards the floor.
Feel your hand and arm contact against the floor: Can you get all 5 hand knuckles on the floor? How about your wrists? Do your hands slowly start to move more and more inward of your elbows as you hold? Try to hold firm contact of all knuckles, wrists, and elbows- It changes the way it feels and helps you develop a more powerful push.
Being aware of where all your body parts are on and in relation to the floor helps you helps you be your own best coach. Since many of us are working out at home these days with no outside eye, the floor is a great tool, built into the forearm press, at no extra cost 😉
6. Tons of fun progressions to challenge your whole body
There are endless forearm press variations to play with when you’ve mastered the basics and are ready to progress the challenge level!
Here’s one progression that’s been a staple for me for the past couple of months: The knees hovering elbow bend (don’t have a fancy name for it…). Welcome to tricep city.
I originally stole this from Lizette Pompa, realized how hard it was, and reverse engineered it back to the forearm press, because that was honestly where I should have started. Basics…
Here’s Lizette making it look oh-so effortless. And notice how she can do it without rocking her butt back to her heels, like I have to do, making it a more pure upper body exercise:
7. Ability to self-modulate the intensity purely with your intention
Working out at home without equipment means we have to find other clever ways to modulate exercise inensity than adding external resistance (weights).
As I often say to my clients/students, you can make this exercise as hard or as easy as you want simply through your intention to do so.
Find your own specific intensity threshold at which you can perform the exercise with good quality, maintain your structural integrity, and still be able to breathe (use your quality of breathing to gauge your intensity threshold, ie if you start to hyperventilate, you’re done).
Push down the floor more (make it more intense) or less (less intense).
Hold for longer (more breath cycles) or shorter.
Focus on keeping your body more forward on your arms (harder), or back slightly off your arms (easier).
Little tweaks to where you’re focusing and fine-tuning your body positioning help this become harder or easier without even having to move to a more “advanced” variation.
8. Becomes a lovely way to tune into breathing mechanics
In this position we can get a few really nice things, breathing mechanics-wise:
With scaps protracted, all the muscles of the upper back are lengthened, and the area called the posterior mediastinum can open up. The posterior mediastinum (see photo below) can get a little squashed, and some vital tubes and things pass through this very small region. Keeping it open and breathing into it is important for both general health and movement reasons. Push the floor, expand your upper back, breathe into it, and enjoy the extra space between your lungs and spine.
With the head a bit lower than the hips- a slight inversion, this position also helps enhance the “pump handle” breathing action of the upper chest- Forwards and upwards expansion. See what I mean by pump-handle in this cool animation of breathing mechanics
The forearm press position makes it easier to hold the ribcage slightly “exhaled” and down, which helps to more easily access the abdominal muscles and create greater intra-abdominal pressure. This helps one to access a better diaphragmatic breating pattern, without flaring open the ribcage excessively with each breath, with better abdominal co-contraction, which means hello abz.
Conclusions?
I love this exercise because it makes my shoulders and neck feel awesome. Like I got a great workout and an upper trap stretch at the same time.
But you are not me…
Most people don’t have any problems with it, but if you do, don’t force through it! Get some help if you have pain with this or any movement.
The forearm press is wonderful for both shoulder health and strength, and is also a gateway to more advanced arm balancing exercises, like headstands, and handstands, if that’s a thing you have on your movement-goals-list.
So if you want to build a solid handstand from the ground up, I would start here, with the forearm press. Basics, basics, basics!
Want to be able to do push-ups really well? I would start here.
Even just to be able to do set your shoulder girdle up for a perfect plank position, I would start here.
Don’t be like silly, young Monika. Start your shoulder strength journey from the ground up, and enjoy more linear progress because you won’t have to go back and work on the basics later, after experiencing discomfort, like me.
Give it a try, and let me know how it goes for you! I’d love to hear how the forearm press feels for you. Love it or hate it? Probably a little of both 😉
In my Movement and Strength Training Foundations online classes we worked on the forearm press for four weeks straight. If you’d like to learn more about these classes or try one out, shoot me an email 🙂
Do you have one of more of these problems with your current exercise routine?
You feel generally stuck in your exercise routine.
You don’t know what exercises to do for your goal so you default to the same shit even though you don’t particuarly love it.
