Movement Practice (part 6): The Challenges of Talking About Movement

If you are still reading this series, I really appreciate you! I don’t know exactly where this is going, but what I know for sure is that I’m not anywhere close to being finished… Thanks for reading this far.

Beyond Archetypes

In parts one through five (see all Movement Practice chapters HERE) I used archetypes as a metaphor for the various ways people think about, talk about, and act out movement. In exploring this intersection between who people are and how they interact with movement and exercise, we’ve set the stage for the meat of the conversation to follow: What is a movement practice? How is this different than exercise? And, with the assumption that having a movement practice is important, how do we go about creating one that has meaning and use for us?

Speaking of Movement…

My very attempt at writing this may be a fool’s task. Alas, movement is not a medium for which a deep understanding can come through talking about it. Words are poor vessels to help us understand something like movement that is, by its very nature, meant to be embodied and experienced, through our physical structures.

Indeed, as I sat down to write about why this thing in my life and the lives of many called a “movement practice” is important, and what it means to me, I realized that I had a concept, but not the concise words to communicate it (a recurring theme in my life, for the record). 

Up until this point I was operating on vague feeling- That a movement practice feels different than a workout, exercise, or physical activity. That the women’s fitness chain Curves’ curcuit workout has different “vibe” to it and attracts a different archetype than a traditional Sivananda yoga class, for example.  

I think this subjective feeling is worth identifying more clearly, and in this chapter I will begin the investigation of the words that help to describe the quality of these relationships between mind, body, and movement I call movement practice.

Moving Into Understanding

There are many who, like myself in my “then”, can’t quite describe why their physical situations feel saturated with a sense of lack (of purpose, goals, or meaning), or are indescribably stressful, painful, or monotonous. In fact, many people I work with have initially come to me with the sense that there is something “more” they need, or that something is missing in their lives, usually relating to their bodies and their health, that they can get through movement.

Movement, not words, can be the hand to reach out and turn the doorknob of the door of understanding, behind which we can discover what’s currently missing from us. Where words can fail and confuse us, movement speaks to us on a visceral level. It connects us with a physical feeling, an undertone that we can then put words to. This is why somatic therapeutic practices (like Somatic Experiencing® and Somato-Emotional Release® for example), can be so helpful for individuals with mental health issues. 

Think of words as signposts pointing to something greater, beyond the words themselves, for us to examine. For you, the reader, my hopes is that my words may challenge your current belief systems and habits around movement. That by identifying with an archetype, your relationship with movement becomes articulated to you beyond a “vibe”. 

The rest of this chapter will define several core terms that I feel to be important for this discussion. I found the definitions from the dictionary to be insufficient for our discussion around movement, and that it was necessary to inquire into the words’ meaning more deeply in this context (as The Transcender knows, context changes everything). 

The following words (signposts) are relevant for the chapters to follow, and I suggest you get acquainted with them.

Movement

The dictionary says:

• An act of changing physical location or position or of having this changed. A change or development in something.

I am writing this primarily with the movement of our bodies in mind, but think like The Transcender for a moment. Movement isn’t limited to the physical motion of our bodies. Movement is change. In location, position, or in a thing itself. Your internal environment changing. The environment around you changing. Movement is you developing, for better or worse. Movement is forwards, backwards, and sideways. Three (or more) dimensions. Movement requires reference points to observe a change, and thus must be a relationship between two or more objects or phenomena.

Exercise can be movement in many senses of the word, but not all movement is exercise. Likewise, not all exercise is development. Not all exercise can be seen as a relationship like movement must be.

I want to suggest that we think of movement in this broader sense as trajectory, change, development, and relationship. In doing so we can see how movement is inclusive of more elements than the physical movement we consciously do with our bodies when we workout or play a sport.

A movement practice, by this line of thinking, can include things such as I am doing right now: Periods of stillness, introspection, and the act of sitting down to write. In the words of Greek philosopher Heraclitus, all things are flux- Movement permeates and relate to all areas of our inner and outer lives. 

Exercise

The dictionary says:

• Activity requiring physical effort, carried out especially to sustain or improve health and fitness. A process, task, or activity carried out for a specific purpose, especially one concerned with a specified area or skill.
• To use or apply.
• Occupy the thoughts of; worry or perplex.

As previously mentioned, exercise is movement, but not all movement is exercise. An exercise can be skilled practice, skilled practice can be exercise, but exercise is not skilled practice. These distinctions are part of what I like to call the movement/exercise/practice fallacy. (There’s nothing I like more than clarifying distinctions between similar terms and discovering fallacies by which we live.)

To be clear, when I compare exercise and movement I don’t want to demonize exercise and put movement on a pedestal. Exercise is an important component of a movement practice, which is why I don’t like to see the two lumped together to rot in the compost heap of misunderstood words.

