Tag: exercise

On Physical Mastery #1: Moving Beyond Conditioning

The following is a thing I wrote as part of a new series of reflections called: On Physical Mastery. (Oh, and I don’t mean “conditioning” as in energy systems, In case anyone’s mind went there. Pun sort of intended…)

I’d like to share my humble thoughts on having physical and fitness goals in this time of pandemic (although I was thinking these things pre-COVID, they seem especially relevant now).

Have you noticed? The government is telling us what our fitness goals should be, and how we should achieve them.

This isn’t really anything new. From the food pyramid, to Body Break (with Hal Johnson and Joanne Mcleod!), society has been telling us what we are supposed to do with our bodies. What appropriate goals should be.

If you’ve read anything in the news lately, the latest “should” is that, despite the call the stay at home, we must keep exercising for our health right now.

And I don’t disagree.

I am happy that in this global health crisis, our collective, primary reason to exercise has deepened. I can see a shift from shallowly chasing a “fit body”, aesthetics-based, physical norm, to authorities encouraging us to “move because your health depends on it”. It is even being acknowledged that movement and exercise are necessary for our mental health. This is amazing.

But there’s still something insidious to be aware of… We’re still being told why we should exercise, and we’re not questioning it.

Society, the government, is still exercising influence over our beliefs about what we do with our bodies. Just that the form in which it is doing so has changed. However, whenever there is an outside source guiding what we should do with our bodies, when we’re not aware that our decisions are not our own, no matter how benign or in our interest it may seem, we cannot truly, honestly be in touch with who we really are. 

I hate to break it to you, but your- all of our- physical goals have been hijacked. It just seems a little less in our face right now because it feels like the suggestion is coming from a caring place. Maybe the government does care. True or hidden motives aside, that’s missing the point.

The point isn’t whether or not the recommendation is useful, it is whether or not it bubbled up from a well-spring of truth from deep inside you, or it was dumped on your head from a 3rd floor window.

You see, I struggle with this. My conditioning for a long time has been to believe that exercise is important because one should not get fat. Exercise builds discipline and character (more like stubbornness and rigidity…). Healthy, beautiful people exercise regularly, intensely, and often. Exercise is a moral decision- it simply makes you a better person. This is what I was taught in my family of origin.

I reckon with this conditioning everyday. It rules more than just the physical area of my life. If I’m paying attention, it permeates every decision I make.

Yet I know a deeper truth. If I look at what it means to rise above the “shoulds” I learned, its almost as if I don’t know what to do with my body. Up until recently, I’d never examined if my goals and intentions for exercise were mine- something working through me- or if they’ve been hijacked by someone else- something I was working through.

If you look you will see how many of your physical goals can be traced back to another person or an institution, who taught you “this is what exercise is for”. And they may have had incentive for you to believe in them that were not in your best interest (if best interest means your well-being, freedom, and vitality).

I’m not saying that we should rebel against the government’s suggestions and not exercise daily. I wholeheartedly think we should!

And i’m not rebelling against my parents’ beliefs that staying lean and building discipline are good reasons to exercise, because leanness and discipline are components of health and vitality.

My point is simply that these beliefs need to be investigated. Are they true for me? And is the way I’m acting them out truly serving me?

And I think at the core of it, when I strip away everything I’ve ever been taught about exercise, and tune in to what is important for me, the role for movement in my life is more than health and fitness. More than strength and looks. It’s to keep me grounded. To keep me balanced. To keep me present in my physical home. Its to keep my brain healthy as much as my body. Anything else, any other result I attain, is a byproduct. 

If you feel aimless without a clearly defined goal, you might scroll through Instagram to find one, but you’ll only find yourself hijacked.

Is being present with your body enough? Or does exercise need to be a means to an end? Ask yourself, to whom does that end serve? Is it you? Or is it someone else you’re aiming to please? 

So yes, do exercise for your health. But do it for you because you care about you.

And yes, exercise because it keeps you lean and strong, but don’t do it mindlessly like a hamster on a wheel. Can you find a way to engage with exercise such that the physical result you achieve is simply the byproduct of cultivating a state of mind in which presence, celebration, and kindness to your body are the goal itself?

Don’t just chase a result because that’s what everyone else is doing. Engage with your body with reverence for its brilliance, and you will be amazed at the result- the inner vitality- that naturally unfolds. 

But how do you know if your goal is your own, or you’ve been hikacked? Its not always easy to tell… It takes a desire to see reality as it is.

But you can start like this:

Before each time you step out for a walk, or lie on your yoga mat, or strap on your jogging shoes, or lift those heavy ass weights, ask yourself:

What is the source of the goals you have for your body? Are they your own? Or are they hand-me-downs from your family? Your friend? Our society’s standards for health, beauty, and fitness?

Ask: Is your routine an act of reverence for your body? Or are you chasing a result that you were taught somewhere was the “ideal”, but which could be keeping you stuck in a repetitive pattern. Rigid in your thinking as much as your body’s potential for movement.

And then simply try out how it might feel to have no goal other than to celebrate being in your body. Just see what comes up, spontaneously, from the intent for complete presence. No ulterior motive. No agenda. Nothing to gain, and nothing to lose.

Just a humble reflection from the mind of a human who struggles everyday to understand, “what is reality?”.

Movement Practice (part 11): A Food Analogy

Big Food and Big Fitness

If there is another industry set up to package and sell us something to consume which, when otherwise left untouched by capitalism, has had (can and does still have) a traditional salubrious value for our species, its the food industry.

There are so many parallels that I see running between “Big Food”, and “Big Fitness” (capitalization representing the omniscience and all-pervasiveness these industries seem driven to have), and how these businesses (note: businesses, not healing traditions) can affect our behaviours, for the better and the worse.

Primarily, there is the parallel tendency for both of these industries to profit off of peoples’ insecurities around body image, a near universal shame trigger that strongly motivates our behaviours around food and exercise (particularly in women). The less good we feel about how we look, the more money there is for them to make in the selling of “solutions” which are rarely more than bait-  a diet, a fitness program, even a shoe-  perpetuating our comparison between how we look with their decided upon societal norm for health, beauty, and fitness.