You don’t really know what your goals are or should be so you’re just going through the motions
You’re just going through the motions but the spark, joy, and fulfillment are gone.
I’ve been there, too, my friend. Many times.
If you said YES to any of the bullet points above, then I invite you to do a Movement Practice Audit.
In the 30 min video I’m going to introduce the MESH framework I used to audit my own movement practice, to strip away the useless garbage, keep what was working, and reconnect with my “why” that keeps me moving (because, “exercise is good” isn’t a good enough reason…)
Need to audit your own movement practice? Follow along with the video:
Want to listen while you’re on the move? Here’s an audio version:
What is the MESH framekwork?
Does your movement practice MESH for you? MESH helps you audit four key areas of your movement practice to see what works, and what needs to change.
What works for you right now is not fixed. Auditing yourself every 6 months to a year is a good way to check in and make sure your movement practice is still serving you.
M= Meaningful
“Why am I doing this?”
Does your movement practice support your highest values? Or are you just moving because someone told you exercise is a thing you should do. Let’s discover what makes movement actually meaningful for you.
E= Enjoyable
“Do I even like doing this?”
Life’s too short to spend time doing shit you hate. And if you don’t enjoy it, you’re not going to be able to do it in a way that is sustainable. If you hate jogging, why are you forcing youself to do it? Could you find something comparable, that meeds your needs, and that you actually like?
Also note that you can learn to like something if you can connect it to your highest values. You might not love something in the moment, but you can start to connect with how it makes you feel, or that you like the feeling of mastery you get, or you like what it enables you to do as a result.
S= Sustainable
“As my movement practice is now, could I do it for the rest of my life?”
If the naswer is no, it’s not sustainable. Not that your practice should stay the same for ever. Sustainability takes into consideration that you will evolve and your practice will change, and that you are not getting locked into one paradigm for movement.
Also consider Dr. Peter Attia’s Centennarian Olympics thought experiment: What do you want to be able to do if you were to live to be 100, and how are you gonig to train for those, like they are Olympic events. Don’t just hope for the best.
Like my favourite shirt says… Train For Life.
Amazing shirt is by Toronto company Screaming Monkey Apparel
H= Healthy
“Am I meeting my body’s demands?”
Healthy means so many things to so many people. I like think of health as an act of meeting our bodies current demands.
Is your nervous system sympathetic dominant? Health might mean meeting that demand.
Do you have joint movement restrictions that are keeping you stuck in pain and lethargy: Health might mean meating that demand.
And many other factors that I couln’t possibly cover in a video.
So how did you do on your audit?
Understanding the MESH framework is a great place to start. From here, we can go deeper.
The MESH audit is just one tool of many that I’ve been developing for the past 2 years, and I’ll be putting it out slowly in a series of videos like this one over the next several months.
I’m going to be putting together an in depth program called Physical Mastery in which I’ll be taking a group of folks through all the steps of my movement practice audit. Not sure when it will be a fully actualized thing, but the gears are in motion.
Physical Mastery is for anyone feeling stuck with their body, uninspired, energetically depleted, and not sure what to do to get out of the physical and mental funk.
The Physical Mastery program will help you to connect more deeply with your body by understanding, healing, and deepening your relationship with it. You’ll discover what’s holding you back from inhabiting your body with more ease and joy through a series of practical and conceptual exercises. The end result is to have all the tools you need to build a movement practice that inspires you, and makes you feel energized, resilient, and grounded to take on the world.
Sounds pretty good, right? I think I created this program because it’s exactly what I needed when I was going thourgh a quarter life crisis and needed to get myself out of the hole I was digging for my body and my life: Eating disorder, compulsive exerciser, multiple back injuries, trying to meet everyone’s expecatations and dismissing my own needs.
Sound like you? I’m looking for a group of “beta” participants to give the Physical Mastery Program a test drive!
If you are looking for clarity in your movement practice so you can feel more energized, connected with your life’s purpose, and in better relationship with your body, shoot me an email to get in touch and be one of the beta participants.
Well, its been a while since I posted anything on this here blog, but not for lack of writing anything new. In fact, the opposite is true. There is way too much coming out of my brain to organize succinctly into blog posts, so I’ve given up trying.
