Rehabilitating Your Urge to Move

We are born moving and have instincts to move that are rhythmic. At certain times it feels better for us to move than others. Like at times it feels better and easier to get to sleep than others.


This article, "Lack of Exercise can disrupt the body's rhythms" is talking about exercise helping us to know optimal times to move. It feels like its conflating exercise with movement, which sometimes happens. They aren't the same. The peaks of your natural instinct toward movement is something you should be able to pick up on at any state. If anything, I'd say exercise isn't a good way to achieve this for most people. Especially if you aren't in to it.

It's a bit like demand feeding/normal eating/intuitive eating. You have to clear psychological obstacles out of your mind-like identifying your body as inherently incompetent or yourself as forever physically incapable. Adopt a new more neutral open-minded stance, if positivity is too much of stretch.

Put your mind on alert for optimal times to feel the urge move at its most strongest, then above all, respond to those feelings/urges, freely. Act on them, no matter how short in duration-seconds even!
Follow through with that impulse as long as it feels good to you, stop promptly when it ceases to- at least at first, until you get into the swing of things, later you'll gain more flexibility.

With consistent practice and patience these urges should become stronger and more distinct, longer lasting and more satisfying to engage with.

The key is learning to perceive and go with rise in your instincts to move, synchronize impulse with a positive response. Avoid overburdening them with excess desire, guilt or shame about seeing yourself as inactive, or needing to make up for lost time.

Now's the time to learn patience and love for yourself. Go at your own pace.

You can do this outside the movement you need to make to go about your normal affairs. It will feed into that at some point.

Make a point of shifting your consciousness away from any negative or forcing to a more coaxing wait and see what you can do, type stance.

If at first you can't feel any sense of an urge to move, then try for least disinclined/most easeful of all. And take it from there.......

Musical Youth

I loathe campaigns to teach fat children to know their place or "obesity prevention" as they are creepily tagged. I've already said how unimpressed I am with Michelle Obama's insistence on taking this stance, I have to say though, I quite enjoyed this video and found it unexpectedly uplifting.




If anything that again shows how pointless and unnecessary it is to target fat children, rather than concentrating on building on the joy of movement and physial expression in children. Something we actually owe them for its own sake.

Teaching children to take possession and direct themselves physically, has a spiritual element. Not only is it an avenue of expression, release and sense of freedom, it can increase their sense of confidence.

Apart from natural highs, this helps to ballast their mental health and decrease the neuroses that seem increasingly prevalent among them.

Watching it made me wonder if someone has gotten through to those running the campaign as it features a noticeably fat child very prominently from the start, something I can't easily recall in the usual mainstream efforts to invoke child activity.

Although it's as likely to be in part cultural expectation, fat people are not by necessity excluded from movement like they are in those led by commercial interests, who see fat people exercising as tthreat to their delusional pretence that fatness is incompatible with (any) activity.

When it comes to dance its almost a mode of conversation, a bit like some cultures associated with gesticulating to make, support and underlie verbal expression.

As with those cultures he is expected to be part, keep up and express himself in his own style, included along with everyone else. I note the featured routine is a mix of running on the spot, alluding to skipping and certain kinds of dances that have relevance outside the usual context of 'exercise'.

I also suspect that might be behind Beyoncé wearing heels, if you look at her beforehand you can see she changed from trainers. I think that's about the constituent of teen girls who tend to stop a lot of physical activity quite abruptly at a certain age as part of defining themselves as women.

Hence singing pointedly about "a little sweat never hurt nobody".

A fraught sticking point with those not wanting to mess up their hair by getting sweaty.

Very important.

It does occur that it's a bit jump heavy and although one might dance vigorously in a club, I would not advise anyone to be jumping up and down on a regular basis like that in heels.

The spectre of things such as "Shin Splints" hover in the air.

But then, that's as much a defect of trying to use calorie wastage via activity to regulate weight, it's fundamentally flawed notion at the best of times.

