The Movement Habit

 

    Making a habit is at once super hard and super easy. We automate so much in out lives that we don't even think about it half the time! Every day has a rhythm, a routine. You get up, make coffee, browse Facebook or other site to catch up on your social media, you go to work, eat dinner, and tend to go to the same places. This just makes life more manageable, predictable, and minimizes the mental resources we need to expend on a daily basis.

    What gets complicated, though, is when we try to introduce NEW habits into the mix. I recently did this, myself! I wanted to get more consistent movement practice in my routine, and wanted to go about it in a reasonable, reliable, efficient manner. For a few years now, I have been a follower of Zen Habits, a blog about just such changes! I went out and bought his book. Simply stated, the way to build a new habit is to start small, a minute or two a day, and gradually add in more as you become more successful. Currently, I get up at 5 am and get about an hour of my fundamentals in every morning, more or less, before work. My "trigger" is the alarm clock.

    Some days you do more, some days you do less. Sometimes I get an additional 30 - 60 minutes of movement in the evening, sometimes I don't. The point is to follow the essentials, or the minimum viable habit. But when you're looking at movement, we can look beyond a "workout routine" or determined time set aside for "exercise."

    Gravity is constantly at work on us. How we sit, stand, move, walk, travel through space is ALWAYS a certain kind of training. We might be training in moving and standing well, or we might be training poor postural and movement habits. But to just add a little bit, to add novel movements in to our day, is something that doesn't require a lot of commitment or a lot of thought. Try adding a few deep breaths after brushing your teeth, do a deep squat or a lunge stretch after driving to work, stretch your arms overhead a few times a day at work. Simple things, to keep your body-mind integrated and your awareness turned toward your quality of movement, even a little, during the day.

    If you need an idea, check out my video on shaking and swinging! Simple, silly, and gets you moving! 

 

What We Value

    What we value can be seen as what we spend our energy on, our time on. Internally, we might FEEL like we value an ideal or a cause or a system, but unless we express it it remains an idea. Let's take the case of someone who reads a lot of books about diet, for instance. They can know the ins and outs of particular programs, they can know the nutritional value of foods and what nutrients they have. But unless they spend time on actually preparing the food and following a diet, their time has been spent in gaining knowledge, not in dieting. 

    Similarly, if you are in a relationship with someone, and you think about them all the time, but when you are together you don't talk, or you don't spend time present with them, are you REALLY involved with THEM, or just the IDEA of them, the IDEA of being in a relationship? Are you on your phone on Facebook when your significant other is trying to talk to you? Or are you looking at them because that is what you care about?

    I think we can safely say that we love what we give our attention to. What you care about is what you spend time on- NOW in the present moment. This is one reason I appreciate my movement practice so much- I'm spending time on myself, the physical part of myself, which is the expression of my entire inner world and value system.

    Because I think we can look at how we approach ourselves, or bodies, the same way. Do I care enough about my body to pay attention not only to how it feels, but also to the QUALITY of how it moves? Shouldn't we want to be efficient in the mechanics of our bodies so that the joints and muscles and internal bits work as well as they can for as long as they can? This is an anchor for mindfulness, an anchor to the present.

    I always try to look at these questions in a mirror. How I treat my body and think about my body can be an analogy for how I treat and think about my spouse, my family, my life in general. Am I honest about it, am I appreciative of it, do I like the THING or just the IDEA?

    For me, my movement, my "exercise" is really an exercise in being present with myself, in investigating how I approach the quality of how I move through space, through life, through relationships with the environment, of which others are a part. Yes, that is a clunky sentence! But, I value life by valuing the moment in which I exist, the body in which I exist, and the social sphere in which I am present.

What do you Want to be Good At?

     This is a really tough question, when you get down to it. "What do you want to be good at?" I was asked this in the context of physical skill but it is really an existential question. We all want to be GOOD, don't we? To be successful (i.e. comfortable), to be loved, to be interesting, to be at peace.

