How to love moving your body
It is hard to find a love for movement when you’ve been convinced that exercise is just to change how you look.
Liberation from this bind is found by getting out of your head and into your body.
There is so much that feels good about stretching and challenging muscles, bending in ways you don’t otherwise, and all of the chemicals that are released when our bodies are active. While doing all this stretching and bending and challenging, interest with how you look in the mirror can be replaced with interest in how your glutes and hamstrings feel when you drop into a squat and then push off of the ground. Interest in the shape of your what you see when you look down can be replaced with interest in the sensations of wind and sun on your skin. There are options when it comes to what we pay attention to while moving our bodies. None of the options are wrong, but if we’ve gotten caught up in obsessing about one thing, it can help to open up our awareness
Some of us have gotten a bit obsessed with what we look like during exercise because we are using exercise to change how we look. Muscles that are regularly active look different than muscles that are regularly sedentary. Our whole bodies can and do change when they move. But when this is THE reason we choose to move our bodies, it is hard to ever truly accept our physical selves because acceptance has become conditional. And then it is almost impossible to ever truly enjoy moving our bodies, because we’ve become so distracted from all that there is to enjoy. We have to look at other reasons that a balanced relationship with moving is so important.
The basics are:
•improved immune function: getting sick less often, and healing more quickly
•improved cognition: ease in focus and improved memory
•increased energy: feeling energized throughout the day
Note: If you are exercising regularly and not recovering from sickness or injury, are struggling to focus or remember, and/or feeling drained or a lack of energy, you may be exercising too much. Rest and recovery are more important the more we move our bodies.
Our bodies weren’t meant to be still all day long, though we’ve worked for decades to have less and less physical activity in daily living. We no longer have to grow and harvest our own food- we don’t even have to go shopping for it anymore, it can be delivered to our car or even our home for us. We no longer have to get out of the car to manually lift up the garage door, or get off of the couch to change the TV volume, or a host of other activities that used to naturally provide movement in daily living. So we have to find ways to add movement back in to our lives in order to feel good and function well.
The importance of movement and exercise goes on and on and on, but knowing a few of the reasons moving our bodies is so important can help remind you why you are working on improving your relationship with movement at all. Once you’ve made that decision to feel better about moving your body, you get to go shopping for different forms of movement and try each of them on.
