I am scared. The state of the worlds’ health and fitness scares me. The progress of technology has decreed that the human race no longer needs to be able to move. The food industry has done an exceptionally excellent job of training human beings to be addicted to their products by the addition of sugar salt and fat (and indeed all three at one time), that hunger is now replaced by habit. Children are corralled behind desks and taught to be learning machines as the PE curriculums are stripped of staff and funds. Need I go on?
My plea to all humans, is to tap into your inner (outer/all-over) athlete. To start, all you need to do is listen. Not to my words, not even to the pleas of your physicians, not to the statistics on mortality rates. Listen instead to your own body- it speaks exclusively to you. Listen deeper, beyond the chatter of the small inconsequential messages that sully the water. You’re not hungry, your purely in the habit of eating, or are you simply thirsty? You don’t hate to work-out it’s just a chore to get yourself ready and get moving.
Watch any animal, even domestic dogs and cats and see how when they wake up they reach back stretch and prime themselves for movement. Watch any baby to see that their whole world is motivated by the desire to reach and grasp, crawl and get to standing, to walk and move. Watch any kindergartner on the playground and they will run incessantly until forced to sit down. What happened to those messages of internal movement that the body cries for? We train them out of our bodies as we are told to sit down in school but told to sit at a desk and be productive at work. We are told we don’t need to hunt and gather, farm the land, create… All we need to do is press a button and whatever we need will be delivered to our door.
We no longer live in our bodies we live in our phones. Talk to text and you don’t even need your fingers to move. The dopamine rush of a ‘liked’ post or flattering comment has replaced the endorphins that flood our blood stream when we push ourselves out of the state of rest. We live in a virtual world of imagined experiences at the expense of our own well-being. We are enabled to live in total disconnect with our bodies.
Listen carefully for the loud silence that used to be your body telling you to move. The pain in your back is labeled as a herniated disk or sciatica but it is in fact your body conforming to its own confinement. Listen to the whispers……… the deepening breath (of fresh air) that fills your lungs when the body is allowed to move. It will gulp for hydration, nutrition and oxygen. Listen to it yell. Listen to it whisper. Listen to it scream when you reach a new milestone.
Start to listen and you will know what is habit, what is real pain, what is boredom. Start to move and listen to the symphony start to play, and I challenge you to sing along.
Loudly.
The Body Unbroken 