Op/Ed: It Won’t Be Pretty, It Doesn’t Have To Be.
Origin stories are built on a foundation made of trials and tribulations. When it rains, it pours and it’s been pouring recently. Not to be confused with “making it rain”, we either have or we will experience “when it all falls apart”- the car, the hot water heater, the other car, the medical bill. As unwitting parts of this hyper-connected world where anyone has a platform to say anything (yet only certain voices are elevated), it’s easy to fall into the “true grit, that’s it” vibe. An algorithm based on a capitalist, white-surpremacy, patriarchy will never elevate the voices that contradict it the way that it will those that don’t. As a result, the ugliness of grief gets lost- sent to the margins where it eventually disappears.
Any story worth hearing, and story that evokes feelings, notably includes the “hard part”. We indulge in TV dramas and news media that capitalizes on our fears, not the “beige” and boring. So how can we tilt the inevitability of suffering to rewrite our stories through the eyes of bravery? How do we grapple with the loss of “who we were before” without succumbing to the numbness that lies on the other side of the initial response?
I write at length about unfolding of our experience of “becoming” because it’s something that I personally struggle with to often to see “success”. I am frozen in time in the body that I inhabit- simultaneously eager to push on and tethered by what’s been. I know this struggle is not uniquely mine, so I write about it to hopefully create space for any of you folks who feel the same.
Scale and scope of “falling apart” is personal and, fortunately, the Buddha speaks to the inevitability of circumstances ripe for the fall being an inevitability of the human condition. Life is suffering, it’s a perpetual shedding, unfolding, awakening, becoming. On one side, there is so much life to greet, and on the other, there’s versions of ourselves that we have loved and lost by no fault of our own. And it’s a hard conversation to engage because the gloomy-negativity loves company, particularly by cannibalising it’s own human form.
And so, I continue to lean into “por que no las dos”- both can exist, the unexpected rattling of grief as we lose these versions of us and the eventual comfort and control that settles in once we do meet and get to know that which we eventually become. Who is this person? What are their new strengths? What does “overcoming” add to this person’s outlook? How, then, do these experiences build up an armor to dress us as we continue on our finite life journies?
There’s a classic episode of Spongebob in which Mr. Krabs molts his shell and runs around Bikini Bottom for a period of time as a squishy blob as his new shell takes shape. The poignant example of what it feels like to feel overexposed, easily defensive, sensitive to what would otherwise feel dull has carried me through each new battle that’s greeted versions of myself that I’d formerly loved.
We can (and should) always have space for grace and self-expression, to look directly at our overexposed, naked form to meet this newer version with just a bit more love. The dead look in your eyes, the battle wounds (both physical and emotional) fresh and raw, and the changes in your posture are all sights to behold. Because origin stories are build on being beat down, you take your rest, you mend your wounds and you return to you. Because, at the end of the day, you’re the only one who can and will embrace yourself and get yourself back up and going.
Heavy shit, we process in our own ways, but this sort of mind map has been hugely helpful for me in times when things get tough- especially when I hear how nasty my inner chatter gets.
5 Simple Strategies to Elevate Your Movement Practice
Key Takeaways
Your body is built to move in patterns — and training those patterns with intention builds strength that actually translates to real life. By combining foundational movements, diverse planes of motion, and an understanding of how your body manages energy, you can train smarter, not harder.
Movement patterns like pushing, pulling, lunging, and walking mimic how we live, so include them all in your workouts.
Move in all directions; life doesn’t happen in a straight line; neither should your training.
Lifting well helps you sit, stand, carry, and recover with ease — it’s just practice for being human.
Foundations of Movement Patterns
There are somewhere between 5 and 7 fundamental movement patterns: gait, push, pull, anti/rotation, hip dominant, knee dominant, and lunge. An argument can be made that the latter three are really just variations of push or pull movements- a conversation for a different day. Our muscles and bones (and transitional tissues in between) are a series of pulleys and levers to make movement happen.
A full-body, valuable workout protocol incorporates all of these in some way. Some of them pair more nicely than others- for instance, a pull movement in the upper body pairs nicely with a pull movement in the lower body. That said, checking off the boxes is a level-one, solid start for any movement practice.
Planes of Motion
We move through 3 dimensions (though some of us might dive a bit deeper into the fourth): frontal, saggital, and transverse. The frontal plane is side-to-side movements, the saggital plane is front-and-back movements, and transverse is a lil bit of both*. Most all of us live most all of our time in the saggital plane. Loading weights, for sure, is most often moved through that plane of motion.
Incorporating the other two, especially integrating frontal plane movement, contributes to healthy, multidimensional joints. The transverse plane is an eventual byproduct of moving the full body, in a balanced way, through gravity’s constant pull.
