Putting the “Bio” Back in Biomechanics

My body used to hurt a lot, every day, in a way that affected my basic daily life functions.

Simple things felt bad. Like wearing a backpack (arm goes numb). Walking (hips and spine hurt). Going up and down stairs (dreading the pain in my knee). 

I consciously micromanaged every limb movement, carefully bracing my body in anticipation for the pain.

But when I was on stage, dancing, I didn’t feel anything (possibly due to the pain numbing effect of adrenaline and endorphins).

I thought that if I could just keep on ignoring the pain, life was ok. Tolerable. And I could probably keep this up for… ever??

But then things piled up and escalated. Fast.

My body started to hurt to the extent that I could no longer ignore it. Perhaps I had depleted my physiological ability to pump out the chemical stew of corticosteroids and other endogenous polypeptide analgesics I was relying on to keep myself numb.

Or maybe it was because I was so numb that when I finally sustained some actual soft tissue damage (a neck strain, then 3 back injuries, then a hamstring strain), it seemed to come out of nowhere.

Regardless of what tipping point I’d violated to accelerate my descent from one injurious event to the next in the span of just a few months, one thing became very clear: The way that I am existing is hurting me.

I was 21 years old, and I realized…

I am my body’s biggest problem

My body wasn’t the problem. I was the problem my body was having.

If you’re asleep at the wheel and you drive your car into the ditch, do you blame the car for hurting you in the crash? Maybe you should apologize to the car…

But that’s how I’d been inhabiting my body, and then I was kicking it for getting busted.

Inhabiting is too generous a word… More accurately, I was ignoring it. And then punishing it when it spoke back too noisily. “Stupid, annoying body. Just shut up, do what I say, and let me carry on with my path of self-destruction, damnit”.

My body was an “it”,  too repellant to claim as “mine”.  And I’d learned only to value it for what others praised it for.

I was letting other people make decisions for it. Caring about what it looked like and what pretty shapes I could make it do were my only measures of success and worth. But my body could never comply adequately with my wishes. I hated it and wished I could trade it in for a different model.

I was nothing but an ego puppeteering a Monika-shaped mass of flesh and bone. Where was I…? How did I not realize what was happening?

Because I wasn’t even there.

As a puppet- A surrogate body to play out the thoughts and opinions of others, I barely had a real existence.

I could blame the terrible “role models” from my dance training – teachers and peers- and their subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) forms of bullying. But I won’t. Because I went along with it. I let my puppet strings get pulled.

I could have said, “NO” (yes, all caps) when it was suggested that skipping meals was what smart dancers do to stay thin (and thinness was success). Had I drummed up the courage to protest, I could have stood up for every girl in my class who was in terror of being publicly fat-shamed (which was a real threat).

I could have refused to contort my body beyond its structural limits. But I chose to bend over backwards (literally).

And I might have questioned the statement, “To wake up every day in pain is what it means to be a dancer” (told to us by one ballet teacher with the intention to help us build character, I guess). So I developed a sense of pride in my muscle and joint pain, and didn’t know it wasn’t normal.

Again and again, puppet-me consented to things that went against my well-being.

Had my brain been working, I might have inquired: Is striving to be this flexible useful? Do I even like how this feels? Is a human body set up to do this long-term without consequence? Is pain really normal and noble?

And so, as a result of my failure to consciously question my reality, I became this under-nourished, overworked, un-thinking puppet-thing that simply went along with what everyone else was doing.

And I was praised for it.

Over and over I received the reinforcement that the thinner I was, the better I was. Everytime I dropped some weight I got compliments on how my technique was improving. They even gave me money (a coincidentally timed scholarship for being “most improved” that year of university, directly following a period of weight loss). As if my dance technique was obscured by a thin layer of fat.

And in the process of trying to conform to their ideal of “success”, I stopped paying attention to Me.

My world was ruled by comparison and judgement. I was constantly seeking validation based on my body and my abilities, which became my sole identity. What more identity can a puppet have, other than it’s exterior, structural reality?

