How do you want to feel?

Summer feels in full bloom . For me it’s gotten busier, but maybe it’s slowed down for you? 

My movement musings for you today is about how feelings can follow form… 

Want to feel freer? Run fast. Like really fast. Sprint with your hair down, arms out, and the wind at your back. Run with bravado! 

Do you feel like you’re in your head a lot? Lifting weights will ground you and bring you back into your body immediately. 

Want to feel powerful? Generate explosiveness through punching and kicking pads in martial arts. Add sound to your striking, and you'll feel the vibration of vocal power too.

I love how feelings can follow form. But this little life hack is not an absolute truth, and it depends on where you are with your relationship to your emotions and body. Sometimes you have to feel your feelings until they’re spent or have moved through you completely. I don’t advocate using movement or exercise to deny, deflect, or suppress your feelings either (which I did for years). It’s only through feeling my feelings completely that I can now identify when I’m stuck in an old pattern and then gently nudge myself, often through movement, in the direction I'd like to go. 

Honestly, repatterning my nervous system is the hardest work for me -- more so than any physical conditioning that I've done. The shift happened for me when I allowed myself to feel all the range of emotions that were backlogged in my body... and well, I didn't die. Lol, I know that sounds dramatic, but the version of warrior that I was raised in was to suppress emotions, which makes sense if you have to stay alive (either in war or in some situation in childhood). It's a survival strategy that I'd like to retire from. Feeling my emotions through to the other side granted me the feeling of trust and safety in my body, which has been life changing. Now I'm curious as to what it would be like to live into a version of warrior that can navigate the full spectrum of being human.

Where are you with your relationship to your feelings and movement? How do you use movement to get unstuck or invite another feeling in?