A second parallel is that food and exercise are both are things we can buy and consume, and their respective industries desire to control the market so that what we aware of that exists to buy is theirs. To choose otherwise is to rebel. From Big Food we learn that it is much easier to be ignorant as to where our food comes from and the intention behind how it was “manufactured”.

What CAFOs, Monsanto, and Tracy Anderson have in common

As an example, take the dominant sources of our food supply: CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations). These are the unsightly, shit-swamp, factory farms that produce the majority of our meat supply, and Monsanto, the agriculture business that has the largest domain over the produce available to buy in the supermarket. These two players dominate our food supply to the point that we don’t think to question where it comes from and what else might be out there because its the norm, its cheaper, and we’re told its just fine to consume.

Similarly, from Big Fitness we have popular figures and companies- celebrity trainers like Tracy Anderson and Jillian Michaels, fitness companies like Beach Body, and spreaders of health trends like Doctor Oz, who believe their way is the best way and have the platform to sell it. Their dogma (whether it is useful or not) permeates our culture. We consume it because it is there in our faces, believing it is true, unaware of the values, goals, and intentions held by their creators.

Is it fair to compare Tracy Anderson to a CAFO, or Doctor Oz to to Monsanto? Maybe not. But my point is that we can make choices, both in food and exercise, that can serve our goals or move us farther from them. The options sold to us by the big industries are often unhealthy (sometimes unethical) and they’re not the only options. Sadly the other options lack the voice to have as strong an impact (though this is changing) and remain hidden from us unless we look. The problem is, most of us don’t know there’s something else to look for.

The choice we often don’t know we have is to rebel against what is being sold to us and actively seeking what aligns with what is truly healthiest and best for us. The latter is to choose the path of exploration, inquiry, and critical thinking.

And so, I feel that this comparison between Big Food and Big Fitness provides a useful analogy to more deeply unpack our question “what is movement practice?”, and unveils some of the ways that these industries thrive on our ignorance, our insecurities, and our tendency to choose what is readily available (remember part 10 which was all about instant gratification).

In Defense of Movement

In his book In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan offers what I feel to be the most simple, concise, and useful piece of advice for any human “eater”: Eat real food. Not too much. Mostly plants. We can apply this guidance to any diet, from raw vegan to paleo to ketogenic to pescatarian (but probably not Breatharian).

From this, I was inspired to distill a similar soundbite of advice for us humans as movers, echoing Pollan’s guidance: Move daily. Not too much. Mostly non-exercise. Similarly to Pollan’s eating advice, I feel this applies to any physical practice, from powerlifting to yoga to marathon running.

A little further along I’ll break down in more detail, as Pollan did in his book, what I mean by these three sentences.

But first…

Commoditization Strikes Again

In Defense of Food is an informative exploration of Pollan’s first-hand experiences of the Big Food industry. How it thrives on us eating more total food, prioritizing quantity over quality (particularly our consuming more processed food products, which are notoriously low in nutritional quality). Pollan describes this commoditization of food as reductionist, replete with fads, deliberately manufactured and marketed to get us hooked.

Commoditization changes what the food is, in particular with the advent of genetic modification, and agricultural “advances” such as mono-cultures that allow us to grow heaps of scientifically altered corn and soy. Mono-cultures are not regenerative ways of growing food and not only produce lower quality produce, but deplete the soil of nutrients in the process (regenerative agriculture, by contrast, aims to use farming as a way to naturally enhance the quality of the land by working with it, not depleting it. It uses farming practices that actually enhance biodiversity, soil quality, and the ecosystems themselves, replicating the cycles in nature that allow a system to thrive).

Pollan would argue that this “enhanced” produce is not even real food (hence the first three words of his advice: Eat real food). In his view, the food industry makes a profit on reducing food to its individual nutrients. Rather than seen and eaten in its whole food form, we have industries that revolve around creating “fake foods” that can be made more nutritious than real foods, with science (think almond milk enhanced with additional B vitamins, or eggs with additional omega-3 fats). Clever impersonations of real food that are “nutritionally equivalent”, or even claiming to be superior, put in a package touting impressive health claims. To this, Pollan has another ludicrously simple yet effective rule to follow: If it makes health claims, it probably isn’t healthy. After all, we don’t need a label to tell us that celery is healthy.

What the food industry fails to consider in its reductionism is that food was meant to be eaten in its whole form. There is a sophistication in the whole food that we have yet to fully understand, that we probably lack the tools to measure yet, and which we miss when all we see when we look at an orange is the vitamin C.

We notice that eating oranges has health benefits. Thanks to our current scientific abilities, we can measure the vitamin C (the discovery of which wasn’t even until 1930, a recent blip in our history). And so we reduce the orange to the vitamin that can be measured, and infuse the vitamin into things it would never be found in in nature- gummy candies, pills, drinks, powders-  without considering that there is more to an orange than its vitamin C content. We just don’t know enough about it yet. It was only very recently in our history, after all, that vitamins and minerals were “discovered”, but they were always there. What new compound in the orange will we discover is all important to our health in 2130 that we will decide is useful to isolate and infuse into as many other things as possible? It is this reduce, isolate, and scientific –reinventing process that Pollan warns against.

The nutritional claims Pollan urges us to avoid are smoke and mirrors as the intention behind the business of food is to sell more food at a lower cost while claiming it is just as good as the “real”, unadulterated thing. For example, there is the fact that the government subsidizes the production of those vast fields of mono-cultured corn and soy because it is used in so many products, food and otherwise, giving incentive (or rather, little other choice) for the farmers but to grow more and more of it if they want to stay in business.

Modern day “hunting” for real food

A sad story indeed that it takes actual effort for us to find and eat real food. We have to actively look for it. We have to go out of our way, hunt for it, armed with information, because much of what is sold in big grocery stores are processed and unethically produced food commodities, not gifts from the land.