I’ve also started working on a “secret” project. Except I’m going to tell you about it in this blog post, so not really a secret.
The “secret project” entails three main things:
I will no longer be posting the completed ongoing work I am doing with my Movement Practice essay series. Not here anyway. It will be available for exclusively for readers who are genuinely interested, but via direct sharing, not on this blog. More on that if you email me (because its kind of a secret right now…). I’ll post partial work here on this blog when it strikes me.
I am designing a process to accompany the Movement Practice essay series that aims to systematically put into action its key learnings and philosophies.
I am looking for a few people who would like to join in the fun and give the Movement Practice Process a test drive while it is still in its infancy to help me develop and perfect it before I make it available to a broader audience.
The following blog post is the first draft of the introduction to The Movement Practice Process. After reading this, if you feel that this process would be valuable to you, see point 3 above, and shoot me an email. I’ll fill you in on all the “secret” details (before May 15th 2019 please).
Enjoy 🙂
How to design a meaningful, enjoyable, sustainable, and healthy movement practice
“Mere slogans without teaching skills and putting systems in place are a half-assed attempt at normalizing.” ~Brené Brown, from Dare to Lead
Slogans are the gospel of the congregation of Good-Intenders. The gospel of half-assery from those who preach from the side-lines.
You’ve probably heard some of the following slogans from the Good-Intenders: “just move daily”, “eat healthier”, “start exercising more”, “get your stress under control”, “you’ve got to sleep more”.
Maybe you’ve heard these from authorities like your doctor. Or from your personal trainer friend. Your know-it-all friend. Your Mom. Maybe you’ve said them yourself thinking they are great and practical pieces of advice. But how often do they result in action in your life? And how often do you get shown how?
Slogans are great, but they will remain in the illusory realm of nice ideas that slip through your fingers like grains of sand without systems in place to capture them. Holding these notions of “things will be better when…”, without having guidance on what exact steps to take, sets you up for failure and disappointment as your goals continue to elude you. This is why it is important to have processes and systems in place to help us do the work in the areas of our lives we wish to take action.
I have created a process, The Movement Practice Process, which focuses on transforming the slogans, “move daily”, “exercise more”, “get in shape”, “start lifting weights”, etc. into action, and investigating what they mean for you.
I’d like to explain what the Movement Practice Process is all about.
THE 7 AREAS OF LIFE
I first heard the concept of the 7 Areas of Life from the transformational coach and speaker Dr. John Demartini. He described these 7 areas that our decisions and behaviours fall within:
Spiritual
Mental
Vocational
Financial
Family
Social
Physical
While I am probably the the last person you should consult with on most of these areas, I have dedicated an obscene amount of time to the physical (which makes me quite unbalanced, albeit in a way that I see more people could benefit from). In particular, I’ve spent years exploring movement as a vehicle for creating health, feelings of self-empowerment, and developing a meaningful connection and peace with myself.
Fascinatingly (and fortunately) because we are whole, integrated beings who cannot live as our separate parts, when we start to investigate and change the physical area of our life, the effect isn’t isolated to the body. The benefits spill over into other seemingly unrelated areas.
PROTOCOL vs. PROCESS
“Expert” as I may be (only by virtue of making nearly all possible mistakes in my realm), I am not here to tell you what to do.
I do not have a protocol of “if this then that”. A protocol focuses on an outcome. A protocol does not require much critical thinking and creativity, only that you be a good little instruction follower. In fact, in following a protocol, the less you think for yourself the better. If you think too hard, you might deviate. A process, on the other hand, encourages critical thinking, creativity, and deviations, and is much more interested in the journey.
The Movement Practice Process may not be linear for you, and you may end up somewhere completely unexpected. For the exercise-addict coming into the process seeking more control, their ultimate realization might be that they will be healthier and happier by letting go of exercise as a defining part of their identity, and doing much less.
On the opposite side of the coin, the sedentary Indoorsman (an archetype we will define in section one), overwhelmed by the options, dogmas, and polarized ideologies around movement and exercise might come into this process with the expectation that it can tell them exactly what to do. But this is far from the truth. I can only hand you the torch to light the way, but you must walk the path yourself. Be open to where it might lead.
As Joseph Campbell wrote, “If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know its not your path. Your own path you make up with every step you take”.
