Bringing My Body to Portland

I think it’s time for me to watch Last of the Mohicans again. I remember seeing this in the theater when it first came out. Big screen, surround sound, Daniel Day Lewis in a loin-cloth in the Midwestern frontier of O-HI-O. I saw it several times, actually. I was mesmerized not by Daniel Day-Lewis, interestingly enough, but by the stories of the women awakening to freedom, each woman her own freedom. Cora, a dark-haired British woman, to a life on the frontier without her British fiancée (whom she loved but with whom she could not enter into the confines of 18^th-century marriage); her fair-haired sister, to a choice of freedom in the here-after, alongside her gentle-souled love just murdered by a Huron warrior.

I can already hear my husband with his knowing and accepting smile: No projections there…none. Which, of course, is true. I was so enamored by the movie that I checked the Fenimore Cooper classic book out of my local library, so to enjoy the story in more ‘slow-motion’ and appreciation. I’ll save you the trouble here: Cooper’s literature classic does not tell the story of these women coming into their own freedom. Not even close.

Driving to the gym this morning, however, I heard the voice of one of the women in the film in my head. Cora’s voice: “I would rather make the gravest of mistakes than surrender my own judgment.” Even writing it out, I sit straighter, feel taller, and sense a groundedness in my body I’ve come to cherish in these recent days.

Soon I will be walking off the plane in Portland, Oregon, to visit my parents in their new life there, their new apartment home. I am curious about how they will react when they see me. I suppose I should simply prepare myself with detachment and as few expectations as I can muster. That’s the best practice with me and my folks these days. I do best with them when I don’t need anything from them, emotionally or spiritually. I’ve long not needed anything from them in most other categories—economic, intellectual, etc.—determined as I have been for my own independence, right out of college. But this time, I admit I am curious for internal and external reasons.

Internal reasons: I am the happiest I have ever been in my body. Ever. I finally feel like I have a healthy relationship with food for the first time in my life. I have learned how to nourish myself, and to discern—really discern—what my body prefers in increasingly subtle-body sensate ways. I’ve landed in a CrossFit community that circles up each day, several times a day, to invite movement and health, challenge and safety. Adult recess, I often call it. I get to play on the jungle gym and we sometimes play games. I hear encouragement to ‘just get better,’ and the freedom to define what that means for me, that day. My life has a rhythm to it that I love, and I can be present in my body in ways I’ve never known how.

If I were to guess, based upon past experiences: My father’s eyes will widen and he will be emphatic in a breathy-body-voice sort of way about how I look when he gives me a hug hello. He will be surprised and affirming in a loud sort of way, both touching my previous needs for his approval and my felt-sensibility that who and how I was before was somehow lacking. He clearly prefers the skinny, the trim, the … whatever.

My mother will give me a hug and murmur her own version of whatever he does. We’ll have the familiar love-hate dance we’ve shared forever about our body-type. I inherited my mother’s body-type and shape, which is both a beautiful way to feel connected with her AND a difficult challenge. She’s hated her body for as long as I can remember, naming deficiencies often. As a young girl growing up, I never could deflect those judgments, ingesting and internalizing them instead. Now I’m the happiest I’ve ever been, in a body shape that perhaps at one time would have been like her own…but is, no longer…but still is, in type or shape.

External reasons:  The curiosity arises because so much of what I knew, what we know about nutrition and medical care of human beings, is evolving and changing within those populations that are allowing the change. What we were ‘sold and told’ in the 1950’s-1970’s is simply wrong, which has led to the rise (some say epidemic) of obesity, heart disease, cancer, and more.  The medical care in the United States is some of the most challenging in the world, largely because of the bed-fellow relationship of medical-research science, government-funding, capitalism and its  consumerist markets, global corporations, and ‘managed-care’ or insurance-impacting practices of care, diagnosis, and compensations. It is overwhelmingly difficult to get uncomplicated information and to make health-care decisions that you feel you can trust, as an ordinary human being living life and love at the grass-roots level of ‘what I know.’

All of this undergirds and instigates curiosity about a now-familiar contemporary dynamic that touches me and my life at multiple levels—with my family of origin, in my marriage, in my work-world.  Much of what my father, the internist and ‘must be right’ man knew and stewarded was wrong. The father figure was simply wrong, even if good intentioned and working with what medical and governmental science-institutions said at the time. He was wrong, through no fault of his own. I can count on my fingers the number of times in my 50 years of life I’ve heard my father say, without resistance or humor, “Yep, I was really wrong about that.” He doesn’t know who he is unless he is explaining something to someone (man-splaining, we call it now) or offering medical expertise in family, school, or doctor’s office settings.