If you remember back to the chapter on gift culture versus commoditization, we can see this theme emerge once again. Regenerative agriculture treats the land as a gift, and each practice is undertaken with the intention that using the land in an appropriate way leads to its growth and development, and increase in the gift. On the other hand, Big Food takes the land and turns what grows there into a commodity, leading to the slow destruction of the ecosystem’s quality only to produce more food, of higher value on the market, but lower worth to us as eaters.

Food rant complete, what does this have to do with movement?

Did those attitudes feel familiar?

They should. I feel that most everything I wrote above about Big Food could be said about Big Fitness as these industries operate with nearly identical values. Is it not so clear to you? Here’s what I mean.

First, take reductionist thinking. This is rampant in popular fitness culture. Movement is often reduced to specific exercises for body parts. Individual muscle groups are isolated rather than seen for their role with the body as a whole, moving unit. The bicep curl works the bicep, often neglecting to look at how the bicep serves us in full body movement patterns like walking, climbing, pushing, and pulling. But because we are told quantity (in the bicep’s case, size) is more important and we reduce training the bicep to various exercises, sets, and reps in isolation. This takes a familiar parallel with Big Food’s tendency to take the nutrients out of the food and recreate more scientific ways of eating, rather than eating the original, whole food. Similarly to Pollan’s earlier advice, if you hear a fitness trend or exercise program called “scientific”, steer clear. In this way, a workout routine based around bicep curls and other isolation exercises can be similar to a diet based around taking supplements.

Second, in fitness (and in rehab- an often necessary component of movement practice) we are often guilty of blaming muscles for our problems.”Its my tight psoas and weak glutes causing all my physical and psychological problems and I just need to get someone to jab their elbow into it every week”. Psoas and glutes are now labelled as problems to isolate and fix. Similarly to our food paradigm, its often a specific food, macronutrient, or vitamin that is labelled as the problem (too much, not enough) and needs to be cut out or carefully managed. Remember how fat was labelled bad, a primary cause of cardiovascular disease? And then as bodybuilding became more mainstream, eating a ton of protein was the touted solution to all problems? And now present day, low carb is the holy grail. Are eggs good or bad? (the debate still rages on). The demonizing and putting on a pedestal of muscles and exercises, foods and nutrients, often doesn’t solve the actual problem. Taking more vitamin C in isolation to support your immune system won’t help if you continue to live a high-stress life you struggle to cope with and eat a diet that is 50% pizza, just as releasing your psoas and strengthening your glute muscles in isolation won’t necessarily help unless you treat your body as a whole unit and address the underlying cause of these perceived deficits.

We are as guilty of falling for the misleading health claims of exercise fads as as we are for fad diets with similar outlandish claims.

We are susceptible of being marketed the idea that we need to look like celebrities and Instagram fitness models, who then sell us both their workout routines, diets, and dogmas.

We are susceptible to the pull of quantity over quality in both exercise and our eating habits.

In fitness and food, we lack the regenerative aspect: We use our bodies for exercise and deplete our energetic resources (our poor mitochondria…) just as agriculture tends use the land and deplete the soil of its nutrients.

And when we are kept in the dark, we have only one option: Big Food as eaters, Big Fitness as movers. To have just one option is to have no option.

Big Fitness $ells

Sometimes I think my career would be more lucrative if I were more ignorant.

Big Fitness sells to the masses in the short term for two reasons. One, because it feeds on our insecurities: Body image, looking weak, and the need to fit in. Three things that are especially poignant drivers of our choices of behaviour that Big fitness knows exactly how to cater to. And two, this message is spread by people who already have platforms and budgets to market it far and wide.

There are “leaders” and celebrities in the fitness industry who I think care more for having a full roster of clientele (or passive income via their online fitness program) to support their affluent lifestyle goals than they do for helping people create healthy habits for the long term. The leading spokespeople for Big Fitness (who are either honestly delusional or incentivised by monetary gain) are rarely in the business of educating their clients on how to make their own choices so they won’t succumb to the marketing of commoditized fitness. There is profit in keeping people dependent, ignorant,  and providing an easy, mindless solution backed up by “science”.

While kept in the dark, many of us have been, and will continue to be, lured in by the touting of health claims and promotion of fitness fads because these speak to our insecurities, are readily available, and most of us don’t know any better. Some people truly believe that pizza counts as a vegetable source, appropriate for children in many US schools because of the tomato sauce (a belief that was ultimately shut down when it was deemed that the slice would need to be swimming in half a cup of sauce in order to be considered a serving of veggies).

And if you will remember the point expanded upon in part 10, most of us are more motivated by instant gratification, and behaviours patterned by our shame, than by the thought of engaging in a challenging (yet enriching) process that delays reward, and thus we are susceptible to this too-good-to-be-true marketing. This is extremely frustrating to witness as a personal trainer, because what I’m offering- A regenerative, healthy movement practice based on an honest exploration of the congruence of their needs, goals, and values- doesn’t sell nearly as well as “burn fat fast with this simple exercise routine you can do while you watch TV!”, and “eat pizza, its a vegetable!”.

In both matters of food and fitness, if it claims to be convenient, fast, easy, and scientific, beware.

Breaking the cycle of dependence

Yes, Big Fitness and Big Food have a lot in common, and one of the main points is that they thrive on keeping us in the dark as to what is naturally regenerative, holistic, and healthiest for ourselves and our society, while keeping us dependent on their commodities for their own profit.

This might seem to be an overly pessimistic view, but in fact, I’m ever the optimist (annoyingly so, if you were to ask a few of my clients). If the only thing Big Fitness has on us is our ignorance, there’s an easy fix- Its awareness. We all have the power to break our habit of dependence simply by starting to recognize how Big Fitness also depends on us feeling ashamed of our bodies, and looking for the next easy dopamine hit in the form of an outfit, exercise, or diet. Its this weird, unhealthy, codependent relationship, and as much as we’d like the industries to change, the onus is on us to break the cycle.