INNER WISDOM
This process was born from a fundamental truth that I have learned on my own path: You are the only person who can truly know what’s best for your body. Developing the skill of tapping into that wisdom is the primary objective of this process.
We all have an inner wisdom inherent to us, held within the very cells of our body. Call it cellular memory. Call it epigenetics. Call it “energy”, intuition, or God. However you choose to conceptualize your inner wisdom, this process is designed to train your ability to reconnect with it.
I came to this understanding through my own messy process, for which I had no map or guide. I learned through necessity that there was no one else on the planet that could or would ever be more invested in my physical state of affairs than I was.
I became disappointed when I went to see therapists who could not show me how to change the way I moved to improve my physical state, and when I did meet a practitioner who showed me just one exercise that I could feel was of value, I committed myself to it fully.
A chiropractor once showed me a single exercise that changed and challenged me. I made a promise to myself that would do it everyday for a year and just see what happened, with no further expectation. I had to commit out of necessity because at the time I had no money to pay for further services from him, but I knew the movement he showed me was of great utility for me and I sought to understand the mechanism behind why it made my body feel so much better. This promise changed my life.
Rather than feel victimized by my circumstance (poor, in pain, and ignorant), I made it my mission to explore the movements that worked, understand why they did, and follow the breadcrumbs wherever they led.
I adopted the mindset that it was 100% my responsibility to learn how to take care of my body. The decisions about my body were not ones I could outsource if I wanted to take control of my physical state. This mindset was a place of power, and it is my intent to show you, through this process, how to cultivate this position of power for yourself, to make appropriate choices for your body, not to give your personal power away to the plentitude of advisors and “gurus” in the confusing world of health, fitness, and exercise.
Although I have plenty of experience about what is and was right or wrong for myself, I’m not going to presume to know what’s right or best for you. I believe that the only person who can know what’s best for you, is you. You and only you have the inner wisdom to make choices about your body. No one else could possible have this same understanding about what your body needs, nor should you give over this power to anyone but yourself.
This process I’ve put together is designed to help you tap into your innate kinesthetic intelligence. You will learn to listen, and cultivate critical self-awareness around your choices, attitudes, and beliefs about your body and movement, and dare to tinker with some new ideas.
Unfortunately we live in an age where we are very disconnected from our bodies. We aren’t given the tools and opportunities to develop our inner wisdom and interpret its non-verbal language. In some cases, the idea of communing with ourselves and our inner wisdom is laughed at. Not taken seriously because it cannot yet be quantified objectively by our current technologies. It can also be very scary.
This diminishes the importance of self-awareness in the eyes of the hyper-rational, analytical, and skeptical types, and eventually results in cutting off communication with our bodies. The concepts of healthy, enjoyable, and meaningful lack a kinesthetic feeling tone we can understand as “keep doing this thing its useful!”. We need tools, opportunities, and support to reconnect ourselves with this inner wisdom again.
JOURNEY MAP
“Move daily”, and “exercise more” are the slogans easily preached from the congregation of Good-Intenders. How to do it is the terrain less traveled, and this process if your journey map.
What does moving daily and exercising more look like for you? How to bring this vision into reality? And is this process for you?
Maybe you are interested in starting an exercise routine but find there’s so much information on what’s “the best” thing to do that its daunting to start. Perhaps you’re thinking about exercising because you feel like you “should”, but if you’re being honest, you really have no desire to. Or perhaps your experience with exercise is limited to leisurely walking your dog. Maybe there have been times in your life when you really pushed hard with that running thing and managed to do a 10km race (after which you decided “my work here is done”, and stopped running. Also, your knees hurt).
If you are already someone who moves regularly (or excessively), this process will be equally valuable for you if you want to reinvent or revitalize your practice. Perhaps what you’re doing no longer interests or holds meaning for you, or you’re no longer inspired by your movement practice, and your body is giving you subtle (or not so subtle) messages that something isn’t right (boredom, chronic fatigue, pain, etc).
Or maybe you’re like I was at the beginning of my quest: Addicted to exercise, a lover of movement, but with so many ache, pains, and overlooked injuries that the challenge was finding the appropriate type, frequency, and intensity of movement that would lead to my best health, enjoyment, and actually be sustainable. I did not have a map, but I am happy to have been able to look back on my winding path and share with you the specific questions and actionable steps that I eventually went through myself, and ones I believe will help you step into your own power.
