START WITH THE BODY

Do you feel like you’re just going-through-the-motions of life?  Have you become separated from what’s true about yourself so that your days feel one-dimensional and brown? Do you keep yourself from “feeling” too much, because you just can’t even…?

Start with your body.

Unlike your “mind” or your “heart” your body is a physical place; you know where and what it is without doubt. Start there.

Here’s something I learned this year: Strength is sympathetic. When we are strong in one area of our lives, that strength can lift and inspire the other areas to rise up a little too.

Just over a year ago, I was not strong anywhere. Physically and emotionally spent, I felt spiritually and creatively abandoned. I was treading murky water and expending all my energy just staying above it all.  Suffocating, despairing, lost.

Good times! Or not.

I forgot who I was. I let others tell me what was true, and folded into this false self. This kind of thing happens - a lot, as it turns out - to a lot of us. Our lives get swallowed by the (essential?) minutae of everyday life and the needs of everyone else in it: children, work, volunteer commitments, higher-needs-than-kids-relationships... and it leaves us depleted. Flat. Weak. Profoundly unhappy. We forget how to speak the language of our hearts and guts. We mistake the busy-ness of life for life itself, and in our semi-conscious state we forget how to dream, how to make choices, that we can make choices. 

But back to what I learned this year: When you are feeling hopeless and you don’t know how to make changes or what to do next, forget everything else and start with your body. Your body is a solid and tangible thing, and it will respond to you in ways your mind will not.

Your mind will lie to you all day long; your body, on the other hand, doesn’t know how - and what we need most in these times is TRUTH. Because how we become “lost” in the first place is by lying to ourselves about everything that preceded that moment: my life is great, my kids are great, my relationship is great, I’m fine, really, I’m working on all of it, what more can I do, lots are worse off than I am, I need to be more grateful, blah, blah, blah…

A few years ago, I walked into a gym. I made sure I could get there from where I lived in 10 minutes or less, because I knew if it wasn’t easy, it wasn’t going to happen. Despite all my best intentions (lying to myself, much?)  I knew that “it’s too far away” would be one more excuse. So. 

I sat with the assigned trainer, and from her script she read, “what are you looking for from your gym membership?”  Almost verbatim, I said: “My life is shit, and I don’t know how to change it. My goal is to get physically strong and then use that strength to drag the rest of my shitty life behind me, to a new and different place.”

File under: reasons for joining she had not heard before.

And do you know what? Nine months later I’d gained 7 lbs of muscle and could deadlift my own bodyweight. I used that strength to walk away from my husband and my fancy life with nothing more than twin 3 year olds and our clothes in tow. One year after that, I bought a little house of my own, put some stuff in it, and started a business.  It all started with my body.

How?

Because strength is sympathetic. My trainer had me POWER LIFTING. Lifting with power! I dare anyone to lift, push and pull heavy weights with ease and not feel like they can (finally) take on the shit in their life.

Do you know how a body grows new muscle? You stress the hell out of it; you give it more than it can take. The GOAL is to work to FAILURE.  The muscle literally has a breakdown. When you rest afterward,  you integrate and repair and your capacity to withstand more of everything grows. You have become stronger.

Truth: The point of failure lives on the heels of repair and growth.

A metaphor for the rest of life: that emotional come-apart? You are not failing - you are building capacity!  

   Where there is no struggle, there is no strength  -- Oprah Winfrey  

When I say strength is sympathetic, I can tell you from experience that when your body is strong, it can – and does - pull your mind and spirit up. Through doing more than you think you can do physically - through running further, lifting heavier, swimming faster – you do more in all areas of life. There’s a reason the most successful CEO’s and leaders in the world make time to work out every week. Until you actually DO it, you can’t know the life-changing  stores of strength within yourself, physically and otherwise.  For me, it’s always a surprise to pick up a weight I think is too heavy only to pull a Nike and “just do it.” And you better believe I use that strength, and that experience, to propel the rest of my life.

The body, the body, the body…

We are mind, body and spirit and it all needs tending. The body is helplessly honest and will not tolerate being lied to – unlike, say, your head which will buy its own bullshit whole. “I worked that muscle/I did not work that muscle; I feel like shit because I drank too much last night/I feel great because I didn’t eat a bucket of ice cream today.” The body only knows, and will only tell you, what’s true.

Oh, don’t get me wrong: I am hardly righteous about this. Ha! It’s no straight line I walk. I waver because I still get weak and my mind still likes to lie to me. So it happens that I still comfort myself with food when nothing else will do. I can accidentally eat a whole block of cheese or bury myself in a bucket of ice cream. I could live inside a loaf of bread and I still have nights where I drink far too much for no other reason than I really want to.  Because I over-consume in a conscious way doesn’t make it right or better – it just makes me a realist about who I am. Besides which, some days it’s just hard to be human. What the hell (*shrugs). Get back to the gym/the trail/the bike - and start again.

Because here is the other thing: Whether you think you are stuck or not – you are right. We are not static creatures though, and life, beautiful life, responds accordingly by giving us an endless number of do-overs. Take a cue from your body; tap into the reserves of strength – physical, spiritual, mental - and let them move you. Take the proverbial left at Albequerque and do it again, whatever “it” is and whatever that means. Find a new way within the existing framework, or tear the whole thing down and redraw from scratch.   Still not right? Do it again.  Do it until the one thing you know for sure, is that you’re strong enough to get it right.

Please share your comments and thoughts below. I'd love to hear from you - and hear what you know to be true. Spread the wisdom!