    What do I want to be good at? I want to be able to do cool "human tricks" like the flag, the one arm lever, Ashtanga Yoga, Chen Style Tai chi... but I also want to be flexible enough to be at peace if I'm in a car accident and can never walk again. I want to still take joy in movement and my body, even if it is sick or injured, even if I can't do the things I imagined I wanted to do.

    So, what can we learn from this question?

I think we can learn a few things:

1) Have a goal. 

    My mom is a Life Coach and she is constantly waxing eloquent on this point. Have a goal, make it specific. The goal is a direction, the goal helps you set your path and know where you want to be.

2) Make plans and take small practical steps toward those plans.

    Have a road map, follow a system, track progress. There are MANY MANY options out there, or you could create your own. But if you run towards the horizon, unless you pick landmarks and know the stops on the path, you'll never know where you are or how far you've come.

3) Be prepared for contingencies.

    Having a goal is not an assembly process, it's a growth process. Sometimes a tree gets cut down to make a chair, sometimes it's firewood. We can do what we can do to make a good life, but there are forces larger than mankind out there, fate, god, whatever you want to call it. Learn to be at PEACE, and move from there, but don't let your peace be dependent on meeting the goal.

    All that being said, I have goals that are physical goals. I want to be able to be a warrior, a monk, at least in my own mind. I'm using a system to get there, a system I believe in made by individuals I respect. It's a fun journey, and playful, but also serious to the point where it intimately touches my personal outlook on life.

I wish you a similar journey. Good luck, godspeed. 

    

The Path to Autonomy

 Or: The Last Time I Use The Name of The Course

    I recently started trying to have a very purposeful way to address my life and my movement practice. As a guy who loves Yoga, Tai Chi, and Human Movement, I have to say the last 3 years, at least, have been a very unfocused meandering through various sets, forms, programs, and practices with no real goals and a lot of procrastination and laziness. It's funny, because I should know how to make a program and progressions and timeline for myself, but work, life, and lack of initiative kept getting in the way. Also a lack of specific goals and a lack of direction didn't help either.

    But at the start of 2021, I decided to re-focus and re-visit a program that I've been watching from afar for years now. GMB, a group of people that I affectionately think of as "The Movement Skill guys", puts out programs focused on making people comfortable in their own bodies, able to approach any movement challenge that comes their way. They have multiple programs and if you follow me on social media at all, you've seen me share their content. Along with their normal offerings, I decided to spring for the premium "Alpha Posse" content and BOY have I loved it so far.

    I am not going to reveal anything about their programs in my blog- if you enjoy my journey you can feel free to check them out. I will merely be sharing some snippets of what I am practicing, and learning, through their material. Hopefully, my journey will be meaningful and inspiring to you, too.

    But at the beginning, they want you to look at yourself, your body, and how you move and sort of do an assessment and recap. So, that's what I want to do, right now, real quick.

    As I mentioned before, I have been playing with movement in an unfocused way for long enough that I am pretty much at a baseline. That being said, I feel like I have a pretty good baseline. I feel like I can move well and control my body enough to dive into a new program, and have the background and body knowledge to approach it safely and reasonably. It's hard to say exactly what my goals are, but I know I want to resolve some compensation around my right shoulder, as well as have a good approach to athletic flow sequences that are fun to perform. I don't want to WORK OUT anymore, I want to do stupid human tricks. I think my biggest limitations are strength and stamina in the upper body (boy that's super vague, hah).

    Right now, my biggest goal is to be consistent in practicing the program, and not to get too unfocused by trying to include other modalities and types of exercises. In the coming weeks, I'm going to write short blogs, like this one, about the journey, and do videos of myself performing the techniques, transitions, and giving my thoughts along the way.

    If you've read my posts before you might be saying "Justin, you sure start over a lot!" And I do. But every day is a new day, and sometimes re-evaluating and re-prioritizing are useful skills. It feels right, right now. Let's go! I hope you come with me.