Living some “nutrition-re-education” practices and choices in these last 14 months or so, I now have a lived-trajectory of what I know about my body, what nourishes my body, what makes my body feel good and most active, strong, and healthy. I had my annual physical yesterday, celebrating within myself this new place I’ve found within me and within a supportive community. Except we spent a good chunk of time discussing how my cholesterol levels had jumped about 25 points, within range but on the higher end of ‘the latest standards.’ My doctor, whom I do appreciate for many reasons, encouraged me to consider two different kinds of diets—Mediterranean or South-Beach. She wasn’t listening to me and what I know about my body now. The food-freedom I have. What I am finding in my own experience. As a matter of fact, she didn't even ask much about it.

So…I have two books to read this weekend—one, a more science-heavy expression of ‘medical-science-research’ on how Fat and Cholesterol Don’t Cause Heart Attacks: And Statins Are Not the Solution. (Columbus Publishers Ltd  2016) and the other, a more-popularist expression text, The Cholesterol Myth: Why Lowering Your Cholesterol Won’t Prevent Heart Disease—and the Statin-Free Plan that Will (Fair Winds Press, 2012).

The challenges here are multi-faceted for me. I no longer trust my father’s medical expertise in areas of nutrition, women’s health, and overall health-wholeness. That is such a huge statement, I can hardly withstand the dissonance inside for how I used to live in my family’s sense of identity and giftedness. Not only are ‘the brothers’ a focal point of authority and significance, my father is the recognized medical authority about most everything. Except in the instances of what I know now, he was simply wrong. Secondly, I can see more how my own doctor works within basic tropes of ‘established medical knowledge’ that, at least for nutrition and health-wholeness, no longer suffice. I know something else or differently in my own body. She did not know how to ask about what I clearly knew and we spent most of our time in a supposition of 'what she knew,' which was not relevant to me or what I know now. Finally, reading these books then offers me invitation to learn more in my cognitive and intellectual awareness things that I don’t know how to articulate yet. I do not and will not presume to challenge my father’s (or my husband’s) clear convictions rooted in (what I would call out-dated) medical science…AND…I want to ingest deeply what this strand of argument/discourse has to offer what I know in my own body. The trick, of course, will be not to ‘bite the hook’ of intellectual debate with either of them. This reading is for me, for me and my body alone.

So it's time to watch the movie again: “I would rather make the gravest of mistakes than surrender my own judgment.” ~ Cora Munro, Last of the Mohicans. 

[For those who desire critical-assessment in the larger literature/science world of ‘information-curation,’ assessing the validity/legitimation of information: Columbus Publishing, Ltd is an independent publisher, in the UK, with motto “because the world is not flat; specializes in ‘books that challenge’… Fair Winds Press is also an independent press located in Beverly, Massachusetts, originally part of the Rockport Publishing Group, now owned by Quarto, which has a global market in health and fitness publishing. Most medical-establishment, university-research-discourse authors and leaders would hold these publishing sources with high suspicion and skepticism. "Independent publishing" tends to be disregarded as not-peer-reviewed, so not rigorous in contributing to objective human knowledge.]

Dedication Health -- Part II -- Journeying Ever Onward

The first gathering we had two months ago, we were asked the question of what brought us to the table, to the program. I don’t remember what I said, but I was aware I wasn’t very articulate about it. Later that night, I sat with a journal and wrote my intentions for the Dedication Health journey I was undertaking. Here's what arose for me...

1)  I seek food-freedom in my own mental life. Cravings, thinking about food, emotionally-driven eating (and drinking)… I desire freedom from the psychological dynamics surrounding food and drink in my life. Especially fear—of not having enough, lack, or of eating too much(shamed in this way in my early years, suffering hypoglycemic symptoms from high-fat/high-carb/high salt processed foods). I want to know what my body feelswhen I am at my most mindful and supported-healthy. What does it feel like to be mindful yet free, active as much as I desire?

2)  A secondary aim is to reconcile myself with my abdomen. May sound strange or even overdramatic, but most of my own self-loathing lives there. My mother’s body shape—which I inherited—is one I heard condemned and belittled, shamed and refused all my young and early adulthood years. My mother hates her own body. She has never truly embodied herself in a way I could observe except in critical judgment…so I have had to work overtime to simply enter in and the be in my own body with compassion and hope for my own shy beauty. If these ten weeks could move me toward acceptance of my abdomen, no matter how it looks, that would be fantastic.