Revolution starts in your kitchen

In an interview a short while ago I heard Dr. Mark Hyman, functional medicine doctor and founder of the Cleveland Clinic, say something that struck me as quite poignant: “Cooking is a revolutionary act”, as it helps to develop critical awareness of what you’re eating, where it comes from, and how it impacts you and society. Not buying in to Big Food starts in the kitchen.

I echo his sentiment here from a movement perspective:  Adopting the mindset of movement practice can be a revolutionary act. Not buying in to Big Fitness can also start in the kitchen (or any room, the point is that it need not be a big formal gym), when you decide that in the time it takes for your dinner to cook, or the five minutes in the morning for your coffee to brew, you can connect with your body. It doesn’t need to be an hour. It doesn’t need to be intense, trendy, or even have a specific goal or metric attached to it.

In an economy that thrives on us being less self-reliant and self-aware, following trends, and doing what we’re told we “should”, choosing to move in a non-commoditized, marketed way- choosing to explore what your body can do and move as an act of gratitude- is a revolutionary act.

And as with learning to eat with quality of nutrition in mind, learning to move with our health in mind is a matter of changing values, which is no easy feat. It requires clearing the noise spouting from Big Fitness telling us how to look, feel, and exercise, to do some exploration of the options that are not blatantly marketed at us.

Feeling is Believing

The hardest part is making the first steps into the unknown.

But once you dive in- eat the local, pasture raised chicken, taste the difference, feel the difference in your health, and see the impact that supporting your local farmer has on the community, you can’t easily go back to pulling the wool over your eyes. Sure it may be more expensive, but only in the short term, as in the long term you are supporting sustainable practices both for your health and the environment around you that means you’ll probably spend less money on managing sickness later in life. I would rather spend my money on investing in my good health than trying to treat illness.

The same holds true for movement and exercise. The choices that are truly going to be the healthiest for us and not for the economy of fitness may be more costly up front (but not always, as a 30 minute walk in nature is generally 100% free), less obvious, and less instantly gratifying, but once you start to feel the difference you will be happy to live by the mantra: Move daily. Not too much. Mostly non-exercise.

Movement Practice (part 6): The Challenges of Talking About Movement

If you are still reading this series, I really appreciate you! I don’t know exactly where this is going, but what I know for sure is that I’m not anywhere close to being finished… Thanks for reading this far.

Beyond Archetypes

In parts one through five (see all Movement Practice chapters HERE) I used archetypes as a metaphor for the various ways people think about, talk about, and act out movement. In exploring this intersection between who people are and how they interact with movement and exercise, we’ve set the stage for the meat of the conversation to follow: What is a movement practice? How is this different than exercise? And, with the assumption that having a movement practice is important, how do we go about creating one that has meaning and use for us?

Speaking of Movement…

My very attempt at writing this may be a fool’s task. Alas, movement is not a medium for which a deep understanding can come through talking about it. Words are poor vessels to help us understand something like movement that is, by its very nature, meant to be embodied and experienced, through our physical structures.

Indeed, as I sat down to write about why this thing in my life and the lives of many called a “movement practice” is important, and what it means to me, I realized that I had a concept, but not the concise words to communicate it (a recurring theme in my life, for the record). 

Up until this point I was operating on vague feeling- That a movement practice feels different than a workout, exercise, or physical activity. That the women’s fitness chain Curves’ curcuit workout has different “vibe” to it and attracts a different archetype than a traditional Sivananda yoga class, for example.  

I think this subjective feeling is worth identifying more clearly, and in this chapter I will begin the investigation of the words that help to describe the quality of these relationships between mind, body, and movement I call movement practice.

Moving Into Understanding

There are many who, like myself in my “then”, can’t quite describe why their physical situations feel saturated with a sense of lack (of purpose, goals, or meaning), or are indescribably stressful, painful, or monotonous. In fact, many people I work with have initially come to me with the sense that there is something “more” they need, or that something is missing in their lives, usually relating to their bodies and their health, that they can get through movement.

Movement, not words, can be the hand to reach out and turn the doorknob of the door of understanding, behind which we can discover what’s currently missing from us. Where words can fail and confuse us, movement speaks to us on a visceral level. It connects us with a physical feeling, an undertone that we can then put words to. This is why somatic therapeutic practices (like Somatic Experiencing® and Somato-Emotional Release® for example), can be so helpful for individuals with mental health issues. 

Think of words as signposts pointing to something greater, beyond the words themselves, for us to examine. For you, the reader, my hopes is that my words may challenge your current belief systems and habits around movement. That by identifying with an archetype, your relationship with movement becomes articulated to you beyond a “vibe”. 

The rest of this chapter will define several core terms that I feel to be important for this discussion. I found the definitions from the dictionary to be insufficient for our discussion around movement, and that it was necessary to inquire into the words’ meaning more deeply in this context (as The Transcender knows, context changes everything). 

The following words (signposts) are relevant for the chapters to follow, and I suggest you get acquainted with them.

Movement

The dictionary says:

  • An act of changing physical location or position or of having this changed. A change or development in something.

I am writing this primarily with the movement of our bodies in mind, but think like The Transcender for a moment. Movement isn’t limited to the physical motion of our bodies. Movement is change. In location, position, or in a thing itself. Your internal environment changing. The environment around you changing. Movement is you developing, for better or worse. Movement is forwards, backwards, and sideways. Three (or more) dimensions. Movement requires reference points to observe a change, and thus must be a relationship between two or more objects or phenomena.

Exercise can be movement in many senses of the word, but not all movement is exercise. Likewise, not all exercise is development. Not all exercise can be seen as a relationship like movement must be.

I want to suggest that we think of movement in this broader sense as trajectory, change, development, and relationship. In doing so we can see how movement is inclusive of more elements than the physical movement we consciously do with our bodies when we workout or play a sport.

A movement practice, by this line of thinking, can include things such as I am doing right now: Periods of stillness, introspection, and the act of sitting down to write. In the words of Greek philosopher Heraclitus, all things are flux- Movement permeates and relate to all areas of our inner and outer lives. 