The routine also reflects current fashions in the fitness industry, conditioning the body from a standing position, fewer gaps in shorter routines and using the whole muscle groups together to increase energy expenditure.

In other words, exercise has had a slow drift from punishing de-contextualized repetition, to more and more imitate real and/or pleasurable movement. So predictable and so funny. When I think of the people they've written off who struggled manfully with their more ill conceived efforts.

No matter, as long as kids of all sizes can be given more options to express themselves physically, as phys ed has virtually been jettisoned in favour of sitting kids at desks to make up for inadequate teaching and fulfil parental ambition.

This campaign may not do quite as much harm as I feared.

But I'm keeping my eyes wide open as it is very much a hope.

Thinking through your body- part 1

Trigger warning; mention of extremely negative feelings

Wow, even the possibility of fat people improving their fitness and/or health as fat people is just too much for some. I don't object to the questioning the study findings, but this resentment about possible loss of bullying rights is just sad.

I went through a period where I felt all I could do was swear off exercise and direct attempt at physical fitness. My demoralisation with the way we are supposed to approach the concept- run at it and try to cling to nothing had reached a point where it was just another source of hurt to add to the rubbish bin marked "pointless".

As a child I took part in a sports, nothing major I slowly burned out as the divergence occurring between my body (and therefore myself) into viewer of something to be watched in order to curtail it set in. I've not fully gotten past that to this day.

Getting to this point has meant having to psychologically unburden myself of what built itself around that split as far as I could. The harder part is to repair the actual split the physical alienation between thinking of moving and actually doing it. Either stopped before it starts or by an aggressive build up of tension or ill feeling.

Recently I stumbled on the fact that the whole hating parts of your body thing; "I hate my stomach, thighs, behind, hips etc., -or the imprint from having had long periods of this-can be enough to affect your fluency of movement.

One day apropos of nothing in particular I was of a mood to focus on each part of my body in turn, I can't remember exactly what I said, but I remember gently focusing on each part of my body and kind of apologizing by thanking each part, feelings of gratitude, that sort of thing.

Sounds hippy trippy but I was amazed that I actually felt and moved better soon afterwards. I had no idea those thoughts could just linger, even though overall I'd learned to be accepting and kind towards my body.

It hadn't occurred that the whole body might feel demoralised by abuse directed at it in the same way we can be. I'm supposing that is the mind body connection and that these attacks can become part of a conditioned reflex. The way you think about and through your body that can interrupt it's competence and the fluency of your ability to produce movement.

That is in addition to the numerous messages we get from voices of authority that fat bodies are physically incompetent and incapable due to the 'disease' of fatness. The endless warnings and orders about our health should be are one thing, but the requirement of premise that it is not possible to become fitter or fit without automatically becoming slim displays an even clearer desire to cause harm through confining to the wish fulfilment element of obesity.

That this is required to make fatness fit the predestined prognosis is the kind of thing that has undermined the belief in what we are told, over and above our own personal experiences.

Don't even talk of the female cult of body loathing as bonding etc., ritual. Yes I'm sure there's more to it than we wish to face.

Think about what that may have meant for millions of fat people filled- many since childhood-with taken for granted assumptions of their incapable "unhealthy" compromised bodies. Even if that were so, some kind of rehabilitation would be the correct response not encouraging sidelining and withdrawal.

After years of trying to attain fitness whilst whatever intrinsic fitness I had began to actually fade, which I would have been better off supporting. I felt I had to let go.

The last straw for me was when I was doing some rather tame exercises and out of nothing feeling an intense aversion crash through me like a wave.

Disconcerted I decided this time I was not going to give in. I was going to step back (in my mind) and just let whatever it was wash over me because for once I wasn't doing anything extreme, I wasn't pushing it, this just must be inner laziness coming out to play.

I'd be cleverer, I wouldn't try to suppress or ignore it, I'd just relax continue, be polite, tip my hat to it, but not engage directly or battle with it.

So I continued.

Then there was another wave. Bigger this time, step back, continue.

