The Body Doesn’t Forget

“We must become acquainted with our emotional household: we must see our feelings as they actually are, not as we assume they are. This breaks their hypnotic and damaging hold on us”

-Vernon Howard

                Our society demands self-control; ‘perfection’ is our ultimate pursuit and we strive for it with our appearance, with our relationships and with our careers.  We join gyms to work our bodies in the pursuit of maintaining our shape and becoming more fit or beautiful, we run our children here and there in the hope that they will be happy and love us and we are busy at work or in our relationships because we think that time spent is time valued.  Showing emotions or feeling is something often associated with weakness; it shows a lack of control or a vulnerable side to us.  Strength is often depicted as being made of stone.   And when you think about it, the people whom we often admire for beings strong are those who have faced a traumatic event, put on a brave face and soldiered on!  The feeling and the pain isn’t there so, therefore, this must be strength!  When did being made of stone become so admirable???

                When we are young we are full of feelings.  We cry when we hurt, feel fear or pain and we “are sensitive and react immediately and directly to our social and physical environment” (“The World of Feelings and Emotions” – Walter Last).  However, it is very early that we are taught that this is unacceptable; parents are told that by letting a child cry through the night it will teach the child to sleep better.  Often what happens is that the lesson appears to be learnt; the crying stops, the sense of abandonment doesn’t.  When we feel abandoned and afraid we often hold our breath, contract our diaphragm and close through our chest.  A closed chest, contracted diaphragm and held breath are often associated with respiratory problems such as asthma.  We learn certain conditions due to how we train our muscles to respond.

We don’t often associate emotions with the body.  Even scientists would have us believe that they are in our head.  Yet there have been many yoga instructors, massage therapists and psychologists that have reported patients or subjects that, when they physically moved in certain positions, it brought fourth emotions and sometimes tears.  Paul Ingraham (BIO) writes of a lady who asked him why is when she tilts her head back she starts crying? (“Body Memory and Body Work” – Paul Ingraham), while performing a shiatsu, a friend of mine pressed on the abdomen of a client and produced tears and many associates I know who teach yoga have been told to expect and respect crying during meditation.  Why is it that, despite not having expressed the emotion, we feel it when we are touched or positioned into a certain posture?

                When we expect pain, for instance, someone sticking a needle into us, our natural reaction is to tense our muscles and hold our breath.  Emotions often inspire pain, therefore, when we feel emotions, there is a physical reaction; we feel guilt and so our blood vessels constrict, our blood pressure drops as does our muscle tone (“Body Memory and Body Work” – Paul Ingraham), we feel anger so our body temperature rises, our shoulders become tense and our skin becomes more coloured, when we feel nervous we feel our hands become cold and fidgety, we become cold, pail and nervous and we feel a nauseous or sinking feeling in our abdomen.  So what happens when we want to be ‘strong’ and suppress our emotions???  According to psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich, our body stores this and our emotions become “carved in flesh” (“Body Memory and Body Work” – Paul Ingraham).  Our anger gets stored in our shoulders, our nervousness gets stored in our gut and our guilt gets stored in our lower back.  Older adults talk about the aches and pains they feel in their body.  Perhaps this is where all the lost emotions went.

                                It has been proven that negative thoughts suppressed show themselves in other ways; unexpressed negativity has been proven to develop cancerous tumours and other health disorders (“Body Memory and Body Work” – Paul Ingraham).   Findings show that cancer is frequently diagnosed about a year after a traumatic event such as losing a spouse, mental depression has proven to have many negative effects on our immune system, our digestive juices are inhabited when we are stressed and asthma attacks may be triggered by fear or apprehension (“The World of Feelings and Emotions”: - Walter Last). Our tendency to hold our emotions back, be everything for everyone and to be a soldier for whatever task is at hand can cause us bad health.  If there ever was anything to cause us weakness and not strength, it is to put our physical health at risk and lessen our chances at longevity. 

                When I consider the posture of successful men; Kerry Packer, Rupert Murdoch and see slumped shoulders and a protruding chin, I think “is this not the weight of the world on these men’s shoulders”???  The face still and tearless may tell us strength, but the body tells us more.  Take the late Kerry Packer for instance; over developed trapezius (neck) muscles probably due to stress, he suffered from as many as eight heart attacks in 1990 and was reported to have kidney issues in the year 2000’s until he eventually died of kidney failure in 2005 at age 68 (Wikipedia).  Despite us showing a brave face, our body responds to what we feel, and if we feel it over and over again our body distorts us into who we really are.  Oscar Wilde was right.  We can be beautiful and immaculate on the surface but our true-self, through our body, paints the portrait of who we really are.  Our Dorian Grey is ugly!  If we were what we felt, the picture would be beautiful. 

