Category: Physical Mastery

Feeling Stuck in Your Exercise Routine? Here’s How to “Audit” Your Movement Practice

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.

Physical Un-Education

A conversation I have weekly with my students and clients revolves around the idea that our bodies are always in a process of healing.

Healing is self-reorganization to a more centered state. And we are constantly reorganizing. Perpetually redefining what balance is.

What is the difference between healing and health?

Right now, this very moment, your body is healing. I think the amount of energy going into your healing indicates your state of health.

How much energy is your body using right now for homeostasis- The sum of biological processes involved in keeping our dynamic state within “healthy” parameters?

When we feel “well”- mentally, physically, emotionally- our state is more rested, more effortlessly at center. Homeostasis takes less energy expenditure. The cows are peacfully grazing in the pasture and we’re just sitting there watching.

When we feel “unwell”, it is an indication that something is off balance, and our dynamic state is more one of actively healing than of resting into our health. The cows are trying to bust down the pasture fence and you’re hustling to wrangle them back in.

What if the feeling of being hurt and unwell is actually what it feels like to be healing?

Are you resting into your health? Or are you more often in a state of healing?

Where physical education goes wrong

All life is taking us away from center, and the inner wisdom of our body is always working to bring us back. This action of coming back to center is healing. Trust in that one thing- Your body is always healing, even when things hurt.

Just because You can’t trust your body, doesn’t mean your body cannot be trusted.

One big barrier to trust is that we aren’t good at communicating with our bodies, and we lack a refined kinesthetic language to communciate with it.

It’s not our fault. Society doesn’t place a high value on exploring the inner kinesthetic arena, only the actual arenas where the competitive, “bigger stronger faster”, phsycial events take place.

In school we learn the value in communicating ideas, philosophies, and thoughts, which are not same as embodying the thing itself we wish to learn about.

Traditional physical education never taught us to listen to and interpret our bodies’ language. Moreso we were taught how to follow rules, fit into measurements, and meet expectations for physical performace. Lessons of winning and losing. And many experiences of shame that made us want to stop paying attention to our bodies altogether.

So what is real physical education?

My mother worked as a phys-ed teacher. She also did fitness testing to collect data that I guess was used to help us create better phys-ed programs.

But do you know what she was asked to do? Measure people’s “fitness” based on a set of parameters based on societal norms, and then tell people whether they fit in with those or not.

This is not physical education. This is more like indoctrination. Sorry, Mom.

I think real phys-ed is a process of un-educating ourselves that makes learning the language of our body possible again.

The language of our bodies is non-intellectual. It’s a right brain experience, not a set of normative, left-brain-procured, data. It’s a language that speaks to us through physical sensation, indescribable states of consciousness, and visceral knowingness that transcends words.

Don’t you find it hard to know who you can trust when you’re a tourist in a country where no one speaks your language, and you don’t speak theirs? Aren’t you a little apprehensive and cautious? Doesn’t it take a little effort before you can figure out who are the “good guys” you can trust, and who to avoid?

It’s the same process of orientation with your body. Only we don’t generally think of our body as a destination to visit, like a vacation to a foreign country, and so we don’t invest in the guidebook, the foreign langauge dictionary, or see what value could come from even going there.

For most of us, our body is a thing we’ve been trying to escape because we are in a state of healing.

Healing happens when something isn’t going right, when we feel unwell. Healing isn’t this amazing love and light expereince. Healing sometimes hurts.

Remember, as uncomfortable as it can feel, the fact you can heal is something about your body you can trust. It is safe to go there. It is safe to participate in your healing.

Physical mastery > Physical education

I think what I do in my practice is a new paradigm of physical education. The opposite of what my mother did. Funny how life is…

I don’t want to tell you what the data says about how you should fit in with other people, I want you to know where you stand with yourself.

I prefer to call it physical mastery, because education sounds too much like an indoctrination. Like a cult where you are told to believe things about yourself so that you can have permission to forget that paying attention to You is important.

Physical mastery has nothing to sell you, its just You studying You. There is no degree or certification to pay for that you can flaunt. All you’ll get is trust in you.

Physical mastery is a process of paying attention to you, which no one can do for you, only guide you and hold you accountable. But you do the discovering and learning for yourself.

In the physical mastery process you are not given a physical education. You become the process of educating yourself on your physiology.

Physical mastery is the process I invite you to come on with me. It’s a process that I’m in, because I have to do it. I couldn’t stop if I wanted to. Once you step in, there’s no going back. Try it, and you’ll see what I mean.

Are you ready to stop getting an “education”? Stop scrolling through Instagram for the next hot exercise. Stop the endless Youtube searching for the fix for your body’s problems.

The answer isn’t out there. In fact, you probably don’t need an answer. You might need a better question.

“In what ways have I learned to stop trusting my body?”

“What does trusting my body look like?”

“What does a ‘yes’ and ‘no’ feel like from my body?”

How long can you really sit with these questions before slapping on an answer from the internet?

Would you care to join me in this process of un-educating yourself about your body? Would you like to learn your body’s language from an inside, embodied experience, not from a book, Youtube video, or online “movement guru”? (ironically, I wrote a book, have a Youtube channel, and someone once called me a movement guru which I AM NOT).

All I know is I can’t possibly know more about your body than you do. But a third party is sometimes needed to interpret what your body is saying, or mediate a dialogue.

If you want to learn to trust your body, I can show you a path. I won’t tell you what you should do, or what is right or wrong for you, only what avenues you must investigate to get your answers for yourself.

This is the work I share in my Liberated Body Workshop. It’s a good place to start learning to pay attention to You again.

Have you lived 50 years in a country whose language you couldn’t speak? Whose language you didn’t even bother to learn? Can you see how stressful that might be?

How long have you been living in your own body, not knowing its langauge?

I’m not saying its easy, but the longer you wait, the harder it gets.

When you’re ready to get un-educated, you know where to find me 😉