A Love of Movement; An Unbridled Brain

The morning after returning from India feels oddly normal. Was it all a dream?  

We may have hit the travel jackpot with timing and amount of sleep during the journey. That combined with our perfect unwind upon return is going to be key to our return to normalcy. I don’t want to jinx it, but it seems to be happening flawlessly. 

But what is normalcy anyway? Neither of us have a regular schedule, but we do our best to have routines and rituals. How easily one can return to these and regulate their systems can be trained and is the key to functioning the way we do. So many elite athletes and high performers have very regulated schedules and routines without much variation. For both Christ and I, travel limits our access and availability to the luxuries we have set up within our homes. The only consistency is inconsistency.

This constant change can be a practice within itself. We are training our bodies to adapt quickly and often. The more in-tune with our bodies and well-versed we become in achieving homeostasis, the more we can push the limits. Building resilience to change does not eliminate change, it adapts what our body considers novel.

Asleep around midnight, wake around 8. I think we did it. Sure our bodies will feel the exhaustion, but Christ is even more well versed in travel return than I am and properly dosing our systems with teas, supplements, and all kinds of plant goodness. 

The movement begins to spill out of me again this morning. This perfectly curated, completely unplanned, and wildly varied playlist pouring from Christ’s phone has captivated my flow state and need for movement. There’s no specific pattern or even destination; but this coffee, tea, ginseng, lions mane, wood-burning stove fueled exploration is weeks in the making and sure to be informative. 

Half fold, modified down dog, pike stretch. Whatever it should be called is supported first by my hands on the workout bench in the middle of the room. I play with knee flexion and extension, pelvic rotation, curvature of the spine. My hips move freely in all planes as I notice the change in my rib cage. I recognize the posterior pelvic tilt and subsequence rib protrusion to create the illusion of a straight line. With each breath I allow barely perceptible change, noticing how the anterior nutation of my pelvis moves the line of tension to the proximal, lateral hamstrings and glutes. I can feel it into my back and continue following the line of pull to my ribs. As if I were one of those hand-held puzzles with the single missing piece allowing one tile to slide in a linear pattern at a time. I retract my entire rib cage into the new alignment of my pelvis and spine. A more narrow, elongated line appeared in my visualized consciousness and in the mirror. There were no specific lines of pull or stuck points. The line existed, beautifully and efficiently, for just a brief moment until my attention focused on the incongruities of my belly. 

I know there’s a facial restriction twisting its way around my body, but I had to let my belly all hang out to absorb its intensity and decide to make a change. Letting my belly hang out is so uncomfortable. I am unaccepting of it. I WAS unaccepting of it. How do I reprogram my own thoughts? Can I separate them from societal pressures and experiences? What am I to feel letting this beautifully chiseled human in front of me see how far my belly extends - how saggy and squishy it is? 

I look down and notice the most obvious twist in the system. Seeing the shirt-swirl fascial analogy on my own body so distinctly and unchangeable even with visual, mental, and breathing attention was elucidating. The more I focused on expanding and dropping the left side to match the right, the more the right expanded beyond any negligible change to the left. I have known the fascial restriction is there and “worked on it”, but have I? I claim to let my belly hang out (at least when calling attention to it during yoga), drop expectations and judgement, but have I? 

This new level of release and acknowledgment hurts me more that I was unwilling to see it than my disgust in my body as it looks in this position. I suppose this is progress. For the first time, I’m seeing what I need vs what I want or makes me feel better in the moment. What is actually going to make me feel better is addressing the problem rather than living within self and societal constructs of how I should look. 

What I should be looking at, paying attention to, are the segmental rotations back and forth, self-correcting, to a fault. As I did for so many years in gymnastics, I’m simply masking within my own body, as well as my brain. I can make the right shape, or at least make you believe I’m in the right shape. But rather than stacked, square, and untethered; I have various degrees of rotation, in individual segments and lines of torsion to create the illusion of straight. How do I unwind this? I’ve been in the practice of unwind for so many years, chasing my tail and rarely overcoming the threshold of change. Stuck in maintenance and slow decline. This ends here. 

I support my forehead on the bench as I wrap my hands around the sides of my hips and facilitate the fascial pull. I don’t have to wait long to find the most obvious and surface level restriction. No depth available due to the iliac crest; an immediate, fire-y pull with the most gentle glide of the hands. I continue to visualize the distention of my belly, overlaying the actual three-dimensional image in front of my eyes, feeling each breath travel deep down into my belly and slowly compressing the air out from the bottom up. Slow and steady. I further bend my knees to allow slack into the outer edge of my hip. It changes the available position of my ribs, as well. So much movement. How do I keep control? 

I pause to consider the hyper mobility aspect of this unwind. Why is it there? What was the need it compensated for? Can I trace this wind up to the beginning? Do I need to? I oscillate  between digging through the layers piece by piece to get to the core and digging to the core to expand outward shedding layers. Neither seems enough to overcome the input of need. Is there a sweet-spot balance of both to be found?