Where ever your point A happens to be, you’ve found this work because you’re looking to revitalize, reinvent, or create from scratch a movement practice that is healthy, enjoyable, sustainable, and meaningful to you.
HOW THIS PROCESS WORKS
I like to call this process a quest in 7 parts. 7 sets of rugged terrain. Moving through each one will help you get clear on a specific component of your relationship with your body and movement, and to cultivate the ability to connect with, listen to, and interpret your body’s signals. If you engage fully with the tasks in each section and put them into practice, you will be able to uncover for yourself what is “best” for you in your movement practice and design one that truly serves you.
Your point A: Movement Archetypes; reinvent, revitalize, or create from scratch?
Investigate your relationship with your body and movement
Get clear on your vision, intent, values, and goals
Appraise your current physical state
Find what actually interests you
Identify your barriers to success
Create your movement practice through congruent innovation
SOME HELPFUL JOURNEY TIPS
I have a few important tips and reminders for you as you prepare to embark on this quest (should you accept the challenge):
The act of engaging in the journey itself is more important than the expectation of getting anything out of it. The secret: There is no point B. There is no concrete, unchanging movement practice for you that you can cling to forever. There is only the constant seeking to understand and iterate, trusting that you are listening to your body’s inner wisdom to the best of your ability.
I recommend you write notes as you go through the tasks in this process. Some tasks are investigations of your current beliefs and attitudes, and some are actual physical tasks. Consider the physical act of writing the truth on a page part of your movement practice. Writing with an actual pen and paper makes it more real. Speaking it out loud takes it to the next level of realness, and so I also recommend you find a journey companion.
Do not expect perfection and total clarity from your first try at the process. Inevitably, there will be questions that you don’t know how to answer right now. Don’t rush the process. Take the time you need. You may need to sit with something for a month before your body gives you an answer. This is not a quick fix, do in one hour process. This process is a life’s work. There is no pressure to “get it right”. Be gentle with yourself. Be patient.
Engage in this process with the understanding that you and nature are in constant flux. What you find enjoyable today you may not in a few years. What is healthy and cultivates balance for you right now will change, and your choices for movement will need to change. Maybe you’ll have a baby, someone you love passes away, or you start a new work schedule, and your priorities will drastically change.
Be honest. You will be expected to answer some challenging questions. Lying to yourself will not serve you.
Remember: There is no one you will ever know that can ever be as invested in your process than you.
WHAT IS A SUCCESSFUL OUTCOME?
Success with this process will look and feel different for everyone. I would like to borrow the words of Dr. Svetlana Masgutova, creator of MNRI® (Neuro-Sensori-Motor Reflex Integration) as I feel that her definition of “success” mirrors the ideals I hold as true for a genuinely useful movement practice: “Success is measured not only by points in assessments, but more importantly by deep restorative sleep, pain-free bodies, health, joy in the simple pleasures of life, confidence, resilience, and optimism”.
These qualities are difficult to objectively measure and compare, and yet can mean so much more than numerical achievement. It is through noticing changes in these measures, that often occur in small increments over time, that your body will communicate with you that you are doing something good for yourself. Please listen. Please pay attention. We live in a world that loves quantifiable evidence, but remember there are many examples of someone’s progress looking good in the numbers, but not feeling good in their lives.
Did you know that the neural pathway that is dedicated to your homeostasis, feelings of safety, social interaction, and activating the epigenetic expression of our innate healing processes, is 70% afferent? This means that it is more involved in relaying information to your brain about how you’re doing internally, than it is about telling your body what actions it should do. That’s a powerful system to be able to interpret.
Everyone’s got an answer and a solution for you. There’s no shortage on those. What we are generally lacking is the ability to ask the right questions. And ideally, these are questions that help you to make decisions for yourself. Become your own best advisor (coincidentally, the name Monika means advisor, but don’t take that too literally…)
As the famous samurai, Miyamoto Musashi wrote in his Book of Five Rings: “There is nothing outside of yourself that can ever enable you to get better, stronger, richer, quicker, or smarter. Everything is within. Everything exists. Seek nothing outside of yourself.”
