Sustainable Practices and Squeezing the Sponge
Amid the holiday commercialization and hype, I still find December a favorite time of year. My Sagittarian mother, sister and I celebrate our birthdays. And I have a tradition of wrangling at least some portion of the holidays into a personal “staycation” to wind down annual projects and look ahead to the new year in a good way.
But then of course there’s January, the tricky month that puts all our aspirations to the test–especially here in temperate California where there’s little to no seasonal winter pause to turn inward. To set myself up for success, rather than resolutions, I kick off each new year with intentions and practices.
To be resolute is “to be resolved; set in purpose or opinion.” To resolve is to “decide firmly on a course of action.” All that sounds great for getting started, but what happens next? Enter practice… “To perform an activity or exercise a skill repeatedly or regularly in order to improve or maintain one's proficiency.” Our practice is where we set ourselves up to grow into and sustain our wellness vision.
“Okay that’s great,” you may be thinking, “but what about the sponge?”
My clients come to me at the new year and throughout the year for support with a range of health and wellness issues. My areas of specialization are in healing acute and chronic injuries, alleviating pain, increasing somatic awareness and total body function, and helping overloaded working professionals find more ease and balance in their lives. In my work with my clients, I often find that they:
Are caught in patterns of repetitive-stress-based motions, accustomed to holding their bodies in static positions for extended periods of time, throughout days and weeks often over the course of years–but hoping to find relief from discomfort within a few bodywork sessions.
Are active, but tend to repeat a lot of the same fitness activities–often with an emphasis on motion in the forward-backward (sagittal) and side-to-side (frontal) planes…and a deficiency of rotational movement (in the transverse plane).
Seem “hunkered down” in their bodies under the weight of stress and somatic/emotional guarding, to the point where it’s often affecting their basic capacity to breathe fully.
Express fear that they may never regain stability, full range of motion, or freedom from pain.
Make jokes about aging—where “getting old” explains their chronic pain or functional limitations.
The uncomfortable truth is that most of us are leading lifestyles that are on some level paining, fatiguing, and aging our own bodies and, ultimately, constraining our own wellness potential. From a holistic perspective, what the body fundamentally requires of us is actually quite simple:
To give at least some degree of our consistent attention to our bodies on a daily basis, to sustain regular movement practices, to move in varied ways, and to allow the body and nervous system to relax and rest.
And yet in today’s world of screen saturation, digital distraction, polarization, uncertainty, and even somatic alienation, most of us struggle with this seemingly simple recipe. But tending to the body doesn’t have to be so complicated when we come at it with compassionate, sustainable practices.
Here’s a quick functional anatomy lesson, inspired by two of my somanaut heroes, Tom Myers and Tom Hendrickson. You probably know that the human body is composed mostly of water. And of course you know hydrating is important for staying healthy. But you may not know that:
The water we drink doesn’t holistically sustain our bodies unless we also find ways to hydrate our soft tissues, and especially our fascia (the connective tissue woven throughout our bodies)...
The sponge represents the soft tissues. But how does the water get into that sponge?...
Through varied movements we squeeze the sponge throughout our entire bodies, allowing all the old, gunky water to run out. Then, with healthy rest, the sponge soaks up fresh, clean water.
But when we’re sedentary, or when we get stuck in repetitive postural, ergonomic and even fitness patterns that yield a chronic deficiency of movement variation, we starve our tissues of hydration, essentially aging ourselves…
And when we don’t build in proper rest periods, or when we live with chronic stress–such that our nervous system is flooded with cortisol, leaving it in a recurring fight or flight state–we don’t allow the sponge to refill. Again, aging ourselves…
To shift this vicious cycle, we can remember this little recipe for squeezing the sponge:
Make more movement happen on the daily.
Find new movement variations all the time.
Build good intervals in, to facilitate the sponge in resting and intaking fresh moisture—like a pump.
Rely on rest, self care, and restorative practices to regulate the body and nervous system.
So how does this all look in practice? Here are just a few ideas:
We can be less goal oriented and more exploratory when we value and pursue movement (rather than “exercise”) as an expression of aliveness and vitality, of play and self care.
We can be more curious, whimsical, and creative in our lives, making a game of seeking new/more ways to move.
We can be compassionate with ourselves, understanding that we’re living through a uniquely challenging and uncertain time in human evolution, that we’re not doing it wrong, and that when we “mess up,” we can refocus and practice again.
And—one of my favorites!—we can get support. Schedule a bodywork or coaching session with me and we can talk and explore together what it means to live sustainably and well in a human body in 2022.
Thumbnail photo by: Tim Mossholder