Hi, folks. Well, here we are...
The first episode of The Heart of Motion Podcast. You might wonder, where the heck is she going with this? Is it about exercise and fitness? Is it about sports? Is it about play or embodiment or somatics or therapy?
I'll tell you what: I'm planning on digging into all of that and more in coming episodes. I'm on a mission for a deep dive, folks, so buckle up. More often than not, when we talk about human movement, the conversation is pretty compartmentalized.
Essentially, we're discussing physical bodies doing physical tasks. Sometimes, especially in my world, we're looking at whether those bodies have the capacity to do certain tasks. And where necessary, we develop strategies for helping them do it better. I've spent the better part of 30 years working with people to do just that.
From that perspective, movement can fit very nicely inside the context of a fitness routine or inside a therapeutic framework. When a physical body is capable of achieving great things, we talk about performance, and that seems to live in its own little bubble. Fitness and therapeutic work can be assumed to be fundamental elements of high performance. But you know what, what's always missing for me in all of these is the why. What if movement is about more than just mechanics?
What if our bodies are more than vehicles to transport us and our brains around from place to place? Our bodies and our movement are how we make contact with each other and with the world around us. I like to think that the more we can fully live the lives of our bodies, especially through movement, we can feel a deeper sense of meaning and connection to ourselves, to our lives, and to the world around us.
I think it was Einstein who once said, Nothing happens until something moves. You probably learned all about that in high school physics. We're taught that inertia is difficult to overcome, and once we get something moving, it's likely to stay in motion until something else slows it down or makes it stop.
What that tells me is that movement is about relationships, relationships inside of us that allow us to respond to stimuli and gauge muscles that move our bones and give us the ability to exert some kind of force in the world, relationships outside of us that respond to whatever the force is that we're exerting. It's a constantly evolving dance on a wide variety of scales with any number of different partners, all affecting and being affected by each other.
There are good relationships and not-so-good ones. And relationships are not always so easy to define. When any one of the parts doesn't play its role well, whole systems are effective. It's the butterfly effect in action.
At this point, you might ask, who cares? Maybe this just seems like a navel-gazing exercise by a dedicated movement geek. And you might be partly right. If we start from a point of looking at improving movement capacity and quality, which is often where I start, why can't we just agree on a few proven exercises for X, Y, or Z, prescribe those, and then get on with it? Well, sometimes that works, and sometimes it doesn’t.
In my experience, when we can look more closely at the various relationships involved, we can find much more effective and sustainable solutions to movement problems. And in the process, we bring people closer to home in their own bodies. Now, the way movement relationships play out in our bodies is really a matter of scale. On the cellular level, our bodies are literally teeming with cells streaming around inside us, delivering oxygen and nutrients, building healthy tissues, and clearing out waste.
There's an old animated movie that my son and I used to love to watch when he was a little kid. It was called Osmosis Jones. And in that, it illustrates the inner workings of the body in hilarious detail. The film kind of anthropomorphized the various types of cells inside the body and showed effectively how each one had its own job to do. If you have kids, it's a fun and sneakily educational movie to watch.
We have larger structures within us, too - bones, muscles, organs, and so on. All of which can either facilitate or inhibit how well we move around in the world. The beating of our hearts and the rhythmic expansion and contraction of our lungs are simple examples of internal movements that are essential for sustaining life.
Locomotion: things like walking, running, jumping, climbing, swimming. Locomotion allows us at the very minimum to explore our environment, to find food, to escape danger, and to reproduce. All the survivally type things.
On the larger human scale, we know that we move as a way to maintain whole person health. Regular motion helps regulate body systems, maintain essential functions, and supports our mental health. Who among us hasn't gone for a run or done some very intense, exerty type of things in a time of intense stress or as a way to blow off steam?
Beyond the life-sustaining functions, movement is an expression of our thoughts and our emotions. Think about how quickly you can read someone else's emotional state simply by becoming aware of the look on their face, the set of their shoulders, or the energy in their walk.