3)  At the end of these ten weeks, I want to have practices and habits I can carry into my busy seasons of many work hours. I am glad for the summer’s spaciousness to try new recipes and tend my body’s needs with focus and time. Carrying what I learn into a busy autumn schedule? I want to learn with that in mind, shortcuts via preparations on weekends, etc. 

I was not overly interested in losing weight, which is a roller-coaster mountain I've learned simply to not climb.  I had not stepped on a scale for the last 2.5 years, including the doctor's office. "I don't do that anymore," I told the nurse who was startled. "It will take me four days to recover my sense of equanimity and quiet the voices screaming in my head from our culture that despises and objectifies my woman's body." The nurse never asked me again. :) But by the time this DH journey opened, I was willing to step on the scale and enter into the measurements bit. And they do tell a story of this journey for me, but not the most salient details of the story. They are fruits I had not desired, nor really seeded, but grew anyway.

Here, on this end of the journey, I’m smiling with those fruits  and a sense of movement in the intentions I named above. I have felt more food-free these last ten weeks than I can remember. [Well, except for the time I keep a kosher home for 4 weeks, learning about Jewish observance and the wisdom of that practice for my sabbatical-work.] You’d think that tracking our food and the refusal of processed food would be restrictive and isolating, right? Christians often think Jews are legalistic and obsessed with silly things like food-kashrut observance. Here’s another plug for body-teachings: try it for yourself with an open heart and a curiosity of spirit. Soften your resistance inside and truly receive, allow…wisdom from other traditions than what you know. I would put big money on your learning, because humans have shown this for thousands of years: a communal structure gives a human being freedom to be connected to other things, deeper matters, things that connect him/her to his/her best self. Counter-intuitive and Christians especially often resist this wisdom lineage, relying on Christian-centric tropes from authorities invested in differentiating their own tradition. Try it. Stay in your own body and learn what your body has to say when it’s not silenced or numbed.

These ten weeks, I have felt such incredible food freedom. I don’t have cravings much at all, though of course some arise. Then I choose with more consciousness than I once had. But I don’t even really see the billboards of food or fast-food restaurants to seed the craving. I frequent those establishments less, if at all.  I don’t feel fear about whether my body will make it home for her next meal, shaky-hungry and riding the carbs roller-coaster. Startling to me, I don’t much desire the foods I am supposedly ‘giving up’ for this summer journey. The sensation of desire has changed, softened, opened up into an invitation not driven by fear or social pressure. Which opens up spaces for me to feel and be connected to other things I value…I feel freedom.

I am reconciling with my abdomen, bit by bit. Here the numbers of body-measurements have helped, though these were not what I was intending or aiming for in the end. Yes, I’m down 12 pounds in DH journey, 20 lbs since starting CrossFit, and I have lost 5% bodyfat. Those who know and love me mirror the difference they can see in my physical body. More important to me, those who know and love me mirror the light in my eyes they notice, more free than I’ve been. I can more easily see my body when I step out of the shower. Used to be I’d avert my eyes, a sense of shame arising. That lessens and lessens, the more of this kind of integrative inner work I do. So I’m reconciling with my abdomen, more and more. Do negative voices still arise here? Yes. [Interestingly, they arise more if I’ve had a glass of wine or a martini. Doesn’t mean I won’t enjoy those pleasures from time to time, but it’s interesting to me to notice aloud that they come with a possibility of negative self-talk and whiffs of self-loathing]. Do these voices have the last word? No. My body continues to lead me and I practice with a community becoming more and more conscious. Both are louder and more effective than my negative voices.

Finally, I have learned information I can trust because I can feel it and see it in my own body. Did I simply supplant reigning authorities with the authority of the CrossFit coach, Melissa? No, though we have a smiling and laughing refrain that Melissa is always right. (We laugh about it and enjoy it...AND I suspect that can get heavy from time to time! It does for me, always being right in my worlds... :):):) Though my husband would disagree, of course). Regardless, I appreciate deeply her tenacity and her wisdom. She has found her calling and her passion in life, bringing it to the world alongside her husband and her family. But I learned to trust this information about the sugar overwhelm and Type-2 Diabetes epidemic unfolding, the cholesterol myth and statins business-bottom-line, the difference processed food makes in a human body’s sense/reality of well-being because I learned it in my own body. 

