Gratitude Practice Day 6/30 - Bowspring

*I have been writing daily posts on my instagram sharing what I am deeply grateful for in my life as a 30 day practice for a program I am in. This particular post just wanted to be way longer than instagram can hold so I’m sharing it as an article on here.

The journey I have been on with my body and movement is a long one. 

My body is and always will be my most potent teacher. 

I have always been into movement and ‘exercise’ as long as I can remember. It was paired with my obsession with the body and how it worked. It was a healthy and true fascination that quickly got distorted by the obsession with controlling, manipulating, and ultimately punishing my body.

I am sure there was a time when I was very young that I didn’t think about my body and my body and I were fully in sync. I watch my girls now and I see how natural listening to your body and moving your body is. However, I don’t remember this. The only early thoughts about my body I remember having are that my body was wrong, too big, bad, and ultimately disgusting. 

I can probably track these thoughts back to as young at 7. Around 11 I started to consciously exercise to try to change my physical appearance. I would run and run and run the dirt roads around my house. By the time I was 13 it was obsessive and the pushing myself hard physically was paired with a deeply warped view of food or what was ‘healthy.’ 

One of the things I am most grateful for early on in my relationship with my body is that I got into weight lifting very young. I had a gym teacher freshman year of high school that was super into women lifting weights and being strong. He was all about freshman girls setting personal records on bench pressing and would regularly tell us girls how we should always be able to squat more than than the boys. The things I remember him teaching are actually solid foundations of muscle building/hypertrophy that I still agree with today. 

At the time I definitely used this knowledge of weight lifting in unhealthy and obsessive ways, but ultimately, I am so grateful for how early on I got comfortable with barbells, kettlebells, and that feeling of building strength from the inside out.

Girls feeling strong externally, helps them feel strong internally. I know this.

I always loved being really strong and I was relatively strong. Although, now I know if I had eaten more I would have been much stronger.  

As I moved into college, stopped playing sports and having designated practice times or workout sessions I oscillated between lifting weights, punishing my body through hours of cardio on machines, hot inferno yoga, spinning, lots of hiking and biking, and doing absolutely nothing but cowering in bed avoiding daylight after drug and alcohol binges. I had this double life for all of my twenties.

On one hand I was a super health nut and on the other hand I was a complete hot mess ratchet party girl. 

I continued this double life through my stint in Peace Corps, where I was very addicted to opiates, a disturbing (but mostly fun) drunk, all the while doing lots of yoga, meditation, and running half marathons.

When I got back to the states determined to stop using pills as aggressively (but of course still once in awhile), I continued this pattern of sweaty hot yoga with weights, going to spinning classes at 6am after taking ecstasy and blowing lines all night, and eventually I ended up where most people like me do: CrossFit.

What a perfect way to punish myself for my debaucherous ways. 

During the time I got really into CrossFit I did start to clean up my druggy-ness. I could clearly see that I was getting to an age where it was no longer cool to do drugs; it was sad. I was also starting to do the internal work and that god-sized-hole was starting to fill.

As I got more in touch with myself and came back into my body I started to see how deeply all my exercise and movement was about punishment, not joy, and just like the drugs and alcohol slowly stopped being such a thing, the super intense exercise did too. 

By the time I got pregnant with my first baby I was fully sober from substances other than a drink every now and again. I exercised throughout pregnancy and as soon as I could I got back to it after she was born, but my body had started to revolt. 

I was all the sudden incapable of getting into yoga poses that had been very easy for me before. Just walking around the house picking up toys and doing dishes started to flare up excruciating lower back pain that would have me laying on the floor every 10 minutes while I tried to clean up the kitchen. 

I got pregnant again when my first daughter was 6 months old and I started to blame all the aches and pains on pregnancy. I religiously saw a chiropractor, acupuncturist and massage therapist, but I was in a lot of pain and discomfort most of the time. 

I continued to do some pregnancy approved weight training, gentle yoga and walked as much as I could but the truth was it all made me feel exhausted and I was shocked at how little I could do compared to what I used to be able to do pre pregnancy. 

By the time my second daughter was born my body was so entirely unrecognizable to me sometimes I literally didn’t recognize myself in the mirror. I was in pain almost all of the time and I gained more weight in those first 6 months of my second daughter’s life than I had in her pregnancy. Also, around this time is when my severe insomnia started. 

Throughout all this I continued to weight lift, walk, and do yoga as much as I could because I told myself it had to be helping, right? 

I started seeing a nerve pain/nervous system specialist who told me to stop doing yoga and that yoga may have actually been worsening my back pain. She also told me to just stop doing anything but walking and only walking when I absolutely felt up for it. 

It was revolutionary for me to hear these things because even though I was deeply exhausted on every level I just assumed that yoga and weight training were going to be good for me. 

I stopped doing all yoga and my back pain got significantly better within a week. I stopped weight training other than doing the super basic lifts slowly and making sure my nervous system was fully relaxed before and after doing the lifts. I walked only when I felt like it. 

This is honestly where I have been at the last few years. I was able to start doing yoga again about a year ago but I notice that it would flare my back pain if I did it too much. I’ve been through phases where I can lift a little bit heavier and harder. 

I continue to have a lot of body work and be in a constant state of communication with my body. Today, movement is purely for joy and training with weights is to feel strong and capable internally (and be able to play with and lift my kids).

I am still healing the consequences of the choices I made around my body in my twenties. I am clear on that. This last 6 months or so I have felt strong, my sleep has regulated, and my body generally feels good. 

This last summer I stumbled upon Bowspring yoga. I was intrigued because of the somatic repatterining it talked about. 

So I started a totally new thing and it was confusing and weird at first. I would get deeply incommensurately frustrated during class (a good sign you’re repatterining something), but, ultimately after each class I felt clearer. I could tell it was shifting holding patterns I’d had in my body for years. I felt more open and connected to my body and it felt like there was a whole new level of embodiment I was touching. 

After about 3 months of bowstring my back pain stopped flaring. I started to feel like I could “spring” up off the floor when playing with my girls. I was more open emotionally and my body stopped feeling like it was a creaky suit of armor. 

Another wild benefit I’ve experienced from Bowspring is an ability to orgasm in all different positions. Yup. So much more openness in my pelvic floor translated to a higher libido and more pleasure during penetrative sex. 

Now, about 6 months into my Bowspring practice, I am deeply grateful to the modality. It has healed and continues to heal my relationship to my body and help me to fully take up residence in my body in a pleasurable way. My physical body is starting to align more and more with my spiritual embodiment.

My work in the world is truly at the intersection between the physical and metaphysical. So much of what I teach is about how to bring nourishment, healing, openness, and connection from the spiritual, mental, and emotional bodies into the physical body.

Our physical body needs practices to ground and root our mental, emotional, and spiritual healing in to. It’s great to have realizations and make connections emotionally and spiritually, but if you don’t know how to bring it into the physical body, your third dimensional reality will not change.

Bowspring feels like a practice that does this. It helps us repattern the way we hold our bodies so that more energy and life-force can flow through them unimpeded. It helps us open physical pockets of holding and move old energy out. I am so grateful for that. 

I will be offering some super basic and simple Bowspring practices at my retreat SAVOR. I actually believe that somatic repatterining is a huge aspect of truly healing and absorbing nourishment into our physical bodies.