Be like samurai Musashi on your own quest, and enjoy the process.
This is not a post in the Movement Practice essay series, but maybe it should be. Probably, it will be. For now, its just for me. Because I did something I have a lot of thoughts about…
I danced.
On Monday I did a ballet class for the first time in about three years. And it was… What it was.
And then, because I wasn’t quite sure what happened on Monday, I went to another class on Thursday, just to check my hypothesis that this was an OK thing to have done with my life.
So how was it? I won’t blow it up and say, “OMG going to two dance classes this week totally changed my life, best decision ever, I’m gonna go out and crush some auditions now ’cause I’M BACK”. (who is this “I“, and what does “back” mean?)
Not even close. It was sobering. Everything about it was hard. It was thought provoking. I wanted to leave halfway through barre, when I realized, “Oh God, I have to let people see me attempt a pirouette”.
At one point on Thursday’s class I found myself unable to hold back tears dripping down my cheeks, not because I was frustrated or upset, but because watching the woman in front of me dancing with all her soul and all her imperfection was the most beautiful thing I’ve witnessed in a while.
I am feeling real, challenging emotions about this whole experience that I’m still processing. Lucky you, dear reader, you get to read all about it.
Ballet studio vibes
If you weren’t afraid to… what would you do?
It took me three years work up the courage to get myself back in the dance studio. It started when I asked myself the question, “What would I do if I wasn’t too afraid to do it?”. On that list of answers (besides figure out how to do my own dang taxes) was that I’d dance again.
The last time I danced was in a ballet class in 2015, or was it 2016? Doesn’t matter. At that time, I wasn’t taking dance classes as a professional means to an end, but I still had this idea that I needed to be good at it, and that if I wasn’t able to go back to being as good technically as I was before it wasn’t worth doing at all.
I was still so very attached to the Old Monika who called herself a dancer. I didn’t realize that there is no going back, only forward.
Identity theft
I could say that my dance career was stolen from me, but really, it’s loss was a gift.
The gift was an injury and the injury turned out to be sieve. A sieve is a utensil used for separating coarser things from finer things, and that’s exactly what my injuries did for me. I was left with no option but to sift through all the shit that got shaken up as I stepped away from dance. At the end of the great sifting, moving through all the dirt, and grime, and darkness, all that was left in the sieve were the things that truly mattered.
The sifting was the letting go.
Let’s say you’ve danced since you were a little kid, like I did. When you hit high school you decided that dance was your career path. Then, you stop dancing suddenly because to continue is unsustainable, physically and mentally. And you never once though about a plan B because up until then you felt indestructible. That was me.
For Old Monika, every choice was framed by the question, “Will this get me closer to being a successful dancer?”. What questions define life now without dance at the center? If you’ve been in this place, you realize that you don’t know who you are anymore without the one thing you were known for.
Worse, you realize that if you don’t even know who you are, neither does anyone else, and this realization feels agonizingly lonely.
This loss of identity is both relieving and terrifying.
Relieving because now there is this opportunity to reinvent and become the person you are, not the person you felt like everyone needed you to be. Terrifying because you have no idea how to be who you are because you’ve never stood still long enough to feel who that person is. You’ve never had a reason to sift.
Too, there is no praise for the process of figuring out who you are. It’s not like in the dance studio where, if you just did exactly what you were told, you could stand on a pedestal and be adored. No one gives you a high five for making the mess as you sift, only for the cleaning it up when its over (and its never over, so you never get that high five).
Seven years ago on my dance career path the intention was “be the best”. The competition was stiff, and yet there was great comfort in knowing exactly how I was expected to look, act, and be. There were rules to follow, and I was good at following rules. I loved rules and I loved control. There was always a technical skill to learn and master to build my confidence around, and I was a good learner.
Then, when it was all gone, all I was left with was this unrecognizable thing called… Me.
A death.
Upon my departure from professional dance training I was left with a lingering pain that I think I now understand to be grief. For seven years I grieved the death of a part of me. But she wouldn’t die all at once. Old Monika took seven years to die, with varying rates of decay.
Each little spurt of death hurt and confused me. Rather than let myself feel the pain of death, I fought back. I refused to let Old Monika die without a fight. It was like there was a whole forest burning and I was trying to fight the flames with a garden hose. It was a losing battle, I knew it, but I just could not let go.
