Do you want to hear one of the silliest assumptions I have made in my life?
That my body should just instinctively move in a way that is correct.
How silly. Couple that with the pervasive inability to listen to our bodies and I had a crippling life ahead of me. Truly, I lived my first 38 years with this assumption and paid the price for it. Aching joints. Terrible headaches. Awful menstral cycles. All of these things pointed to important underlying problems. I thought I would grow out of them. I thought they were part of my biology. I thought I was pre-broken and that I just needed to accept my fate. Goodness was I wrong.
I am not going to lay out some great plan of escape from bad hormonal care, bad diet, and bad movement habits here. Mostly because I am NOT AN EXPERT. BUT I will also tell you that I have done little within the realm of modern medicine/science to see to these problems. I do have a lot of problems with the modern medical system. I wish that it worked. I wish that I felt I could trust it. I have watched from the sidelines as it has injured or disregarded people that I love. I just feel that like most of us, it isn’t listening. And how can you fix a problem if you don’t understand it? How can you repair a part if you are not looking at the whole organism?
Instead, I have followed a lot of the mystical weirdo, woowoo shit that is out there…and it has worked. Thankfully, I have been able to use the menial (in comparison to the grand scale that is out there) knowledge that I had acquired in my schooling to weed out some of the potentially scarier or more dangerous of the woowoo. That danger is real. So are poisonous mushrooms, however, and we all have learned to be quite certain that we aren’t falling into that trap either. Use your common sense. Weigh the options (read the side effects, especially when taking medications). And KEEP LISTENING to YOUR body!
I am also not really big on doing things for one purpose. I like multi-benefit solutions. So, instead of making going to the gym the focus of my world (which admittedly I could still do more of), I build in places where my real, every day, unavoidable life requires me to incorporate movement. What I mean by that is, I heard that people who live in hill-filled terrain live longer and I set about building that into my life so that it was part of my natural and unavoidable part of my day. I moved myself to the third floor apartment. I own two dogs, those dogs mandate that I must leave my apartment 3 to 4 times a day. Which means that I must climb those stairs 4 to 5 times a day at a minimum. This does not take into account the walks themselves or any other trips I must take to take out the trash or bring in the groceries or cart the 5 gallon jugs of water up the stairs. I understand that not everyone is able bodied to the same level and I am not saying that if you are working with physical anomalies that preclude you from this movement you are wrong. I am saying that there was a time in my life when I would have thought myself too cripple to be able to have this be my everyday life. I have had terrible joint pain my whole life, but I am learning from listening to my own body that there are ways that I can help move it more towards wellness. Each small step (pun intended) helps keep me alive longer.
It is important to remember that our body is listening to what we are listening to. So, if we feel that pain in our knees and do not do the work to address why it could be happening and how we can keep it from happening, we are telling our bodies that we are okay with that decline. If we feel that headache and choose to not drink the water that we have been forgetting for days, then our body stops connecting the dots for us and just serves up the headache. The reponse to both for many, me included (for decades), is to take pain killers. Assuming that the pain is just our body’s way of attacking or hating us. I was up to taking a minumum of 2 extra strength tylenol or 8-200 mg ibuprofen without thought, sometimes even preemptively on a daily basis. When I stopped taking pain killers to numb the signals that my body was trying to use to communicate with me, I started to actually find solutions that were long term, natural, and easy to maintain. Again! I understand that pain killers have a place. I am just pointing out that it is a fix that, while causing its own host of problems, can also be keeping you from exploring even easier solutions.
Currently, I am working on that modern foe – posture. It has TRULY been a beautiful journey. That sounds to overstated but it isn’t. I started considering my posture as purely the visual “stand up straight” idea. This triggered a terrible problem in my left shoulder. I found an amazing ROLFer (a type of physical therapy that is massage therapy meets physical therapy) who helped re-mobilize it. As the mobility of my body started to be unlocked, I changed the goal from a visual one to a physiological one. I realized that I was not breathing from my diaphragm. Having taken many anatomy courses, I knew how the diaphragm was supposed to work and yet I was not using my body in a way that would allow it to work properly.
Your belly is supposed to balloon out as you draw in breath.
Which meant that I needed to make space for that. This changed my focus to rolling my shoulders back, which encouraged me to constantly consider proper alignment with my head, heart, and pelvis. But, until you train the body to consider these things, to hold your muscles strong here or there you will have to keep reminding yourself and it. This takes patience and grace and kindness. Yet, these small focus changes have revolutionized the way I am considering my health, what my body is capable of and has even changed what I am seeing in the mirror. This journey started over a year ago. I am still working on it hour to hour. I have not given up hope that some day I will not have to think about holding myself thoughtfully in this manner or that. I still know that it will take time being as mindful as I am to get there.
But you listen for you. I don’t live in your body. I do not know about that pain that keeps you awake at night. I also don’t know about how hard it is for you to move in that way. You must explore the boundaries of your movement and see where you are able to make small changes that will hopefully unlock even greater change options.
Chew on it. Let me know what you think.
-A
tldr: Don’t assume that your body will instinctively know what to do to keep itself well, especially when you have not been listening to the signs of unwellness it has been sending you.