*the transverse can be said to embody step one of an eventual thrust into the fourth dimension.
Practical Applications
We lift weights and stay strong so that we can perform best in our day-to-day life. I’ll say it over and over: movement, nutrition, and mindset are all just skills to be practiced. We continually arrive at deeper levels of nuance as we become more embodied and aware of our experiences. In life we sit and stand (knee dominant), we pick things up off the floor (hip dominant), we push a shopping cart, we pull a door open, we walk with a sleeping baby dangling off of us. All of these things are replicated in the gym setting, with the addition of load, in order to train and maintain the strength necessary to live with less injury.
Keep it simple! Over and Over, do the thing that looks like the things that you’re already doing and you’re likely to find that you end up doing the things in a way that feels a bit better every time.
Sleep: The Foundation of Health
For most of my life, sleep has been a nuisance. I yearned for all that I could accomplish in that time spent in slumber. As I’ve aged (and come to respect the value of 40 winks) my sleep quality has become a non-negotiable in my routine. That night time, melatonin-fueled semi-coma carries it’s weight in value for our lives. To avoid getting too in-the-weeds with the jargony bits of sleep science, consider this a high level understanding of all the systems invested in your good night’s sleep.
Digestive Health
You’ve heard it before, and you’ll hear it right here: your tummy is your brain’s brain. Our gut plays host to more microbes than the earth does humans. Each of our microbiomes is like a fingerprint, made up of a unique assortment of organisms specifically related to our current lifestyle and genetic factors. Digestion is a star player in the regularity of our circadian rhythms. As such, when our sleep is disturbed, our gut senses that and starts to make plans to adjust accordingly. Additionally, when
Our gut influences our sleep influences our guts in a lot of ways (see more here). Suffice it to say, though, that there are a few easy-peasy ways you can cultivate mindful habits that support sleep health through diet. These include:
Eating within the same time blocks throughout the day.
Avoiding eating within two hours before sleep time.
Following the 1-2-3 rule for fruits and (especially) veggies: 1 with breakfast, 2 with lunch, 3 with dinner.
Minimizing consumption of overly shelf-stable foods or highly processed, densely saturated foods.
Cognitive Function, Stress, and Regeneration
We need adequate sleep in order to replenish our brain stuffs after a day of being “things that think”. Our brains utilizes upwards of 20% of our energy resources to continue to conduct all of our bodily processes day-in and day-out. The byproducts of thinking get flushed out through the “glymphatic system” (the lymph of the central nervous system). This is an incredible feature and a high value mechanism that sleep enacts. Life without proper sleep is a lot like continuing to drive your car without an oil change. Its inefficient and sludges up the engine, rendering the vehicle a risk. Speaking of vehicles, scientists have studied the effects of poor (or no) sleep on cognition and have equated sleepless driving to driving while under the influence.
When we are stressed, though, our relationship with sleep gets even more complex. For instance, the stress hormone, cortisol, mobilizes stored glucose into the circulatory system to provide working muscles more readily available energy resources. If you’re into this shit, you’re into it and already know it. If you’re not into it, or you’re not interested in knowing more about it, don’t worry. Again, the bottom line is that sleep is intended to be a regenerative moment for our bodies to process out it’s waste. The efficacy of those processes is dependent on our circumstances. Because we exist in a hyper-active, hyper-productive world, that’s not always easy. When push comes to shove, if sleep is becoming a problem due to stress, there are a few measures we can take before calling our primary. These include:
Having a bed time routine. We are not immune to Pavlovian response. Put a few key actions into sequence to trigger your brain into “power down” mode.
Reduce or eliminate blue light after 8pm. Blue light stimulates receptors in the eyes to produce more cortisol.
Be observant of the effects that fluctuations on your emotions have on your relationship with sleep. Anxiety begets anxiety, how can you notice those feelings arise without feeding their flames?
The Short of It
We are not exempt from the natural law. Without adequate, quality regenerative time, our bodies run on fumes eventually breaking down from lack of resources. Prioritize that rest time, lean into feeling recovered, and live better for it!
Op/Ed: Make a Choice- On Purpose
You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make the horse drink. You can give your dog some cheese, point right to it, and they’ll still go sniffing in all the wrong places. Change psychology, particularly in this ultra-informed population, has begun to feel outdated at best, jaded at worst. These musings come from my years of struggling through (and eventually recovering from) these same afflictions.
Each day I am presented with various forms of “I saw a TikTok that said X, so I thought I would give it a try”, “I know what I need to do to make meaningful change, I just haven’t yet”, and the famous “I can change at anytime, I’d just prefer that the variables be perfectly aligned with my expectations before doing that”. It feels a lot like talking to a wall.