Exercise

The dictionary says:

  • Activity requiring physical effort, carried out especially to sustain or improve health and fitness. A process, task, or activity carried out for a specific purpose, especially one concerned with a specified area or skill.
  • To use or apply.
  • Occupy the thoughts of; worry or perplex.

As previously mentioned, exercise is movement, but not all movement is exercise. An exercise can be skilled practice, skilled practice can be exercise, but exercise is not skilled practice. These distinctions are part of what I like to call the movement/exercise/practice fallacy. (There’s nothing I like more than clarifying distinctions between similar terms and discovering fallacies by which we live.)

To be clear, when I compare exercise and movement I don’t want to demonize exercise and put movement on a pedestal. Exercise is an important component of a movement practice, which is why I don’t like to see the two lumped together to rot in the compost heap of misunderstood words.

While for many, such as The Exerciser archetype, exercise can be a detriment, obsessive and unhealthy. Yet for others exercise is a valuable, healthy experience. Exercise can be done with the beneficial intention to improve one’s health, strength, or endurance, even while consciously being aware of not enjoying the physical act of it (such as wind sprints, unless you happen to be a masochistic type). We can be aware that we are exercising only to get something out of it, know that we aren’t being present while doing it, and still gain from it.

Or we can exercise unaware that our mind is in a place of should-be, insufficiency, and self punishment (again, often the case for The Exerciser). The dictate of how reciprocal of health our trajectory becomes is our own awareness of how and what we are using exercise for. There is no end to fitness trends marketed towards The Exerciser with this every intention- Providing an means to buy an experience in which people can tune out from their bodies together, feeding off of each others’ perceived need to be and look like someone their not. To fit in with the “good people” with their “good bodies”, and make up for unhealthy habits. Spinning classes, Cross-Fit, and F45 are just some potential examples of this.

We must also distinguish between an exercise (the noun), and exercise (the verb). An exercise by definition is something in the realm of practice, whereas exercise is something we normally do without the mindset of practice.

Lastly, it is interesting to note the latter two definitions of the word from above. We can use exercise in a way that we are in it to get something out of it, and so too can we be exercised- Stressed, worried, slowly ground down. We can be exercised by our improper use of exercise, which often paves the path of demise for The Exerciser and Over-Identifier.

Exercise and movement have an important relationship both with each other in the space of a movement practice, and with ourselves in the space of our lives. How these aspects of a movement practice interact with each other and impact on you, the user, doer, practitioner, define how healthy and useful it will be for you.

Practice

The dictionary says:

  • The actual application or use of an idea, belief, or method as opposed to theories about such application or use.
  • The customary, habitual, or expected procedure of something. The carrying out or exercise of a profession.
  • Repeated exercise in or performance of an activity or skill so as to acquire or maintain proficiency in it.

Love isn’t the only thing that gets to be a triangle. We can identify three sides of practice:

1) The actual doing of a thing (versus the talking or thinking about a thing).
 2) The doing of a thing as a rote, habitual, expected thing to do, to get something out of it, often with little awareness of the impact it may be having in the moment and on the future forecast.
3) The deep practice of a thing that results in a flow state, development of some aspect of self, with the intention of mastery of a skill.

When we talk about a movement practice, type 1 is always implied (or it would be a movement idea or thought- Still movement in terms of changing patterns of neurons, but neglecting the action on the thought that is requisite for the fully fledged physical movement practice we’re speaking of). A defining factor in the quality, meaning, or use of a movement practice is due in part to whether the core intention is type 2 or 3. 

Are you type 2: going through the motions, doing it because you feel you should be as an expectation of your peer group or an authority figure? Or are you type 3: your goal is to practice, to develop a skill, to learn and experience flow?

Neither is right or wrong, and each type has its place within a movement practice. We need to know more about the context and the individual to say which type of practice is appropriate for the person at this moment in time. 

Relationship

  • The way in which two or more concepts, objects, or people are connected, or the state of being connected.
  • The way in which two or more people or organizations regard and behave toward each other.

As previously mentioned, there can be no measurable movement unless we are comparing two objects, people, or phenomena with each other. We need reference points to define the relationship of two bodies in terms of position, location, speed, velocity, etc. As a Complementarian knows, nothing can be understood on its own, without context. And so we cannot speak of physical movement without discussing it as a relationship between two or more things.

As an experiment, just for fun, try for an entire day to use the word movement instead of relationship. The movement between two friends, partners, or family members. Perhaps we have so many challenges with relationships because we think of them as static entities, when in fact it is more like the planets orbiting around the sun- Sometimes moving together, sometimes apart, ebbing and flowing, each with their own trajectory while being impacted on by the gravity of the other.

The relationships I am interested in investigating are the ones we have with movement and exercise, and the connection between movement and exercise themselves (as already alluded). How we regard and behave towards them. How was can become attached to them. How this relationship changes with time. How the quality of this relationship and our perception of it impact on our lives and our health. I think these are questions worth exploring.

Interaction

  • Reciprocal action or influence.

Physicist Carlo Ravelli, author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics believes that all reality is interaction. That the human self is a “huge wave of happenings”. He says in a radio interview with On Being‘s Krista Tippett:

“…we do understand the world better, not in terms of things but in terms of interaction between things and how things interact with one another, even in biology. We understand biology in terms of evolution, how things change… We understand the antelope because there is a lion and the lion because there is antelope. We don’t understand them in isolation”. 

Bruce Hood, author of The Self Illusion, a lovely book on the neuroscience of self (or the lack thereof), communicates through his research how our sense of self is only possible because of the interactions and  experiences.  Our identities are inextricable from our surroundings- people, places, and things that formed who we are and will be since we had sufficient capacity to retain memories. “Self” is the sum of the interactions between other people and our material possessions in our lives up until now. He goes on to explain that, “The emergence of self is epigenetic- an interaction of the genes in the environment… In a sense, who we really are comes down to those around us”.

I find these views on interaction go beyond the definition from the dictionary of reciprocal action or influence and express how interaction it is the very landscape of our existence.