Something like dance, which has existed in virtually every culture over thousands of years, is a powerful way to communicate feelings and ideas. So powerful, in fact, that some cultures have even sought to ban dance in various forms when it's seen as some kind of threatening or subversive act. It makes people feel. Many cultures embed the significance of movement into their rituals and their practices.
Think about the flowing movements in Tai Chi, for example. Those aren't just exercises, but also meditative practices, reflecting the flow of life energy or chi, or the whirling spinning movements of the Sufis, which are a form of meditation and prayer. Indigenous peoples in North America have many dances to connect with the land and with spirit, and to tell important cultural stories, too.
Philosophically, life can be seen as a state of dynamic equilibrium, constantly adjusting through movement to maintain balance. Homeostasis. Balance. And relationship. Again.
I hope you'll bear with me while I take it one step further “To an ecological level, animals and, once upon a time, people, too, migrate. Birds fly south for the winter. Salmon travel great distances in harsh conditions to spawn. Wolves and caribou travel and move hundreds of miles, often dancing around each other for food and for survival.
Movement can play a crucial role in the interactions between species, too. Think about the way bees pollinate flowers or the scattering of seeds by animals. If bees didn't do their thing, many of the plants they pollinate would die, wreaking all kinds of havoc on our environment and our food sources. Here on our West Coast, there's a saying that the ocean feeds the forest. Bears, seawolves, and other creatures bring their catch from the sea into the forest to eat, leaving nitrogen-rich remains to nourish the trees around them. It's all part of the circle of life.
I think what I'm trying to say here is that movement can mean so much more than an exercise at the gym. They can include the exercise at the gym, but that's not all there is to it. We're in constant relationship with the world and the world with us, and movement is usually involved.
So if we get down to it, the compartmentalization that we attempt to create around movement as a purely exercise-related thing is crap. Sure, we can live that way, and a lot of people have no interest in looking deeper, and that's fine. If that's you, this podcast probably isn't for you.
One of my goals with The Heart of Motion Podcast is to open a doorway to new possibilities, a widening of perspectives that may contribute to a deeper, more compassionate, and fulfilling relationship with your own body and movement. And that's possible whether you're pushing limits and boundaries and going hard, or whether you're just wanting to live a happy, active lifestyle.
You are human, in a body, interacting with the world. And I think that's meaningful and a little bit magic. Why don't we play with that and see where it takes us?
Our movement is an expression of who we are and how we engage with the world. Sure, we can attempt to isolate discrete parts of ourselves for convenience in an attempt to increase productivity, or an attempt to get better or master one thing or another, but that compartmentalization is really just an illusion.
Every movement is a whole body movement. We can try to compartmentalize our parts and stuff away pain. We could ignore struggle. I actually used to have a shirt that said on the front: "Sweat. Pain. Agony." And on the back: "Love it!" At that time in my world, I was all about pushing forward with everything I had. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.
On the other side of that equation, that compartmentalizing equation, is sometimes a similar but different problem, where we put the hard things about physical activity in a container that we deem too much. Perhaps it takes us out of our comfort zone. It asks more of us than we think we're capable of. So it becomes something we're afraid of or something we're just “something we're just not interested in engaging.
Here's the thing. The physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual elements of our being exist in the same place at the same time. And they exist within us, not like pieces of a pie, but like a hologram. One thing affects the others, no matter how we like to pretend otherwise.
In 2010, I had the good fortune to interview Thomas Myers, integrative structural therapist and author of the Anatomy Train's Myofascial Meridians for an internet radio show I did back in the day. In our pre-show chat, Tom spoke about how he came to bodywork from his earlier involvement in environmental activism.
He described a seamless path between the two. At the time, I was stunned, because to that point, I had never heard anyone else who likened the ecosystem of the body to the ecosystem of the planet. We're clearly talking about massively different scales, but both ecosystems have similar patterns, flows, and needs for support. And it was around that time that my interest in the depth and impact of those relationships really took hold.