The pictures here and the numbers tell a journey that can be quantified, yes--ten week ago, then four weeks into the journey, then this morning, at the conclusion (really) of the ten weeks (though actually nine weeks so far). It’s a nice happy-ending journey that pleases me at this time in my life. My body is happy and I feel better than I can ever remember feeling inside--energy, steadiness, freedom, curiosity--all after a fabulous weekend in Santa Fe and Albuquerque with my husband. I enjoyed homemade sangria, some of the best Carne Adovada I have ever tasted and more New Mexican fare in moderation. Yet the work for me was learning to love my body when I was 208 pounds and trapped in habits of self-loathing and shame. I did all that before I got to CrossFit, by learning to honor and listen to my own body and its innate wisdom, leading me slowly but surely out of life-denying habits into life-affirming ones. So if circumstances were to change and my body were to return to a heavier weight and a previous appearance, I would still and do love this journey of being human.

That said, CrossFit Dedication and Dedication Health have provided me precisely the ‘container’ and the community I was seeking at a time when my body was trying to teach me things my mind and my worldview, my family’s habits and information-gorge resistance, would never have given me. My husband’s body-journey is different and he need not join me in all these things to be present with me in our life together. Do I want the fruits of my journey for him, for his freedom and body-love and more? Of course I do. I love him. AND he has to learn from his own body, not me. I am not an authority or expert for anyone, nor should anyone be. 

Return to the body. Learn to listen curiously and openly for what nature is saying through your body…for a better you, a better day, a better world.

Dedication Health -- A Pause, in Retrospect

In my fiftieth year, I may have finally learned how my body and I can get along with food, even thrive with food, in both healthy sustenance and the delights of indulgence. Better late than not at all, I figure, and yet I’m lamentably amused too. Only when I turned fifty? Really?

No blame, no shame, no harm, no foul to all those who nourished me the best they knew how in my younger years. None of that even for myself, in my five decades of trying to nourish myself. Yet I am saddened and a little angry to have unknown for so long…a primal facet of being human in a body and I simply didn’t know what I didn’t know… Argh.

And…We live in a time of information-gorge, which can often mean misleading information and unending debates aboutinformation. The movement into responsive action oninformation faces internal and external resistance hard for a person to overcome. How do you know whom to trust? Is the challenge of lifestyle change worth it if you don’t know who to trust? When new information emerges, how do we welcome it? Test it? Be communal and collaborative, yet also wise and savvy to our era? Debates in the information-stage canend, of course, but in our media-soaked environments, it’s usually from exhaustion in the struggle to dominate the discussion with the most compelling or persuasive information. The one who perseveres and disregards the most feelings, the quieter or lesser-known or accessible voices, wins. 

Here, I’ll stand with the Buddhists and say another ‘end’ to the debates is simply to learn from your own body and your own experience. Explore multiple perspectives and learn from those teachers who come into your path, in those invitations that seem to have energy for you. This is not an age to trust the authorities, because there are simply too many of them and they disagree with one another. Even wisdom texts, I’ll say, like scripture or daily sources many of us used to trust, like the evening news. No. Let all that go. Learn from your own experience, felt-senses in your own body. And to be clear, this is not a journey toward orthorexia, as a recent Washington Post Op-Ed piece named it—the only one right way to eat. But it is an invitation toward a skillset with food that offers you the most inner peace, food-freedom, and healthy well-being. 

Learning only from your own body, your body as primary teacher, means you hold a lot of paradox in a socially complicated world, of course. You can live with beloveds whose body experience differs from yours, which then requires you to honor his/her choices just as they are. For instance, my husband loves a muffin each morning with his coffee. I used to confuse our intimate connection time in the morning with having to partake of that too.  So I did, even though my body didn’t really like how I felt afterwards and it set my energies on edge mid-morning. I’ve learned now I don’t need to partake in order to spend present time with him when he has his muffin and coffee. I feel better with just my decaf coffee. He enjoys his experience of dark coffee and a sweet of some kind. We stay more truly connected because I’m not ignoring my body’s teachings for me and he’s staying with what he chooses. 

The only way I know how to stay with inner transformation of any kind is to find a community that will hold space for me to ‘try on their worldview’ for a time all the while listening to my own experience. To enact lifestyle or habit-belief-worldview change on my own rarely succeeds, or if it does, it rarely stays steady amidst the social and relational pressures to conform to the group-mind/worldview. So as soon as I heard about Dedication Health with my local CrossFit gym, CrossFit Dedication, I knew I wanted to enter into the journey of 'nutrition re-education' and 'supportable-supportive health learning.' I wanted to know ‘what they know’ and see what my body would teach me as I learned from their experience, but in my own experience.

