Embodying Joy in Movement
I wanted to call this post "Embodying Movement" but the fact of the matter is that ALL of our movement is embodied. Our emotions, and more importantly our restrictions, are embodied in all of our movements, in how we carry ourselves, in how we sit and stand and walk. You are a physical expression of your inner world all the time, whether you are around other people or not. My job in this article is to try to get you to feel what that means and then try to release some of those restrictions to move more freely, more lightly, and more expressively!
How You Think is How You Move
Do you remember that experiment, maybe you did it in high school or college or a training at work? It goes something like this: Make the biggest, happiest, goofiest smile that you can muster. Go ahead, do it now! Ok, now try to think of something that makes you furiously angry, something that absolutely drives you crazy! Can you do it? If yes, did your face change?
Now, admittedly, this is not the best measure of how the internal effects the external, but I think that a basic principle can still be drawn here. I hope to explore this principle a bit more before we talk about my feelings about the mental/ emotional and the physical. But the fact of the matter is that our emotions correspond to physical behavioral patterns, changes in heart rate, chemical changes, and these have been observed and documented for years. Body language has been described over and over again, and regardless of how accurate it might be, the same conclusion keeps getting drawn over and over again: How we feel internally is expressed by our demeanor and posture.
It's easy to get a mental image of a person who might be experiencing sadness or loss: They drag their feet, they slump in the chair, the shoulders are stooped, face slack, arms and hands moving languidly and without force. On the flip side of that, the motivational speaker: Bright eyed, shoulders back, feet spread wide apart, ready to take on the world. His arms and hands make decisive movements, he leans slightly forward as he walks, pulled along by his own energy.
Most of us, however, fall somewhere in the middle. It's sort of a muddle of ideas, tasks, fears, hopes, and smaller goals. We want to lose weight, we want to have a better job, we're just waiting until we get home to play video games, we're frustrated with our co-worker... lots and lots of low-level stuff that fades into the background. It's kind of like going to the dentist's office. When we first go in, there's that wacky smell, but after like 15 minutes, even inhaling deeply, you can't smell it anymore because it's just accepted as part of the surroundings by your brain.
Embodying Your Brain
So here we are, embodying all of these tensions and hopes and thoughts. Even thinking about it, you might feel resistance, and that might make your body start to tense even more! So what can we do? Well, the first thing is to realize that, right now, you are embodying (expressing in your body) what the brain is doing. 'Well, duh,' you say, 'you just told me that.' Yes, I did just tell you. But now, instead of just mentally recognizing the words, getting an intellectual picture of the concept, let's take it inside and feel what that feels like. And if you 'Well, duh' me again, thinking that you are feeling what that feels like, I would invite you to take it a little deeper.
So let's do this simply, one step at a time. I think sometimes with practices like this, authors spell out the whole process at once and you have to memorize it, or do one part and then open your eyes to review the list and that sometimes makes it a little less meaningful. Here, we'll try to go one step at a time.
The first step is to take a snapshot of where you are right now. So try this: Sitting in a chair, put your feet flat (legs not crossed), and take stock of how you feel RIGHT NOW. So, after reading this, close your eyes, and for a few moments, just observe how you feel. You can go quick: face, shoulders, stomach, hands, legs, feet. That's it.
I'm assuming your eyes are open again.
The first step is to get an assessment of how you are without trying to modify.
Secondly, trying to consciously relax. So, using the same general areas, see if you can consciously relax the muscles. This can be tense and release, shaking the area, visualization, or whatever combination is meaningful for you. I like the shaking and swinging from Qigong that you can try out here.
Ok, do you feel a little different now? Make sure you take a little time with it. If you don't feel different, do it again, but go a little slower.
Third, try some deep breaths. Nothing fancy, just deeper, slower, and more expressively than you do normally. I'll talk more about breathing mechanics in other posts, they're not important now. Just seeing how you feel after assessing, after consciously relaxing, and after breathing.
So, do you feel a little more loose, a little more relaxed, a little less restricted?
No right or wrong answers, here, but we're going to move on!
Embodying Mindfulness
As kids we took chances, climbed trees, walked railroad tracks, rolled down hills, biked, sledded, danced, played sports, or whatever we did. But we didn't have the same ideas of decorum or presentation that we have today. As adults, we take for granted that we are supposed to wear certain clothes at certain times, that there are appropriate times for running, for stretching, certain behaviors that we have in the grocery store versus what happens in the gym. To a certain extent, we need that in society. Wearing underwear only at WalMart is probably a bad idea! At the same time, we have allowed ourselves to be heavily restricted in expressing ourselves through movement. Say you're at work and you just NAIL that special project. Some people might give themselves a 1/4 fist pump, but who does a pirouette, or rocks out hard on an air guitar? We're often afraid to express ourselves, forgetting that restriction is a form of expression.
Your connective tissues is under constant strain from without and within. From without, gravity constantly presses on you, no matter what your position or lack thereof. From within, there is the constant strain of holding, of bracing, of trying to be perceived a certain way. It can be highly therapeutic to get out of those patterns and use the three techniques above (singly or in combination), to rid yourself of some of that internal tension and restriction.
So, as a practice, get up and stretch out! And not stingy static stretches: stretch like a dog, like a crane flapping it's wings, or like a bear rubbing it's back on a tree. Think like a good morning stretch, where you tense and extend through your joints, bracing a little bit through the core. This is called "pandiculation" - actively stretching through long chains of connective tissue in the body. Forget about static stretching for a while, really get into it, get into the limbs and fingers and spine and tailbone. (Again I'll get into more specifics in other posts).
Another practice is expressive breathing. As you stretch and move into big, expansive positions, take deep breaths, trying to fill the trunk (expand the trunk might be a better phrasing). The muscles of the upper body go around the rib cage so breathing while you stretch creates an additional stretch.
Embodying Joy
But this was supposed to be about "embodying joy", wasn't it? Well, starting to recognize how we restrain ourselves and how we are restricted is the first step. The second step is starting to move in ways that can promote freedom and release. The last step is to embody that, to move in a way that is self-expressive, to move in a way that is embodied consciously instead of unconsciously. To be able to choose the way you move and not have the body be an unwitting vessel of the mind, to go towards teamwork between body and mind.
The steps involve mindfulness and conscious effort might not seem like a lot of fun, but when we realize and let go of how we were restricted, we can return to a more free movement, to more unbridled movement, to uninhibited movement. We might start with a little bit of meditation or self-exploration, but the end result is to express yourself through movement. Express your joy, create catharsis, experiment with posture and locomotion. Play with movement again, play through movement again, take joy in movement again.
Art, music, even gaming, are all expressions of movement. You can't do any of them without involving the body in some way, and how you hold yourself and express yourself in any of these medium necessitates movement, posture, breath, and that is directly linked to how you feel. Being aware of how you feel affects how you hold yourself and move is the beginning to changing the restricted patterns and being able to shift that paradigm to finding patterns that are freer.
Joy is a tough concept to pin down. In this article, I mean "free from restriction" or "free expression of the inner self". Even if you just start by observing how you walk on a daily basis and try to put a little more "spring" into your step, you're beginning to embody joy because you're challenging stuck patterns. Starting to think of movement as less of a routine chore and more of a way to express your inner world can be a hugely rewarding and transformative process.
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