To appreciate movement and exercise and their place in our lives therefore it is important to investigate the nature of the interaction both between the two and ourselves. Movement is a “happening”, ever changing, un-fixable in time and space, and we cannot understand it as a thing we study under a microscope, but as the interaction that is a defining feature of what movement is.

Healthy

  • Not diseased.
  • Indicative of, conducive to, or promoting good health.
  • Normal, natural, and desirable.

If the definition of “healthy” refers to promoting good health, then we also must understand what is “good health”? I feel good health is more than the absence of disease and illness, although this is how it is commonly defined (at a detriment to our conventional medical system).

According to the pioneering functional medicine doctor Mark Hyman, “disease arises from an imbalance in the system”. If the opposite is true, then health must arise as a result of a balanced system. In an interview, Dr. Hyman uses the metaphor of a farmer tending to soil quality to produce a healthy crop. Working with the system versus treating a symptom. He describes his goal as a doctor as”creating health”, not treating disease. Working with the ecosystem in an integrated way. In his description of functional medicine he says, “We’re actually taking care of the soil so disease can’t actually occur, or it goes away as a side effect of creating health”.

A system with intact homeostasis, resiliency to stressors; “healthy” is more than the absence of symptoms. We know that it is possible to have a disease that can be dormant for years, unbeknownst to us, yet we feel “healthy”, or “normal”, until we start experiencing symptoms indicative of the later stages of the condition. By this point, we are often too late to effectively treat many illnesses.

Nor do I feel that “normal” or “natural” are descriptive of what healthy is. Especially in our current world state in which what we consider normal is for human beings to cope, numb, and distract ourselves from ill health, physically and mentally, as the average, acceptable way of life.

As one of my clients put it to me as we reflected on her progress over a year’s work with her body, “The thing that blows my mind is that the feeling of unease and tightness used to be my ‘normal’. It was a constant I was unaware was holding me back from being more active and feeling more joy in my life”. If healthy is normal, yet normal is to be ignorantly unhealthy, what is health?

We can say “health is homeostasis”, but what does this feel like? To put put it more poetically, more subjectively, good health feels like the awakening to our potential. Stepping in our own power. Thriving and flourishing, not merely disease free. Health manifests as feeling like energetic and passionate participants in our lives. Good health feels like waking up inspired to interact with our priorities. 

 

Because I am unsatisfied with the current dictionary definition, I would like to add to it. Healthy is not simply the absence of disease, but a state of flourishing, optimal balanced function of all systems in a living organism; efficient homeostasis allowing for an individual to experience a complete spectrum of mental and physical interactions available to them.

“Healthy” can also refer to a relationship or interaction, not a living thing, and we can use a similar definition: A healthy interaction or relationship is one that affords for the individuals and things involved to flourish, be in balanced coexistence, etc.

Integrated

  • With various parts or aspects linked or coordinated. Combine (one thing) with another so that they become a whole.

For our purposes, integrated refers to a way of interacting with movement and exercise. We can integrate it with or isolate it from the other areas of our lives. We can have it as a thing we consider separately from us, or we can see us and movement combined as a whole, see how movement and our relationship with it is linked to how we interact with the other realms of life.

The rest of this work will focus on how to move in a direction of a healthy, integrated relationship with movement: The Integrator’s way of living. That being said, I don’t believe that everyone should aspire to be The Integrator archetype. We need to consider context. Consider what is now serving you in your current context, and what would happen if we took away this source of comfort or stability- your habits, behaviours, attitudes. How ready would you be to adapt? 

Thus, to integrate is my perceived ideal, but it may be a graded process, a journey, to that goal, one which you may never fully reach. Integration is not a destination or a fixed state, it is a path.

Part of the path of integrating is also the understanding that inherent in it is the necessity for things to first be deconstructed, broken apart, and isolated in order to understand them better, before reconnecting them more healthily. 

At the end of the day, its not whether you successfully became an Integrator that will dictate the quality of your life, health, and well-being (things we have a hard time defining in absolute terms anyway), but who you were in that process. How you showed up to the challenges, interacted with the “huge wave of happenings”. 

Movement Practice part 5: Complementarity and The Transcender

Part 5! Today we’ll delve into the last of the six archetypes, The Transcender.

Before we start, I’d just like to clarify that I am not claiming to be a Transcender. Far from it. I struggle daily with my Exerciser tendencies (I’m pot nerfect and I have them). I try my best to be aware of the pull of Over-Identifier-ing. I like to think I possess some of the healthy balanced qualities of The Integrator, but fall short on many occasions. Most days, if I’m lucky, I am able to remember how I aspire to cultivate Transcender qualities. Just remembering is hard (and this is where mantras, in a non-fluffy, practical way come in handy. But more on that later).

The only reason I feel authorized to write about The Transcender archetype is that I have a few mentors in my life that I would describe as such. I’ve been fortunate to spend time with these individuals, seeing how they live their lives over the course of a day, how they think and behave, and the congruence between the two. Observing what they value, what their priorities are, how they interact with their bodies. 

It is because of these people that I feel capable of writing this chapter. I hope you’ll be as inspired by this archetype as I have been by The Transcenders I am lucky to know and learn from. Making the time to thoughtfully write down this description was a gift: The reflecting on what qualities and traits these inspiring people have was illuminating. What is it exactly about these people that makes it feel so different to be with them? 

Complementarity: A Principle to Live By

The Transcender was a difficult character for me to pin down (also one of the reasons I am writing about him last). To nail his description, I think it is necessary to first discuss the concept of complementarity.

Complementarity is a principle from the weird world of quantum physics developed by Neils Bohr, a leading founder of the field. It states that to understand one entity or phenomena in its entirety, we may need to understand it broken down into two or more mutually incompatible theories. It speaks to the complexity, uncertainty, and indeterminacy of things. Things that have complementary properties which cannot all be observed or measured simultaneously.