Not even ten weeks later, I finally feel like I know how to feed and be in my body in a way that offers me inner peace and raucous amusement. Even though I'm fifty and a late-bloomer here. :) The choices I know to make now for myself offer me a steadiness of presence and enjoyment, free of fear of too much or too little. And significant for me and my own spiritual journey, it weaves me into a circle-esque community practicing becoming more and more conscious of the world we live in, the choices that are easy to make and those that are more difficult to make…but better and worth it for peace, body-health, and general well-being. I like to be with people like that, even if I don’t agree with or understand everything they say or do. Their practice speaks more loudly of the values I want to see more of in the world: just get better, whatever that may mean for you. Learn where you are and be with people who support you. Listen to your body. Cheer on those around you to be their best selves. Stay active and rest when you need to. Laugh…a lot. Bring your best self to the world. Who doesn’t want to be around that luscious kind of energy?

[In experience, in my family...? Most folks who are scared of or have been formed to shame their own bodies and those who are rightfully fearful of judgment by our culture for how we’ve not known about our bodies.(Another post for another time…)]

So…People come into this DH journey for a variety of reasons, of course. Some are exhausted from dieting and the frustrations of weight loss/gain cycles. Some are facing chronic conditions of heart-disease or pre-diabetic/Type2 diabetes challenges. Some are well-established athletes with good habits, but who want to focus on the latest in nutrition research and upping their workout-performance. True to form, my own intentions were internal and largely psychological, emotional…Part II...

CrossFit Nuggets…Installment #1

Various 'nuggets' of awareness have been bubbling up these last several days, most not serious enough to merit a full reflection, but none wanting to be 'left behind' in the CrossFit flow... Perhaps there simply needs to be 'an installment' of observations, then, from time to time. Installment #1 follows:

The workout is usually more demanding than it looks, and your body can do more than you think.

It is time to get a new sports bra when a burpee breaks one of ‘your girls’ out, under a shirt or not. Case in point, Spot a Burpee game, day after Christmas. No one noticed, I don’t think…made me laugh the entire rest of the workout. Old bra, from earliest running days. A favorite, but...let go and time to order a new one.

Numbers matter to keep up the intensity and challenge; numbers do not matter in and of themselves. Try texting your numbers to a friend each day, without any context for them. You begin to see how little relevance they have, in any grand scheme of things.

Numbers can distract, however, from staying with your own body, listening deeply to its signals for pace, intensity, and capacity. Never let the numbers push you into pain, whether that is physical pain or emotional-spiritual shame made present from long ago. This takes practice and patience, inside and also with those around you.

Adults need a lot more recess than they usually allow themselves. CrossFit is not unlike adult recess. You can play on the jungle gym, enjoy games of tag and relay races, work out all kinds of energies built up from a day inside.

Subtle changes are happening within me, my body, which make me smile. The woman I see at Massage Envy, massage therapist, observed with me recently, "Your posture has changed. Stronger, taller. Your energy is bigger too."

Sometimes it's important to do the workout the 'gang' has enjoyed, even if you can only do your own version of it. Something like 'feeling a part of the whole' comes for me when I do even a portion of a workout, at my own pace and modification, but similar to the flow of my CrossFit friends. Not sure why, but noted and notable. Today? The Twelve Days of Christmas, or the Eight Days of Hanukah, or the Fifteen Days of…? A scan of diversity holidays comes up with bumpkis—though MLK,Jr. day is February 15, Ramadan 2018 began on May 15^th, and a couple festivals added together might add up to 15 days. Eight days of Passover and seven days of Holy Week. Anyway, a modification WOD for me, unable to join in for class today:

1 - 200 m row

2 – goblet squats, 20 lb DB

3 – snatches with PVC pipe, tending to form in the mirror

4 – jump-up pull-ups on the bar

5 – wallballs, in air with 10 lb medicine ball

6 – step-ups, Matt counting (6/leg)

7 – burpees

8 – sit ups

9 – DB thrusters, 12 lbs DB

10 – knee-ups, from the bar

11 – air squats

12 – lunges, Matt counting, 12/leg

While I missed the company of friends and the familiar energies of the gym, the slow warm-up I remembered and the gentle sense of ‘entry’ felt good. I remember thinking, “This isn’t so much as all that…” until about five or six in the ‘days’ of Christmas. As the burpees loomed, and each movement required more and more focused attention, I realized once again, Nugget One: the workout is usually more than it seems AND my body loved the steady movement. I’d not had lunch of any import, though I’d enjoyed 3 scrambled eggs with ½ an avocado this morning. A bit more than my usual breakfast, and it has seemed to last me well.

enough for now...

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.