The detox journey (not a speedy process, btw) that’s been waking me up to importance of my (lack of) liver function and all the ways it’s been affected by trauma and life has led to the discovery of how much movement matters beyond ‘exercise’. Simple movement is required for the proper functioning of organs, and the support of general mechanical pumping to keep flows moving. What a devastatingly simple, powerful idea. Especially since there’s a lot about life lately that impels me to blow off the effort to move more. A lot of life is currently wearing us out and shutting us down.

These are the connections coming together for me. I knew all this, mostly, but now it’s a visceral, inside out learning. The safer it becomes to be in a body – though not less complicated – the more this makes sense at a feeling level. I could not feel the sense of it prior to a few years ago. Movement was walled off into exercise, work, and occasional forays into dancing.

A Katy Bowman podcast recently reintroduced me to the biological fact of needing to move even more as we age, to combat freezing in place and all the associated detriments we are well aware of. Reading her books I still have rolling around in my head the revelation of work-saving (just made me think of Ronco – I’m dating myself) impacts to health, and the hidden costs of comfort. She also introduced me to this idea of movement as a primary blood mover, rather than the heart. Helps explain the connection between heart disease and lack of movement – one little muscle just can’t do it ALL the whole time!

Recent reading of Wendell Berry has also opened my awareness to a different view of entitlement as it relates to effort, types of work, and the way slavery reclassified cultural constructions of labor.

It seems head turning, chewing, shaking, yawning are all required for emptying deuterium from our heads – heavy pollution that can sit around and clog up the brain. A 40hz flicker bulb can also support this process (thanks, Jack Kruse!)

And then we have the trauma bits, which is where a bunch of this eye-opening started for me a few months ago when the muscles that were supposed to help me stand up straight kept going offline. Bodynamics says those muscles are related to autonomy and personal will, go figure. The diaphragmatic breathing required for “proper” posture (I like healing posture or health promoting posture instead) is the opposite of self protective posture. Can you feel that, even as I say it? Otherwise, good luck getting psoas muscles to release. Modern life produces a bunch of contributing factors – tech neck, survival posture, crushing pressure the organs below, chronic high breath and hyperventilation vs pulsation of breath continuously pumping the flow for the whole body.

Because of our modern life deficit of twisting grasping, balancing, and jumping motions (thanks Tomek Bogdziewicz, Shel, Feldenkrais folks, and dancers!). We’ve become two dimensional characters even in our exercise. Walking without trunk rotation is more like a perpetual falling motion prevented by each next step.

Dancing, drumming, humming, and singing add another layer of stimulation for parts of the nervous system that deeply crave and need rhythmicity, integration of functions, vestibular health, and resilience. It’s a part that gets shut down by all the suppression of sound and movement we’re taught when young; it seems to easily annoy the shit out of adults so they react and sometimes shame it out of us. Or, more recently, diagnose and medicate it away.

Done now. Promised myself I’d write today (thanks, Stephen King – On Writing). Hope some of it was helpful.

Move it or lose it, for real.

PS forgot to add fascia stuff also making sense in this movement picture, but more on that another time.