And then when I started getting hurt, I couldn’t fathom why…

Why am I getting injured?

WHY is different from HOW.

How has to do with the specific patterns of repetitive overuse and misuse leading to tissue damage. Why has to do with the manner in which I was existing that led to said repetitive patterns. 

If one is completely conscious, aware, can one become injured? Unless by random accident?

Yes, I was a biomechanical mess, and I wasn’t eating much or sleeping much or drinking any water (I was on a mostly diet Coke diet). But who was doing that? Who was the one who could have been present to acknowledge the signs and signals (symptoms) that I wasn’t well?

There wasn’t even a witness for the car crash… No one else noticed, and I was asleep.

No option but to wake up

When I was 21 I finally drove my body into a ditch called hamstring strain. Metaphorically, it was like the last puppet string snapped, too. That injury ended my dance career, but it was a liberation from being a puppet, too.

That hamstring injury was like an invitation: “Monika, do you want to find a different way of Being? Do you want to dare to… exist? Do you want to remember who You are?”

A relief washed over me because I finally had permission to stop trying to prove to the world I was this thin, perfect, obedient body who could make pretty shapes.

One of the first thoughts post-puppet-Monika had was a confession: I never wanted to be a dancer anyway (to confess this out loud to another person took a few more years).

I knew this long before I turned into a puppet, but I’d forgotten. I knew it once when I was 14, and again when I was 18. Both times I pushed it down quickly before the thought became too uncomfortably alluring for my puppet master.

14-year old me (pre-puppet phase) had dared to question, “Are you still having fun dancing? Because you seem sad, Monika… Would you like to stop? Would you like to do something else?”

14ish is around the age one chooses whether a physical endeavour is something you want to dedicate your life to, or go the academic route. A dance career sounded like it would be fun… Ha. They (everyone I knew)  believed in me and encouraged me. They told me I could make it. That I was talented and could be successful.

Isn’t it so great to be supported?

Not really. I was wrong to believe them instead of listening to Me.

The rationalizing animal

Robert A. Heinlein, American novelist and science fiction writer, once wrote, “Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal.” Meaning we tend to make a choice first, and then rationalize why we made it afterwards (instead of the other way around).

The following describes my 14-year-old brain’s, carefully rationalized justification for betraying myself and committing to puppetry:

First, I reasoned: “If I quit dancing now, I will let people down. People have invested a lot in me and believe in me. I have a duty to continue this path, because if I don’t, they will be hurt by my actions.”

Second, “The reason I’m not having fun is because I don’t fit in. If I can make myself fit in then I’ll be able to have fun”. (Unfortunately, “fitting in” meant worrying about my weight and caring about my looks, and being very, very judgemental to myself and everyone around me. It did not result in having more fun, only isolating myself.)

Third, and more unconsciously, I reasoned, “If I keep going this path, I don’t have to think for myself. I can pretend I have a destiny. Going along with the decisions and ideas of others is less effort than trying to figure out what I really want for myself”.

And now, the last puppet (ham)string cut loose, I set out to rescue my soul from corruption and heal my busted body. What else could I do?

Gait mechanics to the rescue

At first, I didn’t realize that I was my body’s problem, or that my injuries could be correlated to those three above rationalizations. So I went about trying to correct my body’s very wonky biomechanical foibles without considering anything beyond my meat-and-bones.

But at least I was no longer a puppet. I was giving bith to some kind of sovereign existence. A Me was born, and I was studying and thinking for myself for the first time.

In 2015, I found Anatomy in Motion (or it found me): A 6 day immersive course on gait mechanics taught by creator Gary Ward, and Chris (#Sritho) Sritharan. For the first time in my quest for a pain solution, I had a framework to understand the underlying mechanics for my injuries and symptoms. So naturally I took that 6 day course 7 times over the next 5 years.

