Un-Remembering White Boards -- one wall ball at a time

I remember the slick smell of the markers the most. A sweet, inky scent, pleasant at first, but then off-center somehow, sickly, disagreeable. And I see the white-board resting in the guest bedroom with lime green walls. It charted our achievements and named our progress in its symbols and ink. When the markers were out, so were the chips. Red, blue, and black poker chips, purchased by a religious, non-card-playing family to goad toward actions deemed successful: brushing teeth, making the bed, setting the table, cleaning up the dishes, dusting, and more. Each color had a number unit attached to it, each week added up to ‘successful’ amounts, compared and celebrated. I didn’t know how many chips brushing my teeth was worth, though. I was three years old.

To be fair, it was 1972. The brightly lit horrors of consumerism had not really blossomed yet. The ‘chip system’ seemed an innocent way for loving parents to motivate two little girls to get their chores done and learn how to be in society. Chores did get done, and the two little girls have now grown into mature women in society. Funny thing, though. I’m nearly fifty and I still don’t know how many chips I should get for brushing my teeth. I never ‘won’ at this system, after all, and refused regularly so I would ‘lose’ trying to ‘not play.’ My parents hounded me in it, finally giving up after a long while…do not remember how long. Today, I see a white board and I’m immediately awash in shame, feelings of inadequacy, isolation and emotional fires. We never know what’s going to ‘stick’ from our earliest years, and the flash-fire emotions that can erupt five decades later startle those willing to awaken to them.

I wish I could find some way for another to truly feel what it feels like, this three-year-old’s experience of never measuring up, competing with her sister for parental praise, always lacking in the orderliness to be seen and celebrated. But then I wouldn’t want anyone else to feel this way. It sucks. Who the hell places a toddler into such a market for ‘love’ anyway? Will the sensation of a three year old ever wane? Will the rage at competing for her parents’ affection, never measuring up or being seen ever ease? Part of me says, of course, Oh for Pete’s sake, get over it. Nearly 50 years ago and they did the best they knew at the time. And I have done that for nearly fifty years. Which makes me wonder if there’s a better way to get free of this trigger…sensing in my body that yes, there is.

I remember the sensations rising in the post-workout stretching time, open community space with a new-to-me CrossFit crowd. I had my hands on a bar on the rig, stetching my abs and upper arms. I looked at the white boards on the wall, startled as tears sprang into my eyes. 47 years later, white boards still brought tears? I said to myself. A completely new situation, new age, different people, but the trigger remains. White boards with numbers send me to such a young place of shame, tears, isolation, that I bolt the room, regardless of anyone else.

I don’t have visual or audible memories anymore, associated with these tears. I have little memory of my young years, period. Five years ago, this didn’t strike me as odd, but today, I see a larger pattern of wise repression, the ability to go unconscious with deep feeling in a family system that could not receive or hold it. Today, after decades of inner and outer work in my own profession, I have the capacity and the willingness to listen when deep feelings arise. It’s still inconvenient, of course. I easily get embarrassed by how deeply I feel things, unwilling to repress them as much. But it matters less now if those around me cannot withstand my deep feeling, at unexpected moments.

Like this morning. My life is weaving more and more closely into this CrossFit community I enjoy so completely. I love how my body is moving these days. I love my energy. I love being challenged and the intensity of the workouts in which I can finally ‘lose my mind’ and simply be in my body, moving. I learned this body space in college, with the women’s soccer team, especially on long runs. It has returned in me over the years, when I’m as active as I desire to be. I have found a belonging here that I did not expect. Yet CrossFit has whiteboards. It doesn’t mean anything to anyone there, I hear, except a way to name achievements, track progress. And I have found a beginning ease, seeing my name up on the list with everyone else. Good. Progress. And I even named a number for the wall-ball challenge once. I smiled the first time I saw a smiley-face next to my name, free of the numbers question. And this morning, I wondered whether this strand of my life was finally done, over, better. As the names were spoken aloud, and each person spoke his/her number of wall balls, I leaned in to see what it would feel like to say my number, one of the lowest to be given. I heard my name, said my number ‘17’, and there I was again…tears and shame and bolting the room. Damn it, I ended the text to the coach there.