While for many, such as The Exerciser archetype, exercise can be a detriment, obsessive and unhealthy. Yet for others exercise is a valuable, healthy experience. Exercise can be done with the beneficial intention to improve one’s health, strength, or endurance, even while consciously being aware of not enjoying the physical act of it (such as wind sprints, unless you happen to be a masochistic type). We can be aware that we are exercising only to get something out of it, know that we aren’t being present while doing it, and still gain from it.

Or we can exercise unaware that our mind is in a place of should-be, insufficiency, and self punishment (again, often the case for The Exerciser). The dictate of how reciprocal of health our trajectory becomes is our own awareness of how and what we are using exercise for. There is no end to fitness trends marketed towards The Exerciser with this every intention- Providing an means to buy an experience in which people can tune out from their bodies together, feeding off of each others’ perceived need to be and look like someone their not. To fit in with the “good people” with their “good bodies”, and make up for unhealthy habits. Spinning classes, Cross-Fit, and F45 are just some potential examples of this.

We must also distinguish between an exercise (the noun), and exercise (the verb). An exercise by definition is something in the realm of practice, whereas exercise is something we normally do without the mindset of practice.

Lastly, it is interesting to note the latter two definitions of the word from above. We can use exercise in a way that we are in it to get something out of it, and so too can we be exercised- Stressed, worried, slowly ground down. We can be exercised by our improper use of exercise, which often paves the path of demise for The Exerciser and Over-Identifier.

Exercise and movement have an important relationship both with each other in the space of a movement practice, and with ourselves in the space of our lives. How these aspects of a movement practice interact with each other and impact on you, the user, doer, practitioner, define how healthy and useful it will be for you.

Practice

The dictionary says:

• The actual application or use of an idea, belief, or method as opposed to theories about such application or use.
• The customary, habitual, or expected procedure of something. The carrying out or exercise of a profession.
• Repeated exercise in or performance of an activity or skill so as to acquire or maintain proficiency in it.

Love isn’t the only thing that gets to be a triangle. We can identify three sides of practice:

1) The actual doing of a thing (versus the talking or thinking about a thing).
2) The doing of a thing as a rote, habitual, expected thing to do, to get something out of it, often with little awareness of the impact it may be having in the moment and on the future forecast.
3) The deep practice of a thing that results in a flow state, development of some aspect of self, with the intention of mastery of a skill.

When we talk about a movement practice, type 1 is always implied (or it would be a movement idea or thought- Still movement in terms of changing patterns of neurons, but neglecting the action on the thought that is requisite for the fully fledged physical movement practice we’re speaking of). A defining factor in the quality, meaning, or use of a movement practice is due in part to whether the core intention is type 2 or 3. 

Are you type 2: going through the motions, doing it because you feel you should be as an expectation of your peer group or an authority figure? Or are you type 3: your goal is to practice, to develop a skill, to learn and experience flow?

Neither is right or wrong, and each type has its place within a movement practice. We need to know more about the context and the individual to say which type of practice is appropriate for the person at this moment in time. 

Relationship

• The way in which two or more concepts, objects, or people are connected, or the state of being connected.
• The way in which two or more people or organizations regard and behave toward each other.

As previously mentioned, there can be no measurable movement unless we are comparing two objects, people, or phenomena with each other. We need reference points to define the relationship of two bodies in terms of position, location, speed, velocity, etc. As a Complementarian knows, nothing can be understood on its own, without context. And so we cannot speak of physical movement without discussing it as a relationship between two or more things.

As an experiment, just for fun, try for an entire day to use the word movement instead of relationship. The movement between two friends, partners, or family members. Perhaps we have so many challenges with relationships because we think of them as static entities, when in fact it is more like the planets orbiting around the sun- Sometimes moving together, sometimes apart, ebbing and flowing, each with their own trajectory while being impacted on by the gravity of the other.

The relationships I am interested in investigating are the ones we have with movement and exercise, and the connection between movement and exercise themselves (as already alluded). How we regard and behave towards them. How was can become attached to them. How this relationship changes with time. How the quality of this relationship and our perception of it impact on our lives and our health. I think these are questions worth exploring.

Interaction

• Reciprocal action or influence.

Physicist Carlo Ravelli, author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics believes that all reality is interaction. That the human self is a “huge wave of happenings”. He says in a radio interview with On Being‘s Krista Tippett:

“…we do understand the world better, not in terms of things but in terms of interaction between things and how things interact with one another, even in biology. We understand biology in terms of evolution, how things change… We understand the antelope because there is a lion and the lion because there is antelope. We don’t understand them in isolation”. 