An honest kind of beautiful
You know the cliché phoenix mythology: As Old Monika died, someone new rose from the ashes. I began to feel a sense of peace run through me like a rare cool breeze on a hot, sticky, Toronto summer day. The peace of this re-birthing, still in process, feels so beautiful to me.
On the outside, however, this is not the graceful revival you read about in fairy-tales. Its an honest to God messy, thrashing, struggling just to stand on one leg kind of beauty. Its the honesty that makes it beautiful.
For the past seven years, when people have asked me about my education, they inevitably say something to me like, “Oh, you’re a dancer?”, and I have no idea what to say back. There’s always an awkward silence.
Is the answer “yes”, or “no”, or “I was”, or “I will be”? The current answer is “I don’t know”, and this feels so unacceptable to me. It is the confused answer of someone deep in grief with the unwillingness to let go and move on. I feel like I don’t have enough energy to explain all of the confused things I am feeling.
They just won’t get it. How can they? I don’t even get it.
And then there is the shame of letting Old Monika die. “How could you have let this happen to her? What will people think? What right do you have to go back to dance now? You are unworthy of being seen dancing unless you can be her again”.
But she died. I never even knew who she was, yet I’m still holding on.
The hobbyist’s bravery
As I un-become Old Monika, and reinvent my identity and relationship with my dancer-self, hobbyist is the word that comes to mind.
The word hobbyist fills me with conflict. That word would have sickened me to associate with a few years ago. Certainly 7 years ago. Old Monika would rather never dance again than consider her caliber of dancing a mere hobby. Outrageous. Unacceptable. Shameful.
But that’s the identity I now find myself embracing. Even openly welcoming.
There are so many lovely things about dancing as a hobby that I had no idea existed. There’s no judgement. There’s no pressure to get anything out of this. My livelihood doesn’t depend on me being the best at this. I don’t need to have the pointiest toes, the straightest knees, or the highest arabesque. My leg can stay below 90 degrees and it doesn’t make me a bad person.
The energy in the studio is different, too. The air in here isn’t thick with fear and judgement and rejection. There’s actually this sense that we’re all in this together, a shared experience in which we’re not competing with each other- to get a job, to get approval, to be the best- we’re witnessing each other. We have this shared understanding that we are doing the hardest thing we are likely to do in our lives: We showed up.
We have the courage to just be, and that courage is the work of our lives, not the dancing.
Initially I had this belief that to dance as just a hobby was the easy way out, but I was wrong, because getting here, being ok with being here, was the hardest work I’ve done.
Yes, I found the professional dance world hard in a harsh, critical, and superficial way, but these were the obvious challenges that I knew would come with the profession.
When you make the choice to commit to the professional path you know full well what you’re signing up for: A quest to be the best, to make pretty lines and tell stories. You take pride in pain and you sacrifice a bit of your soul and your sanity and your body for it. That’s what they told me, anyway. They also told me that maybe three people in my class will make viable careers out of this. If you’re lucky you are one of these three people, and you love the quest so much that these sacrifices feel right and you are even able to make meaningful art.
But in the world of hobbyist dancing we are all fierce warriors, not because of the sacrifices and long hours and hard physical work and pain. We’re doing something I found much harder than any of those sacrifices: We’ve chosen to practice letting go of the need to be perfect. We’re practicing self-respect. We’re practicing honesty.
And failure. The hobbyist dancer is engaged in an active practice of failure. We have all stepped into the studio with the shared understanding of the inevitability that, at some point in the next 90 minutes, we will all fail. And what’s even more appalling, we are actually letting otherpeople see our failures. And we’re paying our own money for this experience. We’ll fall out of single pirouettes, forget the steps to the exercises, and probably one of us will wipe out completely going across the floor.
We’re practicing bravery by showing up despite having being told in the past that how we look isn’t good enough, that we needed to feel self-conscious about our bellies, our butts, and our thighs. We show up to be seen in tight clothing having done the hard work involved in not giving a fuck about some dance teacher’s idea of what a “ballet body” is.
All the inadequacies we thought made us unworthy to be dancers are welcomed here, and we honour them, but we first needed to have the courage to show up.