A prime example of complementarity in physics is that we cannot simultaneously observe wave and particle properties. Nor can we measure position and momentum at the same time with the same instruments. The stage we’re in now, as a technological species, it is not possible to conceive of or measure properties inherent to the thing in question beyond what is possible with our specific measuring tool: The type of measurement determines which property is shown.  In essence, it is near impossible to see the whole truth of a thing through one lens. It only seems possible to garner some semblance of understanding of a thing by reducing it to multiple, contradictory parts, then putting the pieces back together again. 

I am enchanted with how complementarity not only describes an aspect of the fabric of reality, but how it can serve as a useful way of perceiving the world and living in harmony with it at an individual level.

If The Transcender had a religion, he’d be a Complementarian. This was a conclusion I came to after listening to an interview with physicist Frank Wilczek on Krista Tippett’s radio show On Being, in which he laid claim to this as his own religious belief (only half jokingly). To him , complementarity wasn’t just a physical principle, but a way of living. He described how he takes his understanding of complementarity and its application in physics into his daily interactions with people and the world around him. 

In Wilczek’s words, the practical application of complementarity is based on the recognition that “a deep truth has the feature that its opposite is also a deep truth”. That there are different ways of viewing the world and we need both and all if we want the complete picture, as each is valid in its own context.

Just as we can observe matter organized as a particle or a wave depending on what instrument we are measuring it with, our interpretation of human behaviour, thoughts, and feelings will depend on our lens, context, and reference point of observation. Thoughts and feelings are about as mutually incompatible as particles and waves, and only rarely can we view them together as a coherent whole with any clear understanding of what’s really going on.   

What makes complementarity useful for us (other than that it is an organizational principle of reality on the micro scale which it would seem foolish not to want to investigate in the macrosphere we interact in daily), is, as Wilczek explains, “It is interesting, fun, and informative to appreciate there are different ways of viewing things that each have their own validity, but conflict if you try to apply them both at once. Apply one at a time and try to appreciate both.”

His belief, one that I feel to be an astute observation, is that there is virtue and intelligence in being able to live with this uncertainty and inconsistency, that this is an important component of wisdom.

This wisdom, this appreciation of multiple views and ways of thinking and doing all as valid in their context, is the primary defining trait of The Transcender.

The Transcender

The Transcender’s mantra could be taken directly from Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book, Antifragile: “I want to live happily in a world I don’t understand”. He has a love for the uncertain. He is curious about inconsistencies. He is a seeker of truth.

In our MLAM, The Transcender cannot be confined to a single shell. As a Complementarian, he he is able to jump from shell to shell at any given moment based on the dictates of context: His present needs and goals. He is the model in its entirety, without being attached for too long to any of the archetypes he inhabits. He appreciates how the traits from each archetype serve a purpose that is useful.  He can only be fully understood as a whole by understanding the other five archetypes and their ways of living.

The Transcender is rare, but it is likely that you can identify at least one in your life. He is probably someone you admire and look to as a role model. Someone to learn from.

Movement is one of The Transcender’s highest values, but to him movement goes beyond physical exercise (we will look at this broader definition of movement in the next chapter). He sees movement in its every form in nature and is fascinated by it, its reflection and representation and in our lives. For example, how the movement of the seasons mirror the movement of our thoughts, the function of our bodies. His overarching view of movement as seasons, cycles, and patterns, as a fundamental property of everything, explains how he is able to maintain his value for movement at all times while himself being in a sedentary character.

The Transcender is excellent at recognizing patterns and appreciates that his life happens in cycles of complementarity: Cycles of input and output, activity and non-activity, introspection and extroversion, play and rest, etc. He also acknowledges that these cycles may last moments, days, years, or decades, and is perfectly comfortable with that. These patterns are only recognizable with a sufficient amount of time and introspection, and so the Transcender is likely to be at least 30 years or older- Enough time to experience the validity of each cycle in its current context. This understanding is what makes him peaceful to be around. He isn’t fighting the currents of his life, but flowing with them.  

In more practical terms, on any given day The Transcender can adopt the characteristics of any of the other archetypes but without becoming stuck in any of their patterns.

For example, The Transcender may have led the highly active life of a Dedicated Mover for 10 years as a professional cyclist, but then out of necessity (a signal to rest such as an injury, or a change in priorities) become a bit of an Indoorsman, deciding to commit his next five years to writing a book he felt compelled to bring to fruition based on these 10 years of lessons as a cyclist. He makes use of The Indoorsman archetype’s characteristics, rather than allowing The Indoorsman making use of him. This is the key distinction between The Transcender in Indoorsman’s clothing, and a true Indoorsman. He play’s The Indoorsman character without carrying these characteristics into other areas of his life in which they won’t serve. It is as if he can put on the costume of an archetype, and change out of it to play the role necessary for the next act of his life, whether it lasts for 5 minutes or 20 years. One of his superpowers is adaptability.

While he is capable of stepping in and out of the shoes of The Indoorsman and Exerciser (two of our archetypes with the least healthy relationships with movement), he was probably encouraged in his childhood to always be moving, playing, and being outdoors, values that stuck with him. As the driving force in his life is his curiosity about movement, most things he deems a good use of his time involve learning about, practicing, or deepening his understanding of the human body in motion. He considers himself a life-long student of movement, and he studies via books and taking courses, experience working with other people, but perhaps most importantly, exploring in his own body, developing a deep awareness of it. 

What he knows to be true through his own experience studying his body in motion is that what he observes to be happening in his body also shows up in his life. When he feels resistance and limitation in his body, somewhere in his life he knows this same restriction must exist and he seeks to understand this connection. To him, the exploration of his body is a vital, inextricable part of investigating his life and how he interacts with it. He knows that his relationship with his body and how it moves- what’s going on “in here”,  is a reflection of what’s going on “out there”. This is not something he can prove scientifically, but witnesses again and again in himself and the lives of others. This insight makes him sought after for advice. Being with him in is like taking a ride in a helicopter from which we can view a greater expanse of the landscape of our lives. To zoom out and see a fuller picture of reality.