Bruce Hood, author of The Self Illusion, a lovely book on the neuroscience of self (or the lack thereof), communicates through his research how our sense of self is only possible because of the interactions and  experiences.  Our identities are inextricable from our surroundings- people, places, and things that formed who we are and will be since we had sufficient capacity to retain memories. “Self” is the sum of the interactions between other people and our material possessions in our lives up until now. He goes on to explain that, “The emergence of self is epigenetic- an interaction of the genes in the environment… In a sense, who we really are comes down to those around us”.

I find these views on interaction go beyond the definition from the dictionary of reciprocal action or influence and express how interaction it is the very landscape of our existence.

To appreciate movement and exercise and their place in our lives therefore it is important to investigate the nature of the interaction both between the two and ourselves. Movement is a “happening”, ever changing, un-fixable in time and space, and we cannot understand it as a thing we study under a microscope, but as the interaction that is a defining feature of what movement is.

Healthy

• Not diseased.
• Indicative of, conducive to, or promoting good health.
• Normal, natural, and desirable.

If the definition of “healthy” refers to promoting good health, then we also must understand what is “good health”? I feel good health is more than the absence of disease and illness, although this is how it is commonly defined (at a detriment to our conventional medical system).

According to the pioneering functional medicine doctor Mark Hyman, “disease arises from an imbalance in the system”. If the opposite is true, then health must arise as a result of a balanced system. In an interview, Dr. Hyman uses the metaphor of a farmer tending to soil quality to produce a healthy crop. Working with the system versus treating a symptom. He describes his goal as a doctor as”creating health”, not treating disease. Working with the ecosystem in an integrated way. In his description of functional medicine he says, “We’re actually taking care of the soil so disease can’t actually occur, or it goes away as a side effect of creating health”.

A system with intact homeostasis, resiliency to stressors; “healthy” is more than the absence of symptoms. We know that it is possible to have a disease that can be dormant for years, unbeknownst to us, yet we feel “healthy”, or “normal”, until we start experiencing symptoms indicative of the later stages of the condition. By this point, we are often too late to effectively treat many illnesses.

Nor do I feel that “normal” or “natural” are descriptive of what healthy is. Especially in our current world state in which what we consider normal is for human beings to cope, numb, and distract ourselves from ill health, physically and mentally, as the average, acceptable way of life.

As one of my clients put it to me as we reflected on her progress over a year’s work with her body, “The thing that blows my mind is that the feeling of unease and tightness used to be my ‘normal’. It was a constant I was unaware was holding me back from being more active and feeling more joy in my life”. If healthy is normal, yet normal is to be ignorantly unhealthy, what is health?

We can say “health is homeostasis”, but what does this feel like? To put put it more poetically, more subjectively, good health feels like the awakening to our potential. Stepping in our own power. Thriving and flourishing, not merely disease free. Health manifests as feeling like energetic and passionate participants in our lives. Good health feels like waking up inspired to interact with our priorities. 

 

Because I am unsatisfied with the current dictionary definition, I would like to add to it. Healthy is not simply the absence of disease, but a state of flourishing, optimal balanced function of all systems in a living organism; efficient homeostasis allowing for an individual to experience a complete spectrum of mental and physical interactions available to them.

“Healthy” can also refer to a relationship or interaction, not a living thing, and we can use a similar definition: A healthy interaction or relationship is one that affords for the individuals and things involved to flourish, be in balanced coexistence, etc.

Integrated

• With various parts or aspects linked or coordinated. Combine (one thing) with another so that they become a whole.

For our purposes, integrated refers to a way of interacting with movement and exercise. We can integrate it with or isolate it from the other areas of our lives. We can have it as a thing we consider separately from us, or we can see us and movement combined as a whole, see how movement and our relationship with it is linked to how we interact with the other realms of life.

The rest of this work will focus on how to move in a direction of a healthy, integrated relationship with movement: The Integrator’s way of living. That being said, I don’t believe that everyone should aspire to be The Integrator archetype. We need to consider context. Consider what is now serving you in your current context, and what would happen if we took away this source of comfort or stability- your habits, behaviours, attitudes. How ready would you be to adapt? 

Thus, to integrate is my perceived ideal, but it may be a graded process, a journey, to that goal, one which you may never fully reach. Integration is not a destination or a fixed state, it is a path.

Part of the path of integrating is also the understanding that inherent in it is the necessity for things to first be deconstructed, broken apart, and isolated in order to understand them better, before reconnecting them more healthily. 

At the end of the day, its not whether you successfully became an Integrator that will dictate the quality of your life, health, and well-being (things we have a hard time defining in absolute terms anyway), but who you were in that process. How you showed up to the challenges, interacted with the “huge wave of happenings”.