Check this out.

This device— clothing that can tell what tissues are active during a given movement—raises a super interesting point about what we’re measuring, and how much that measurement matters.

That awareness, i.e. are my right glutes firing more than my left in a back squat?, can be a beautiful thing. Though here’s my experience, especially with folks who lift weights (both at my clinic, and when I taught crossfit classes): if we get too tunnel visioned around creating left/right, and front/back, balance, we’re almost always:

a) missing some key somatic information, i.e. blocking out the smaller stuff to get to the bigger gains of symmetry, which wouldn’t be a problem were the small stuff not the key expression of our core (tiny little stabilizers that hugely, if not mostly, influence our structural health) and physiology (the functional health of nerve, fluids and organs that sit right next to, and are quite influenced by, those little stabilizers)

Hello again. This one’s a bit of a different kind of post.

A friend of mine, a fellow bodyworker and writer, recently wrote me with a proposal to participate in a blog hop … that is, a spotlight-on-me-and-pass-it-on style of writers of all genres getting to be highlighted, and share their writing processes. I said yes!

Before I answer the big 4 questions, cheers to my aforementioned friend, Jennifer Soames, for inviting me to participate. I’ve really appreciated Jennifer’s curiosity and skills since we were in school together in 2011. She’s also a writer, and just came out with an e-book on self help for back pain; you can check her writing process here.

1. What am I working on?

I really enjoy writing and making videos that help people find their way towards more free, full, embodied ways of living on this wild, often very difficult planet.

I suppose I’m working on doing that better, which to me is moving towards success when it’s a) fun for me, b) good, useful content, and c) reaching its audience, i.e. everyone who would be bummed if it existed and they didn’t hear about it.

2. How does my writing differ from others of its genre?

I think what I share is part health in a mechanical sense—like what are good movements to do, good considerations for a given activity, etc—and a big part a sort of spirit-meets-earth way of relating to the body.

I love the term “movement koan” (which for all I know I coined with this video; may my trademark rest here!), expressing how movement and fitness can be a kind of living question that draws us into our own experiences. And how that kind of drawing in can be transformative, at least physically, as a sort of answer-byproduct of asking the question well and with sincerity.

This way of looking at the body is infinitely more real and interesting to me than trying to find the right dogma, even alignment-based dogma, to live by.

3. Why do I write what I do?

To share what I’ve learned. To help people who aren’t into movement find their way into movement. To relate to someone who feels intimidated by fitness propaganda.

To offer a voice in the conversation of being a healthy human being that doesn’t start with the implied statement, “Well, you’ve done a bunch of stuff wrong [or, ‘there’s something inherently wrong with you’], but here’s how you can redeem yourself …”

To get people interested in my business. For fun. To post something on facebook besides what I had for breakfast.

4. How does my writing process work?

I like to compose with pen and paper, in my journal, as much as possible. This is relatively new—I used to compose on the laptop—and I’m really taken by what a different experience it is altogether to write on paper, make some letters bigger, doodle … and all that aside, just my thought process feels different, more open, less linear. I really like it.

I write at least once or twice a week, sometimes daily. I’m almost always happier when I write more.

I don’t click “publish” unless it feels right, i.e. I really like it. That’s also new; not like I used to just publish whatever, but I would push the button on more draft-type works and was rarely happy with myself after.

Now, it’s just the creme de la creme! When I can help it.

Another Writer Worth Knowing

Heather Day! Heather is a friend of mine from Montana, and a writer I admire for a few reasons, a big one of those being her tenacity in pursuit, and the sheer volume of inspirational writing she throws out there. I’m impressed by this, and often find myself liking and commenting on what she has to say about living a full, beautiful life, whether or not it’s exactly my cup of tea (and, often, it is). I’m curious to hear about her writing process, especially how she stays motivated to write so much.

Her blog is here, and she describes herself as … a Transformational Coach, yoga teacher, and a guide for those who seek to put the passions of their heart into action. She lives in a state of one, ecstatic YES – and continues to enjoy the adventure it creates! You’ll find her eating papaya, dancing wildly, trying not to get sunburned, and teaching yoga and coaching from her home on the coast of Costa Rica.

Athletes, try this one on for size.

You don’t need to warm up. You don’t need to cool down.

You need only to listen, to find that razor’s edge of attention where you are focused both on your internal state and on the task at hand, and really where those two supposedly different realities merge into one experience. And then, from there … why be anywhere else?

This doesn’t mean you don’t likely engage in a progressive preparation of your tissues for the activity you’re about to do. It means you drop the routine-ness of it. You admit you don’t know how this particular movement practice will go, admit that you truly are a blank slate (and that really is a feeling of admittance, in my experience, and not an allowing of a blank slate as people often say; it’s already the case, whether you “allow” it or not!).

We’re closing the gap, the “I’m just doing my warmup and then I’ll pay attention.”

A wisdom of progression exists in the moment of movement. A pre-conceived warmup and cool down can exist only in the past, the one that we remember and apply, to more or less affect, to now.

We might as well pay attention. It’s already happening.

To the journey, LB

There’s a lot of discussion out there about how no one gives us the manual for owning a body when we’re born. How to lift stuff, run and sit and work at a computer, how much sleep you might need, what’s good posture and the like. This is, in my opinion and I can’t imagine many who’d disagree, a really useful conversation to be having. Any single variable—the state of our healthcare system, the incidence of metabolic and hard-to-diagnose (like fibromyalgia) disorders, how many of us have regular back pain, how you can buy ten million ibuprofen for $4, even just the vague sense of constriction that comes with not living in our full potential in these bodies, which gets sold to us as the norm—should be enough to perk our ears.

All that and … I’m not sure a manual is the best analogy. If your car won’t start, we have a set of diagnostic tools to figure that problem out, definitively. It’s all in the car’s manual. But you are not a car, and “mechanics” is a clunky word, at best, to describe your miraculous inner workings.

It’d be more like if you were learning to fish. You’d be fine with a more mechanical style of learning and a manual, i.e. learning the particular nuances and “how to,” if conditions were more or less consistent throughout your life. If the winds blew in the same ways as they did for your ancestors, if the fish returned to the same places every year, if the seasons were more or less consistent (or any inconsistencies well accounted for) … you’d be fine.

When conditions fundamentally change, however, then we find out who understands fishing at a fundamental level.

And we are all fishermen. That’s the kicker.

Your winds, tides, water temperatures and salinity, your seasons and even gravity and density will change. You’ll develop a certain posture from how you sit, and from your favorite sport, from how your mom carried you and the way your uncle walked. You’ll give birth. You’ll experience deep, life-altering grief. You’ll break your ankle; you’ll tear your MCL. You’ll take up yoga, and then quit, and then take up something else. You’ll go through menopause.

Even on a day-to-day scale, you’ll be healthy and then sick, you’ll be sore from a workout, you’ll have a hangover, you’ll take a short course of antibiotics. You’ll have good days where you’re floating through the world and bad days where your stomach hurts and back aches.

Your posture, gait and all around being-ness in your body will change. The entire ecosystem of you will change, true as time. What kind of manual can but point to this deep, rich, infinitely-variabled evolution? (You aging is not something gone wrong. If your manual says that, I’d suggest burning that thing post-haste.)

Your waters are changing. You are a fisherman. Now we really start to see …

Do you really know how to fish?