But the exercises and “better movement patterns” I learned weren’t what “healed” me. As I remember Gary Ward stating on one course, engaging with his work is like “putting the BIO back in biomechanics…” 

Bio = Life.

When you start working with your own biomechanics in a dedicated way, you’ll soon realize that you aren’t just working with joint mechanics, you’re working with the mechanics of your life, the aggragate of which are represented in your physical structure, as it stands (and moves) right now.

That’s a really hard thing for a lot of people to appreciate until they are ready to see it.

Woven into the AiM teaching was the exact “new way of Being” I’d speculated about years earlier when I stopped dancing. What I really learned studying AiM was the antithesis of my dance training:

You are not a puppet. You are a Being in a process, and this is a process of willingly exposing yourself to the truth of your anatomy, in motion. This process is not about blindly accepting someone else’s ideology or beliefs. This is a process of seeking to understand the truth of human movement, for You, by You. This process demands that you honestly observe how far off your system has strayed from that truth. This is a process of deeply studying the mechanics of how you’ve arrived here, as you are, and by that, seeing what more you can become. You are this process of liberation. May you find the grace to love this process of seeking truth.

In fact, I remember chatting with Chris after I had just discovered something about my lumbar spine, and I said something like, “Wow I really love this!”, to which he replied, “And by ‘This’, do you mean ‘You”?”.

And like that, with every new part of my body I discovered couldn’t move, then reclaimed, got moving, and integrated, I little bit more of Me came into existence. And I loved it.

Many times this process was frustrating, confusing, and seemed to take a lot of effort for very little gain in joint motion. Sometimes pain got worse, then better, then worse again. But it was always educational, and by keeping with the process even when it sucked, I learned the discipline I needed to rescue Me back into existence.

Process, not puppet

Who we are is a process. Hopefully we are blessed to stumble into a process we love and can share with fellow travellers. This process (Me) was what I’d given up to be a pretty puppet.

And I think biomechanical exploration was the process I needed because it demands embodiment by default. You can’t just learn joint mechanics by thinking and conceptualizing them. To actually learn biomechanics, you have to put your bio through those mechanics.

When you move your body through an experiential learning process, You have to wake up to do it, deliberately. You can’t zone out, You have to exist.

If you want to know what hip extension is, for example, You have to get up and do hip extension. Go through the messy process of figuring out why your body can’t do it. Practice. Tinker. Explore. Study. Don’t quit. Keep with the process.

 It took me three years to feel my hips extend. How many people do you know who have spent three years trying to do just one thing? Not even do it well. Just… get one degree instead of 0.

Waking up the witness

Studying Anatomy in Motion showed me a way of experiencing my body that had nothing to do with aesthetics, recognition, and performance, but about witnessing my body, as objectively as possible.

I realized that re-learning movement required a gentler way than the aggressive manner I’d originally used to distort my skeleton (and life). One cannot learn anything in a state of stress. So I gradually learned to relax my system a little. And I saw how I needed to approach myself and my life in that gentler way, too.

The skills and characteristics I needed to develop to become a successful AiM student were the real benefit, not the biomechanical knowledge: How to pay deep attention to myself. How to inquire. How to learn. How to reason. How to appreciate that I am a process. How to trust that process. How to observe facts non-judgmentally.

The real knowledge I was after was: Who is this Being interacting with my body’s mechanics? That’s something worth dedicating a life to.

If you can relate with my struggle to evolve forwards from being a pain-stricken puppet, I have no advice, other than figure out a way to stop being your body’s problem. How you do that, is up to you.

My invitation is to get curious and study. And I’m not saying study AiM specifically. Just study anything that wakes You up.

Study movement, and notice how You have to come into existence to learn. Don’t force it. Expose yourself to the truth of human movement, and let that wake up your Witness- The part of you who can learn and evolve. Find a tool for this that You love. Studying gait mechanics is my tool. What will yours be? 

What will you use to help you put the bio back into your biomechanics? 🙂