Hey, I thought this is alright, it's going to be ok, this time.

Then;

BOOM !!!

It was so ferocious, the feeling so piercingly intense that I was stunned. It was the most intense feeling of violation that I've ever experienced in my life.

I stood open mouthed because I had to describe that to myself, what it felt like and excuse me but the first and only thing I could say was;

It felt like I was violating myself.

I'm aware how horrible that sounds and I apologize but it pointed to the way I felt as if I has allowed myself to be taken advantage of and that upset me more than these strange responses. I'm not much of a crier but it stung my eyes, I thought just what do I have to do to make this whole diet exercise thing work?

Why couldn't I just do what I was supposed to do without finding some way to mess it up? Who feels this way, who behaves like this? That's where my head was at then. When you keep falling short and you are hurting because you are trying to prove you want to make good and you just can't, it doesn't show. Feeling it should be so simple, self pity is the order of the day.

And I felt very sorry for myself indeed.

Yoga

I do not consider myself to be an expert in yoga, far from it, but my ears always prick up when people dislike yoga intensely. It seems to be about the way it makes them feel. I understand. Watch makes me wonder is whether that's so much the asanas or that they bring the feelings we store in our bodies rudely back to our awareness.

A bit like the mental experience of revisiting the sight of a bad experience. It's not necessarily the place in itself, but how you feel about what happened there and the fact that it evokes those memories.

You'd want to stay away right. Perhaps though if you're with someone who you really like. One of those who can get you to shift your mood or attention. Then maybe, you could work through those feelings due to the introduction of different more positive feelings. Greater remove, analysis. Even just being more relaxed whilst feeling those feelings.

The dissipation of enough tension can at times do wonders.

For me, yoga is as much about principle.  

The use of breath. 

Breathing to release tension, relax and in motion. Breathing to release imagination, using that to increase the flow of energy.

The hardest thing for me is that moment when you are so stiff that you feel unsafe. Like some muscle or other's going to go pop or break! I've been known to give up. Especially when time after time, nothing changes. But if I prepare enough and am lucky, I've sometimes experienced the yielding that comes when the body lets go, with such elegance.

Like a flower opening.

There is no feeling quite like it. 

And guess what? It's made me just a little bit braver.

Physical alienation

Though I've commented on this before, I haven't made it the subject of a whole post. In a sense, it comes, could come under the banner of HAES. Certainly it's is for anyone of any size, I'm thinking about recovering your connection to your instinct to move.

One of the many reasons many others and myself have become so cynical about the motivation behind the obesity crisis, is the nasty side effects that come directly from that. One is the creation or deepening of a sense of alienation from one's desire to move.

At times this is crudely labelled 'laziness', though I'm not frightened of that word, I think laziness is misunderstood as a moral failing. To me it's more of a signal and sign that needs to be heard and acted upon to relieve or remove a state of on-going indolence. Having some lazy times is fine, when its a struggle to do anything that's something deeper.

I'm talking about wanting to move, sometimes desperately but feeling that to your dismay, you never actually feel able to, without struggle or force. There's always a reason, or you wouldn't have to 'force' yourself. You never enjoy your body in motion, it never feels right, the connection isn't there. It seems heavier than your will and not under your full charge.

There are so many symptoms of this problem. It's important to note that weight makes little difference here, it's more of a question of imbalance. I hate to say mental problem because that gives the wrong impression making it seem as if it's psychosomatic, although, there is nothing wrong with that, it is more of a feedback issue. 

That is, your nervous system is transmitting back to your brain, real feelings of discomfort and sometimes, acute distress though you dismiss it because you're not hurting or injured. It's a general malaise. Because of those feelings, a sense of disappointment can set in, on top of the negative physical feelings. That becomes increasingly discouraging. Making those physical feelings worse.

What I'm saying is, the way we are taught to think about our bodies themselves, including how we talk to and about them, the way we think of movement in general, 'gets into the body itself'.

We need a bridge between getting rid of that and being freely physical.