The uncertainty of imperfection
The notion that failure is welcome and expected is both foreign to me and a breath of fresh air.
The uncertainty of imperfection is just as scary as the expectation to be perfect, but in a way that feels constructive. Perfection is a clear and distinct goal that comforts me, yet causes inordinate amounts of stress. I was taught that perfection is beautiful. I fell in love with the path to perfection when I fell in love with ballet. Imperfection, as I am learning, is beautiful in a way that perfection could never be.
Now perfection isn’t being asked of me and I have no idea what the point of ballet is. Its weird. The idea of moving with the sole intent of “to enjoy” feels like I’ve strayed from an important path and maybe I’m wasting my time.
But maybe I don’t need to know where this new path goes, and its the idea of not needing to know, the stepping into the unknown, that freaks me out.
As an aspiring professional dancer I knew exactly what to do and be to be “successful”: Book gigs, be the best, be thin, do what you’re told. I still have this attachment to that old version of success. Old Monika who learned through ballet to be a perfectionist wants to succeed at everything, but what does it look like to succeed as a hobbyist?
Do hobbyist and success even belong in the same sentence?
And then I met an angel
I’ll call her Alex (not real name of angel). She was in her mid-thirties, and after Monday’s class she came over to talk to me.
She recognized me as Old Monika, “Hey! I think I know you… Didn’t you write that ballet blog?”.
For a moment, there was fear. Who is she expecting me to be? “Yeah, that’s me, danceproject.ca, right? That’s cool you read my blog, I really appreciate that”. I say through a smile that feels too strained, with what I hope sounds like cool confidence. I realize I have no idea what else to say to her because I don’t know who I am right now. She’s caught me standing barefoot in a puddle of vulnerability. And its raining uncertainty. Fortunately, she seemed to be an extrovert. So I let her talk. I am so grateful for the people who love talking and let me listen in silence.
Alex introduced herself as a hobbyist dancer. She actually used those words. I knew right then that I was to be her student. I wanted her to teach me how to be as brave as she was. She didn’t say “just” a hobbyist, she made the statement boldly, unashamedly, smiling and sweaty, with a courage I didn’t have.
Where before I wanted to be perfect like Sylvie Guillem, Evelyn Hart, and Svetlana Zakharova, now Alex is my role model. She is not perfect. She does not have that idealized “ballet body”. She is a regular-ass human being doing her best. She is in love with dance and how it makes her feel. Alex doesn’t seem to give a fuck what people think of her. She is showing up to class for herself, because it makes her feel good, not for anyone else. This is the kind of person I want to be now.
“Done regularly in one’s leisure time for pleasure.”
There are so many hard things about making the identity switch to hobbyist. For instance, why am I feeling so much shame just speaking the word “hobbyist”? When did having a hobby become something to judge someone for or feel about?
Do you know what the definition of hobby is? I looked it up. Its, “an activity done regularly in one’s leisure time for pleasure”.
Why am I ashamed of dancing in my leisure time for pleasure? This is what dance was for me once, before I turned it into this great snarling beast that slowly sucked my soul out through my pointy, bleeding feet.
Alex, my angel-of-dance, I have so many questions about how this is supposed to work.
How often do I need to go to class to call myself a dancer? Do I need to use the prefix “hobbyist”, or can I just call myself a dancer, flat out? Am I allowed to call myself a dancer if I have no desire to be flexible, or have no interest in doing the splits ever again? Wait, why do I even care about labeling myself? Can I just… not? Can I just be a human who dances sometimes?
I miss having rules… Can you tell me, where is this going? What’s the point of trying if I’m not going to be the best at this? What if I run into someone from my past who knew Old Monika and they see how I’ve changed, and they judge me for not being as good as I was before I died? What if they say, “wow, what happened to her? She used to be a good dancer and now she can barely point her toes…”.
How do I step into the unknown of who I am becoming with the bravery you have, Alex? How many times will I have to remind myself that “just to enjoy feeling my body move” is enough? That “for pleasure in my leisure time” is the best reason there is right now for doing this.
I intend to find out.
But to start, I am going to make myself some soft rules. The three irrefutable “U’s” I must surrender to: Unbecoming, Uncertainty, and the Unknown.
This idea of surrender feels like the most important thing in the world right now.