Dispelling Myths In Fitness Training

“Myth is an attempt to narrate a whole human experience, of which the purpose is too deep, going too deep in the blood and soul, for mental explanation or description.” – DH Lawrence.

Myths were something used in ancient times to explain why things happened.  There was no scientific technology for people to research facts and form educated opinions on why things are as they are… so stories were created and passed on through generations; Gods and Goddesses were credited for weather changes and natural disasters, tragedies and misfortunes were explained through creative and fictitious stories; monsters were invented, creatures were given life and victims became legends.  Even though most of us now don’t believe that a thunderstorm means we angered the God Zeus, or a boating accident is due to a Siren calling from the rocks, we still try to invent explanations when we don’t have the answers.  But why is it when the answers are at our fingertips, we can’t let go of the myth?

                Although sports date back to ancient times, the Fitness Industry is a relatively new one; Fitness clubs didn’t really become popular until the 80’s and becoming a qualified trainer wasn’t a requirement until the1990’s.  Prior to this, anyone who could move to music could take an Aerobics Class and anyone who could lift a weight and feel a muscle could train someone else to build strength.  As a result, just as those ancient folk before us did, those of us who didn’t know created a theory or story based on emotion and sensation.  According to Jane Fonda if you lie on your side and kick your leg up in the air it will tone your leg muscles (hey, they burn after 200 reps so! naturally it’s working!), and then she had us walking on our butt cheeks to burn fat from our arse (hey, I think the carpet burn alone did it!), and then someone told us that if you do sit-ups every day fat instantly disappears from the stomach area!…. There are endless examples; if I don’t feel sore after the workout I haven’t worked! If I don’t train weights today all my muscles will shrink overnight and I will become a weakling!  I am female and I lifted a weight! I’ll be huge by the morning!   The word is out there and we felt the sensation.  Of course it’s true!

                As the Fitness Industry becomes bigger and more competitive, the more educated the fitness population gets.  There is a lot of scientific research out there that proves that ‘feeling the burn’ isn’t the easy equation to seeing results.   Muscle soreness indicates muscle trauma and is believed to result from inflammation and microscopic tears in the elastic tissues surrounding muscle fibres.  Soreness is often a sign that we have not yet adapted to the training, not an indication of whether we have worked out or not.  Shock creates trauma, not necessarily growth.  There is scientific evidence to prove that a female doesn’t have enough testosterone to produce bulk and that recovery is an important stage of muscle growth.  The information is out there and yet we cling to the feeling!  We crave the ‘burn’ because it is physical and psychological evidence that we have experienced physical activity so we do small actions like bicep curls, or calf raises, or pulse sit-ups because we feel the burn more easily!  We do not consider the fact that bigger movements such as squats and dead lifts engage more muscles, work more of our body and, therefore, burn more calories and develop more muscle.  We hold onto the feeling and tell ourselves that it is not working or we won’t get results if that feeling isn’t there.

                I thought the idea of a convenient lifestyle was modern but now I realise it was ingrained within us from early generations; stories are easier than facts, answers are easier than questions, explanations are easier than knowledge.  If you look at the modern world it is all about convenience; cars to get you places faster, mobile phones to get you communicating instantly, drive-through for quicker eating, coffee drive-through for that caffeine hit without  the patience of waiting…  it is no wonder that so many myths become part of our lifestyle!  The made up explanation is so much easier to obtain and because it is often emotionally charged and delivered with vigour, we are hooked on the thought; we accept it and pass it on willingly.  It is easier to pass the word and see it go off like wildfire than to pass a book or essay and consider it.

                Sometimes it is the face of the message that doesn’t get the message across.  The 2% body fat girl without an ounce of muscle on her cannot tell the 100+kg body builder that biceps alone may not get his arms bigger, just as the muscle bound hulk cannot go to the 50% body fat woman and say, “Hey, weight training makes you leaner!”  How the message is delivered affects the lesson despite the research and the facts.  In this case perhaps proving that there are many educated voices proving the same points will hold more weight.

                How does one disprove any myth???  Myths work so well because they come from our emotions and our feelings; we feel the physical sensation (‘the burn’ or pain), we connect that with the emotional experience (‘results’ or ‘the lesson’) and then we summarise the result.  We often switch off to this idea of really knowing what works because the answer takes us away from what is more pleasurable; we want to believe that lying on our side and kicking our leg in the air means we exercised today and maybe we don’t like weights or cardio training because they take us from our comfort zones.  It is easier to take on board the myth that tells us what we want to hear.  What if we actually had to learn about our body and ourselves to achieve our real desires? This would mean work!   We would then have to research and be educated, get the information out there and then hope we role model what we are talking about. The answers are out there.  We only have to let go of our emotions and dismiss the myth to reap the rewards.