I will get free of this body-shame-sensation, just staying with it, honoring that my tender heart still aches from not being seen or heard just as I am, that the only pathway to ‘love’ for me, for many years, was the chip system and damnable white board accounting. These are new people who don’t have this history, it seems. It’s a circle-esque community focused upon healthy living, healthy movement, challenge and intensity too. One day, the numbers won’t matter to me, I know it.

For now, it’s progress to see my name up on the white board, and to see a smiley face shining back at me. That makes me smile, helps me feel seen as my body moves.

It's Finally Happened...Again!

I felt the shift sometime this past week, a familiar feeling, a learning received long ago but often lost and forgotten: eating healthy food so to prepare my body for movement instead of moving so I could eat anything and/or everything I wanted to. The first feels joyful, easy; the second feels functional and calculating, spurred on by fear and whiffs of shame.

I have long and winding vines between my body, food, and exercise. I suspect most of us do, both women and men. As I wrote in my morning pages the other day, we live a body-dissociated life in a body-obsessed culture.  Speaking just for myself, I have lived most of my life dissociated, really, from my body and her wisdom. If the pathways to the body’s wisdom are feeling, sensation, responsiveness to clues and intuition, my family line has little interest in any of that. The body was something to be diagnosed, whipped into shape, controlled through will or regulation from outside. We don’t feel in my family, we conceptualize and dissociate from things too joyful or painful to contain. Because it is both—both joy and pain go missing when one learns to numb out. So from a very early age, I pushed my life experience up into my head, lived mostly from there. I will say that most of my innovative work arose from my feminine embodied self, scraping her way into consciousness, but she is relatively young, say about five years old.

What all this means is that food has been a source of solace and comfort, materiality and mothering, most of my life. When I did the daring act of diving off the high dive in elementary school, my reward was a candlelight sundae at home! (Ice cream, bananas, strawberries…a treat concocted by my father for whenever thunderstorms would come and the electricity would go off. It became a treat and a special event! Wise father that he was…). When I wanted to feel comfortable in my skin, soothing the shaky hungers that would come about 4:30 p.m. after my paper route was done, it was a McDonald’s hamburger or even Big Mac. Whenever something was scary or filled me with anxiety, some food would soothe the body. Friday nights at home alone watching TV instead of going out with friends? Chef-Boyardee beef ravioli,  Jeno’s pizza rolls, and ice cold Pepsi, maybe potato chips. It’s no wonder I spent my young life dehydrated, eh?

All this input, as seventies’ salt and fat as it was, led to the need—outside demand, really—to control my body’s appearance through exercise. Running, biking, climbing trees came rather naturally as fun for me, until adolescence and the self-loathing that comes from neglect and religious shame. When my mother judged me to be lacking in my own self-control, when she judged my body as unfit and ‘too fat,’ then the shame dance began in earnest. Probably 6^th grade. Movement allowed me the food soothing my lonely and fearful heart needed. Running for exercise and control of body ‘errors’ became a discipline of necessity.

None of this is very surprising for a woman and her body today. I’ve been fortunate in that I’ve not been overly seduced by diet crazes or extreme behaviors of eating disorders. I have my addictions—bread, mostly—and I have my cycles of craving and resolution—less now, that my hormones have altered my body’s rhythms. But food, emotional solace, and physical activity are always interlaced with fear, self-loathing, will.

Until the shift comes, of its own accord, felt from within. Like the shift came this past week. My body begins to love its movement, enter into its movement, for fun. Yes. For fun. It takes a while for my mind to fall asleep enough to let this happen. It has to happen, after all. You cannot will fun to be fun. But when it finally does happen, food becomes simply the means that allows my body to enjoy itself in fun, in exertion, in movement, in challenge, in community. Then…this free space opens up and food becomes emotionally unimportant and a curiosity without a kick. It is simply a step toward what my body wants to do, which is move. Too much or the kind of food that makes movement hard becomes undesirable. Craving, taste, emotion no longer drive me so. Instead, I find my mind wandering with anticipation toward…when do I get to move next? When is my next workout? Does Nala need to go for a walk in the autumn sunshine? All questions that spur a different way for me to be in my body, without fear or shame. Blessed be.

My Inner Athlete Peeks Around the Corner…Shy She Is...