How do we reconcile that pursuing our dreams feels at odds with caring for ourselves in the present? Have we lost touch completely with our intuition, or whatever it is that guides us towards our goals? Or, is it that our ego has commandeered our inner compass, insatiable unless met with unbound success? As always, more questions than answers.
I recently sat with a line from the book “Inner Excellence” by Jim Murphy that read “The Ego is obsessed with outcomes” and, man, did that hit. As I’ve sought to unravel these blockages in my life decisions, this sentiment is echoed through the hallways of my past. Ego as a concept has historically been tough for me to understand.
At it’s base, Ego is the internalization of the performance that we put on daily. That performance is determined by the lives that we’ve lived, the interactions we’ve had. The narratives we’ve curated about our past unfold in the present and influence the outcomes of our future. We are the cruise directors on our life’s journey, and the Ego infiltrates our passage through protective mechanisms based on our past. At some point, the ego hijacks our inner guide and we lose the creative power of multitudes in pursuit of the singular endgame.
All this to say that we can lead ourselves to water, we can take ourselves right to the door of satisfaction and, instead, turn just to the left, choosing to look out the window and get so lost in the view that we neglect to actually get outside. Knowledge is power, and turning into the shadows can elucidate more tools for the fight- so, while answers may not fully materialize, contemplation is a gift! Keep searching, experimenting, and adjusting to meet the moment. That, I think, is the greatest joy of life.
Sleep Science: It’s Nothing to Snore About
Sleep- we see it happen to others, but we’re unconscious when it happens to us. What exactly is going on with and while we sleep? Knowledge is power, and a brief overview of the chemistry of sleep might be just what the doctor ordered to drive the value of sleep home for those of you who leave your sleep health wanting.
Gut and Neurotransmitters
The gut is often referred to as our primitive brain because, before we had a brain, we were simply an anus. When embryos develop, the first thing to form is tube that runs from mouth to anus. While the brain has clearly presented itself and evolved into who it is today, the gut continues to be the man-behind-the-curtain, shouting cues, directing the whole operation. Our stomachs are the primary production site of several neurotransmitters and the home to gazillions of microbes.
The neurotransmitter, serotonin, is one of these aforementioned transmitters that heavily influence the cadence and quality of our sleep. Serotonin is most well known as a “happy hormone”, mostly produced in the gut (90%), that plays a role in temperature regulation and sleep health. Serotonin is a byproduct of essential amino acid tryptophan (popularized by the post-thanksgiving siesta), only accessible through the foods we eat. When we’re not eating right, our sleep quality diminishes as well. This contributes to lower immune health and increased vulnerability to all sorts of dis-ease.
Glymphatic System
Sleep is so important for us to get in proper amounts because we “thinking things”. The act of thinking is an effortful process (for some more than others) that results in waste byproducts that need to be cleared out of the brain. In Ayurveda, this waste elimination system is called “ambu vaha strotas”- it is the waterways of the body that clarify the waste, circulate the vitality, and keep us operating on all cylinders. Of the fluid systems in our bodyes, the “lymphatic system”is our liquidy-juiciness that transports nutrients, immune response, and nuerotransmitters.
Our central nervous system has it’s own specialized lymph to clarify built up waste product- called the Cerebro-spinal Fluid, part of the “glymphatic system”. At night, when we sleep, this system awakens and flushes our brain and nervous tissue so that we can wake up fresh and ready to go the next day. Long term, low quality sleep contributes to neurodegenerative diseases and cardiovascular disease.
The Pineal & Adrenals
Finally, the enigmatic pineal gland and the energetic adrenals, our internal metronomes. Through sensory input processing of light received via the visual cortex, our pineal gland excretes sleep promoting hormones. Low spectrum to no light, soft sounds, neutral temperature, satiated gut are all signals. These send a cascade of messages out to downshift the system, we are fed and safe, prepare for sleep mode. Blood pressure drops along with body temperature, excretory functioning slows down, and our body goes into phases semi-paralysis.
In the morning, wake-promoting hormones begin to pour into our blood. Digestive processes are energized back into life, the heart beats with a little more razzle-dazzle, and our sense perception eagerly receives the world around it. In stressful times, that energy spike is exacerbated, spiraling into persistent states of unrest while crowding out deep, regenerative rest opportunities.
Heavily stimulating activities in the hours just before sleep are a recipe for underwhelming sleep. Shocking a system in need of repair is burning the candle at both ends, unwittingly taking years away from your life.
Learning and Consolidation
There’s too much reality to face before expecting perfection in any wellness ritual. Systemic and systematic disruption to access to basic needs will always be part of our lives. That said, why wave the white flag and succumb to those habits when you do have those glimmers of “you” time? In the name of true self care, any effort toward your healthiest future is a worthwhile endeavor. Each choice to do so is a vote in favor of your life.