Awareness is powerful medicine. Only with awareness can you truly make changes to anything, and until you are fully conscious of where you are, you will never be able to get to where you want to be.
There is a saying, “You don’t know what you don’t know.” This is true on so many profound levels, and most particularly about our bodies. I am always amazed that when my clients come into my office and I ask them what they feel in their feet, they look down as though they’re surprised to see these five-phalanged creations flopping around on the ends of their legs!
We don’t think much about our bodies and how they move. Our society does not encourage it, and it is rarely rewarded in ways that promote self-awareness. We value hard work, grinning-and-bearing-it, a stiff upper lip. The entire fitness industry is making a fortune off of boot-camp themed workouts where participants pay significant dollars for a military-esque trainer to scream at them to push their limits. Despite the fact that the first person to run a marathon dropped dead at the end – and runners still do die of heart attacks in the middle of races today, even with medical advances – we cherish the accolade of a completed marathon race.
I’m not denigrating the achievements of athletes; I am one myself. I have suffered through many a training session that wrung the blood, sweat, and tears right out of me. I’ve torn bleeding holes in my hands with oars and heavy weights, run hills until I had asthma attacks, and ridden a horse all day with no food in my belly and plummeting blood sugar.
It’s not that pushing your limits is bad; pushing your limits without the ability to know exactly where your limits are is acutely dangerous. As soon as you let someone else tell you what your body is capable of, you’ve disconnected and set yourself up for potential injury. There is a difference between challenging yourself to do one more rep, run one more mile, row just ten more strokes, and feeling severe pain in the back of your calf that tells you beyond a shadow of a doubt that something is vitally wrong with your body, yet continuing to run for hours anyway.
Not only will awareness prevent you from injuring yourself beyond repair by simply recognizing your true boundaries, it will also blow open the doors of what you’re capable of doing. For example, I was told under no uncertain terms that I am not a good athlete. I took swimming lessons as a child and moved into gymnastics; I failed miserably at basketball despite my height. Fast forward to adulthood, and I have competed in some of the most grueling strength-endurance sports around, rowing and kettlebell sport (not to mention my achievements on horseback for those who understand the unique challenge of that sport). I’ve won medals in both, and competed internationally with kettlebells.
I attribute my success to a keen understanding of technique, the subtleties of movement, and this I learned from being acutely aware of how my body moves, how it’s interconnected, and how I can make minuscule changes to alter the flow of my movements. Once you become aware of these principles, you will not only be able to change your movement, but you will suddenly notice how you are holding your body in ways you never thought about before. Many of my clients have seen their neck pain disappear with the simple realization that they were lifting their shoulders – and thus tightening their neck muscles – every time they inhaled.
Every time you make a conscious effort to correct a neuromuscular pattern in your body, you are not changing the original movement but simply overlaying a new, highly controlled pattern over the top of it. Read the underlined phrase through once more; I cannot stress this enough. This type of activity creates layers upon layers of tension in the body, like an onion.
This type of correction causes us to become mechanized and robotic in our movement as opposed to fluid, natural, and graceful. Instead of overlaying new patterns on top of old, I would like to suggest that you first listen to your body and begin to unwind harmful patterns.
Okay, it’s clear that awareness is KEY in healing your body, but what if you don’t know where to begin or what to do first? Sign up for a series of Structural Integration. It’s everything you need to rediscover a deep connection to yourself and heal your body from the inside out. You’ll discover how your feet are directly related to your neck pain, what to do when your shoulders are super tight and sore, and how YOU can find fluidity, grace, and joy right inside your own skin!
Author: Sukie BaxterArticle Source: EzineArticles.com
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