I am beginning to feel a sense of flow in this CrossFit journey, which is a gift to me and those who are close to me! I no longer feel as much fear when I enter the gym, unsure what the Workout of the Day (WOD) is, though it is written up on the white-board. A usual experience has been to read the acronyms, the listed exercises with reps or time slated, and feel a pit of fear. What is the accommodation for 40’ of arm-stand walking? What is the difference again between Strict Press and Bench Press and Front Squats and…? So much I simply could not know, yet it was going to shape an hour of my life and my body’s movement into it. By now, however, I’m beginning to trust more and fear less. I may not know what I will be doing, but space is being made for me—by coaches, fellow CrossFitters, and most importantly, myself—to move in ways that make my body feel good. Fear less, trust more. A good motto for me right now.

Saturday was the first time I felt most seen, welcomed in. We did a community workout—8 or 10 of us that showed up for the morning. I felt at ease from the start, seeing one of the things I know: wall-ball sit-ups. I love those, for whatever reason. It was a partner workout, with wall balls, wall-ball sit-ups, and rowing. Partners would rotate between rounds, a total of three rounds. It was a good community mixer, actually. I got to workout and push/be-pushed by three different people, and they me. The intensity was what I had hoped, and simply, I enjoyed myself.

The middle round was what amused me, however, brought me out of myself in a new way. The drawn-straws paired me with a bear-of-a-guy I will name Tom, whose wall-ball was 20 lbs to my 8 lbs wall ball. He went first, 5 wall balls, then moved to the mat for the wall-ball sit-ups. This meant he would throw his 20 lb ball to me 5 times. The first time, I was not quite prepared for the momentum of the 20 lbs airborne. It knocked me back a bit with an umph of air out of me. But I learned, placed my feet more wisely, told him to have at it. My hips could finally be put to good use, receiving the momentum and getting it back to him in timely fashion. It felt good to meet up at that place of challenge.

Then it was my turn, 5 wall balls with my 8 lb ball, then down to the mat for the sit-ups and thrown wall-ball. He received the first throw with a clear ease. Though there were no words, I could almost hear him think, “Oh! 8 lbs. Easy.” Having a clear sense of where he was, however, the 2nd to 5th wall-ball sit-up throws could be ‘for real.’ I have long arms, with good momentum from strong hips. He was not expecting the momentum of long-arm throws, nor the accurate placement of the wall-ball comin’ his way. When I threw the second wall-ball to him, it was satisfying to hear him lose the air in his lungs, with an unsolicited belch. The look of surprise, and admiration even, was a hoot. I could hear him think, “RESPECT.” We were starting to have fun in our round.

It was good to push and be pushed for the rest of the workout. Though I didn’t necessarily want the CrossFit math question, I acquiesced anyway, since I knew what it was and it wasn’t all just my own. The community gathered around in a post-workout circle, where "Tom" relayed his own experience of the round with me. It was delightful to be seen as a respected athlete player in the bunch. It was the first time I felt like I was welcomed in like that. It's been quite a while since college soccer days and that feeling of camraderie.

A good image to carry with me, as I continue to journey deeper into this CrossFit flow: Tom's surprised face, and the unexpected belch which allowed us to laugh. Together.

A Womanifesto -- No CrossFit Math for Me

Not the usual way I enter a new community: writing a womanifesto of what I needed for the leaders to help me help myself.

About a month ago, I took the dive into a CrossFit gym close to where I work. I figured that when my busy semester hits this spring, I’d have a new routine and a gym to swing by on the way home. I also knew I wanted to reclaim my levels of physical activity that always seem to wane when amidst other things I love to do with my life—circles, teaching, sacred listening-companionship, etc. ... I do have an inner athlete, after all. I discovered her in college when I joined the college women’s soccer team during my junior year. It was an unusual time to join the team—halfway through—but they needed a goalie and I took the dive then too. ... The heady parts of my work and married life, even, do not often allow her much expression these days, so I thought perhaps CrossFit would be a good fit for right now.