Just as modern society has largely lost our connection to nature and to the land, and its moods and rhythms, we've also to a large extent lost our connection to our bodies. Where once regular daily movement work was a large part of every day, modern conveniences have made it such that we have to make a very concerted effort to move at all.
I'm going to ask for a little more help from Hollywood here. There's another animated movie from 2018 called Wall-E, which some of you might remember, which depicted a dystopian future where humans have left a destroyed planet Earth to live aboard a massive orbiting spacecraft. And inside that spacecraft are people who resemble big boneless blobs riding around in programmable floating chairs, watching screens constantly in front of their faces with very little other interaction. To me, it looked like the epitome of disconnection on just about every level. The most frightening thing about it for me was it seemed like we were already heading in that direction.
Think about it...
Today, we ride in our cars to get around. We have machines to do dishes, to do laundry and other physical labor. Many of our jobs have no physical requirement at all other than to sit at a desk in front of a computer for most of every day.
We watch screens all the time. It can be a challenge to carve out even a few minutes a day to actually move more than the distance between your house and your car. For those who are dedicated, sometimes the choice is between two extremes - to sit for hours and then go hard at the end of the day or to do the weekend warrior thing. No wonder we've largely forgotten how to relate to our bodies in motion. We're really, really out of practice.
So I think we've got some relearning to do, some reconnecting, some interoception. That sense that allows us to ask, how do I feel in any given moment? And to explore how we feel as we navigate the physical pathways to our goals.
The strategies we're often pushed toward these days are things like this all-or-nothing thinking, perfectionism, take no prisoners, no excuses. Well, those things can work sometimes, and maybe work quite well for a while, but eventually the imbalance takes a toll. What if there were another way?
What if we took a more holistic approach and began to integrate all our various parts, seeking to understand their influences and challenges as we move through our lives? Yeah, it's going to take a different kind of attention and some learning of new things. In my opinion, though, it can take us to some very cool places.And most of all, it can lead to a sense of feeling really, truly, and fully alive.
A while ago, I became obsessed with the Polynesian Ocean Wayfinders. For thousands of years, these brave souls navigated across thousands of miles of open ocean in double-hulled or outrigger canoes to get to other islands for food and for trade.
They obviously didn't have the benefit of today's scientific data and instruments to get them from A to B. Instead, they relied on the stars, observation and understanding of the movement of birds, ocean swells, and wind patterns, as well as the knowledge and oral traditions passed down through generations. Can you imagine being able to find your way across the ocean by feeling changes in how the ocean and the winds moved around you? The deep connection to the earth and the fluency in the planet's rhythms and patterns that would be required to do that is astonishing to me.
I invite you to consider that it might be possible to develop the kind of physical and internal literacy to navigate our bodies and our movements over the span of our lifetimes in a similar way. All the science and the medicine to which we have access can help us with the data, with the probabilities, and with the guidance as to what research indicates is a good path.
And by tuning in to ourselves, we can learn to act as modern-day wayfinders, using all that internal and external information in real time, sensing the effects of our choices, feeling into the results as we live and move in the direction that we want to go.
There's no such thing as one size fits all. Our pathways may be different. In fact, I'd be stunned if they weren't. We are separate people with different bodies, histories, different challenges and celebrations, different experiences. But when we can learn about our own bodies and our own movement and hear stories from different people about their experiences and talk to experts in different fields about what they have found works, we can begin to more deeply understand ourselves, become attuned to the nature of our relationships with other, whether that's people we interact with or the equipment we work with or the environment we live in, all of them improving our experience of simply being alive.
So, here we go. The heart, the soul, the science. The Heart of Motion.
If you're curious, I hope you'll come along with me for the ride. We're going to learn new things and have some fun along the way. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Join me again in a couple of weeks!
From Heart of Motion: Movement Is Everywhere, Jul 1, 2024
https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/heart-of-motion/id1751804778?i=1000660762524
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