(This picture was a little too ambitious but it was fun to try)
I have been helping to run a windsurfing, stand up paddle-boarding club/shop in Thailand for the last 14 years.
In that time we have taught and supplied equipment to thousands of people. I have also worked as a massage therapist and personal trainer in Australia. I have always been intrested in how people move and how that is effected by our more persistent emotions.
You can see that happy people have happy faces while those who have suffered display their past also. Our tissues remember consistent patterns of tension. Our bodies remember our predominant emotions. The stories we carry about what we have experienced come to shape our posture and effect the way we move.
To stand on a board on the water, when the water is moving requires balance, but what is balance?
In this case it is the ability to keep our weight centred in line with gravity. Or in simple terms to keep our heads over the base of our support. If our heads go too far forwards, backwards or to one side, we fall over. This applies on land also, but on a board on choppy water there is force pushing up through our feet unevenly.
If our body is tense lifting one leg will tip us over, if our body is loose and our hips are free to sway, lifting one leg will not effect our balance or the energy required to maintain it(well not much anyway). It is in fact non useful tension that ruins our balance and wastes our energy.
So why would we carry non useful or dysfunctional tension?
Our bodies are a collection of cells that come together to form tissues and organs. They not only have greater chance of survival in this form, but they are able to specialize, read and respond to the environment in more opportunistic ways. Thats what we are, a community of cells, working together under the central government of that which we call “self”.
As we begin to have and store experiences we become conditioned, so that we always tend to react a certain way in a given situation. Much of that reactivity is not based on what actually just happened, but rather how we perceived it.
Different people respond differently to the same circumstances based upon the meanings they applied to similar events in the past. How we related emotionally to the past experience determines how we will react moving forwards, how we will move, how we will use energy and who well we can balance under challanging circumstances.
Repetition and emotion determine the strength of a memory. The repetition can happen either in real life or in the imagination, the emotion is a physical electro chemical event that leaves an imprint in our physiology.
Emotion determines the shape we are in, so what determines the emotion?
Emotion is the energy of relationship, it is how we see events effecting us personally.
The more strongly we are attached to particular outcomes the more we will take them personally.
Now this sounds like a mind game, but it plays out at the level of our cells. When they feel threatened they contract, when curious they soften and are receptive. When they contract they are blind and can only run programs, when open they are situationally aware and can repsond appropriately.
Those who move well, only tense when it is advantageous to do so, the rest of the time they are also open, flowing and sensitive to their surroundings.
We can not think happy, but we can feel exstatic. Sensation is our chance for joy. So what makes us shut down, tense and run programs? Fear, Apprehension, threat, perceived dangers? Now for sure there is a time when these may be appropriate, but those are almost always the times when we actually need to move with agility, speed and grace.
Why would an opportunistic organism develop motor skills that do not allow us to move effectively when we most needed to?
If we applied meanings to an event that caused us to feel deeply threatened, then we will tense if we think those conditions may be repeated, if we take anything personally it will program the way we move later.
Our sense of self is a pseudo organism that lives like a ghost overlayed on top of our biology. Without it our biology is just part of the greater flowing biology from which all life both emerges from and disovles into. To feel the life that is flowing as experienced by our nervous systems is to know pure extacy, to take it personally and identify as a self that is separate from the greater biology and the geology from which that emerged is to know fear.
This is why we can feel happy, but never think it.
Now what of pain?
Pain is a strong signal, but it does not really become excuriciating until we perceive it as a threat. If we experience it as a strong sensation but have no opinion about it, if we do not take it personally or make it “mean” anything then it will remain as a strong sensation. Conversely if we take it personally and decide we dont like it, or that it is dangerous we will contract against it, this will interfere with our cells ability to maintain homeostasis. The signal will amplify, but the message is let go of the fear, release dysfunctional tension, allow the body to move appropriately and to do this it needs us to be aware of our environment. Rather than playing a movie in our minds about what happened before or what may happen.
Our biology is organised for greater sensitivity, greater opportunity, when we take things personally we end up in strategy all the time. Our awareness is in the movies we play in our minds with our thoughts, while this is going on, our biology is not just blind it is responding to fantasy. It may even be creating fresh electro chemical impulses and laying down more non functional motor skills.
Now can you see why standing on a board on moving water challanges us to both be present and to drop non useful tension? Can you see why the ocean offers such an incredible opportunity for recalibrating to reality, to biology as a flow?
To whatever it was that it was doing before we took everything.....personally?
Hope that made sense, thank you for reading.