And it really is. I’ve been in regular classes now for about two weeks, having done the intro-sessions with Matt, one of the coaches, during late August. I’m learning which classes have which kinds of energies. The 4 p.m. class is a bit snooty and competitive, with folks just off their jobs, working off steam before heading home to family lives. 8 a.m. is led by the other coach, Melissa, and has a much gentler feel to it, plus more one-on-one coaching. More often a women-centric class too, though a husband and wife team was there together once when I was there. The Saturday open-workouts for the community are probably my favorite so far—more body-as-weight kinds of sets because the number of folks can be high. My work life may require me to go to the 4 p.m. class; my sense of well-being values the 8 a.m. class. I’ve not tried the noontime or the 5:30 p.m. class, though I suppose I will in the days to come.

After the third ‘regular class,’ I realized that one of the practices of CrossFit was beginning to distract and shame me: CrossFit math. Matt would ask each of us what our time was, writing it up on the white-board amongst the list of names for each day. I wasn’t here to keep time or compete for a fast time. My focus from day-one has been technique and form, intensity of workout, regularity of showing up. I could feel the dread building in me for everytime I had to gather my things to leave, hoping to avoid the question. By the fourth class, I knew I had to take a different approach than sneaking out.

A day of Columbus meetings, the first in an Upper Arglington coffee shop, I set to writing the draft of an email to the two coaches. I was sure to begin with a huge list of gratitudes and what I was showing up for… I am really glad to have taken this dive, after all, and can feel myself growing, re-focusing my life in healthy ways. 

I did try to give some context for this invitation-demand of them: This message is to help you help me in flows of energy I'm guessing you'd have no reason to know anything about... I cannot imagine you've had much reason to delve into the motherwound or the long histories of bodyshaming that religious traditions exact upon their young--perhaps you have, and you simply hold it differently for yourselves--but CF is the apparent place for me to redress some of this in my own body...

I was pleased to name for them, and for myself, what I was intending and striving for: What I am coming for: the regularity, the intensities deepening, the circle of companions also working out and pushing into their best reps, time etc. I need to have invested at this level in order to show up in the overwhelm of my work life(lives). So far, I'm getting all that I need there, entering in slowly...

I was proud of myself for then getting concrete and specific:

All that said...The whiteboards, the reporting, the numbers/CrossFit math are not going to be good for me at this stage in my body journey... They distract me, my long history of body-shaming and internalized self-hatred are simply too tender for the post-workout-give-the-number routine that is part of your/CF community practice. You can cancel my reservation for the thing on the 7th. Not good for me, at this stage. I don't actually care where I'm starting in the masculine-driven, body-image way of being in human bodies. I finally know how to name what I need and so this is your invitation to help me deepen engagement in the ways<I>need. ...you make your suggestions, but I need you to not put my name up on the board, I need you to not ask me, and I need to find my way into these flows of movement in my own way. Guided and pushed by you, sure, but listening inwardly always first. Maybe someday down the road, I'll enter in this way; maybe not.

I was most delighted by the ending of the email, the opportunity to name what it’s taken me so long to name: I'm happy to flow in and find my way amidst different classes as these next weeks beckon. It's taken me 50 years to love the body I have, just as I am, knowing I've needed every fuckin' cell to do the work I do...so my desire and goal is simply to move into deeper and deeper movement, health, well-being, as I know from the inside alone. Thanks for reading this far. See you tomorrow and more,

A woman-i-festo indeed. I felt immediately lighter upon sending it. I felt the waves of self-doubt and fear too, but I knew to expect those. It is really hard for a woman to name so clearly what she needs and not collide inside herself with the need for outside approval, the need to not take up space, the need to not be too pushy or too much or 'a bitch' or too…something. I could feel some reverberations within me as I eased into new classes. Did they share my words with others there? Did other CrossFitters not want to partner with someone like me? Ultimately, I allowed it to be whatever it needed to be for them, confidence growing in me that I had done what I needed for me to feel most safe and most engaged.

And yesterday, at the start of a full day of ‘mental health care’ for me, I entered into the 8 a.m. class with seven other women. I partnered with a woman I'll call Jaime, a slim buff-honed athlete woman, with ease. I learned how to begin with bench-pressing the yellow bar (35 pounds). I walked out, feeling like myself, on a journey I’ve wanted and needed for a while. I'm a new member of a local CrossFit community, feeling her way in as she needs to.

In our world today, it always seems to take a womanifesto to get there. So be it.