As much as he values and loves moving his body, he is equally able to be with himself in stillness. He can sit down to meditate, scan his body, or to read or write or study for hours. Another one of his amazing super-powers is his resiliency to sitting. Immobilization in front of a computer or on a plane don’t have much of a negative long term effect (not that he enjoys these things exceptionally). He simply stands up, shakes off any feelings of crustiness, and gets on with life with no excuses, regrets, or procrastination, like many of us are prone to do.

It is his commitment to learning about and from himself, his body, and the world around him that define the core intention of The Transcender’s movement practice. In his quest to satisfy his curiosity, he is likely to develop a propensity for teaching, allowing him to share what he is learning and exploring, while deepening his understanding of himself and the human body. Likely career paths for him thus include coaching a sport or movement form, working as a therapist of some designation, teaching seminars, or authoring a book (or all of the above at different life-stages). His ability to play all parts in MLAM serves him nicely in these guiding roles, endowing him with an easy sense of compassion and drawing his “tribe” to him in his capacity as coach, teacher, and healer.

The Transcender is distinguished from the Dedicated Mover and The Over-Identifier by his realization that he cares more to explore, tinker, play, and teach than to compete, win, and be the best. He may have transitioned from being a serious athlete to his teacher/coach/healer role with the understanding that while he loves that particular sport, he gives precedence to having a healthy body and mind, a goal requiring a more diverse movement “diet”, not to become stuck in one pattern.

As his name suggests, The Transcender transcends the need to always be moving: He doesn’t obsess about his training schedule, doesn’t feel guilty for missing a training session, doesn’t succumb to the pressure to exercise because “he should”. He knows to rest when things don’t feel right in his body. He fluctuates between moments of deep focus, relaxation, or calm, and bouts of intense activity, skilled practice, or inspired teaching. Because of this, he is  in good physical health much of the time (though he comes in different shapes and sizes). 

It is as if his MLAM shell-position operates on a highly sensitive pressurestat* system allowing him to adapt to each moment in time appropriately. For example, if he stops moving for long enough, his inner homeostatic mechanism signals a build up of pressure and cues him to get up and move. And when his system needs a break to recover (low pressure) the signal is heeded; he slows down and enjoys some downtime. This happens at both the micro (seconds, minutes, days, weeks) and macro (months, years, decades) level. He rarely needs to think long and hard about what is best for his body, he is adept at interpreting his inner-pressurestat’s readings.

*A pressurestat is a homeostatic control that reacts to changes in pressure in a system, increasing or decreasing it according to the environmental conditions.

This ability to clearly communicate with himself is mirrored back at him in his relationships and professional life. The Transcender tends to have clear, intact boundaries, knowing when to say “no” or “yes” to himself and others in personal and professional matters. Rarely does he burn himself out, as his internal feedback loop provides accurate real-time information on when to stop, go, or change lanes. That said, he has developed a particularly low tolerance for irrational thinkers, from whom he has learned that life is too short to live trying to convince them of their irrationality or change their minds. 

Finally, an interesting characteristic of The Transcender is that he may not consider himself to even have a movement practice, even if it appears to the outside eye that he does. If you ask him about it, he doesn’t feel that he is practicing anything, just that he is living his life authentically according to his values and priorities. In this way, The Transcender effortlessly takes on a teaching role by virtue of modeling how to live a life in congruence with one’s highest values.

The Transcender at a glance:

Superpowers: Resilience to sitting, adaptability, curiosity, teaching, communication.
Religion: Complementarian
Kryptonite: Irrational thinkers.
Vitality: Healthy, abundance of energy, youthful.
Relationship with movement: Transcendent.
Attitude towards the stairs: Take em’ or leave em’, depends on his pressurestat.

Identify with the traits, not the character

As I mentioned before, these archetypes are stories. Communication devices to frame the rest of what I wish to discuss in this work.

You can probably identify some traits from each archetype in yourself, or maybe fully identify with one of them. Perhaps you have an idea about aspects of your archetype that you are unsatisfied with, that you’d like to change. But I’d also like you to ask yourself, how are these undesirous traits currently serving you, where you are now in your life?

Put on The Transcender’s thinking cap, or take a ride with him in his helicopter. Can you see the broader landscape of your life?

A conversation between an Exerciser and a Transcender from up in his helicopter might look like this.

Exerciser: After reading Monika’s description of The Exerciser archetype, I can see how I use exercise as a way of making up for my unhealthy habit of neglecting my body all week as I work at my IT job at Clean Clean Happy Time Toilets and Bidets Inc. I’m unhappy that this is a trait I possess.

Transcender: Let’s zoom out and investigate this. Can you see ways that this undesirable trait is actually useful for you? What could it be helping you to accomplish and learn? Who else could be benefiting from it? How would you feel if you could let go of this trait, and What would you do with the space you’d free up without this trait as part of your existence?

Your first exploratory mission

Consider this your first step in our systematic approach to cultivating a healthy, useful, enjoyable movement practice.

Exercise 1:
I’d like you to take the imaginary ride with The Transcender described above. Start by writing down some of the characteristics you identified with from each archetype (there will probably be some from each). Go back and re-read the descriptions if necessary. Then, for each characteristic, write down your answers to these six questions:

1. How is this undesirable trait useful for you?

2. What could it be helping you to accomplish?

3. Who else could be benefiting from it?

4. What have you learned from being this way?

5. How would you feel, who would you be, if you could let go of this trait?

6. What would you do with the space you’d free up in your life without this trait as part of your existence?

Doing this reflection and writing down your answers is an illuminating use of time, and I strongly recommend you do it. It will help to give clarity to your “now”, which, at some point will likely be your “then”.

Practical post-archetype semantics

The next chapter of this work will describe and define some important words, like movement, practice, and exercise, so that you, where ever you sit on the MLAM, can gain a fuller understanding of the role movement plays in our lives, and how to cultivate healthier relationships with our bodies on this journey of well-being*. The more you are aware of where you are now on the MLAM by investigating your archetypal ways of living, the more you will appreciate the chapters to follow.

*Well-being: I believe it is impossible to define and measure objectively because it a journey, not a fixed state.