Movement is Medicine
Hello Everyone!
How are you all? I hope you've been doing as best you can. Me? Well, it's been an interesting few months. There's lots of internal work coming up for me to explore, and I'm gearing up for the fall season. Which after the crazy heat waves we had I'm more than ready for the cooler weather.
So I've been stuck. Have you ever gotten that way? Feel like you have no place to turn, shift, or move through? This "stuck" feeling hit me on many levels. My creativity, energy levels, mental/emotional wellbeing, and of course my physical body.
As a bodyworker, part of my job is to help my clients come home to their bodies safely. Helping to bring awareness to where they are holding discomfort or pain, emotions, and stress. We are all so good at numbing out and that also includes me.
I think for the past two months I have progressively numbed out and my body certainly has taken the brunt of this. I kind of fell into a well of disappear and tightness. This translates directly to my body as well. My back went out. My stomach inflamed. Old injuries arose, and frankly, I felt awful.
That was until a good friend reminded me of a saying: "Movement is medicine." While there is some poetic irony behind a holistic health provider who doesn't really like exercise that's where I am. The idea of exercise terrifies me. It feels like more work, more pain, and more aggravation. This is my process to work through but this mentality has kept me in the stuck phase.
As we don't heal alone, I decided to buck up, reach out for help, and went to see my Pilates trainer with my tail between my legs, "it's been a hot minute since I've seen her for a session".
She was just as compassionate and non-judgemental as ever guiding me back into my body and helping to fix some postural issues I was dealing with. I'll tell you for the most part I didn't enjoy it. My body hurt, felt awkward, disconnected, and worthless. These feelings I know were also stemming from a deeper space inside. I stuck with the session and trusted my trainer and the process.
Do you know what happened next? I felt better. The session ended and I felt more in myself than I had in a long time. My body didn't ache, some crinks were ironed out, and my mood shifted. I released sometimes the answer to the feeling stuck is to actually move. Walk, workout, dance, sing. All things that make movement in the body. It doesn't have to be fancy or look like you're sitting under a guillotine-like I did in the picture above, "don't worry it's just Pilates equipment."
Sometimes we have to address the physical body to engage the rest of our being. So I'm not saying I've fallen in love with exercise, but I think I might be starting to fall in love with my body again.
I hope you can find this helpful.