Move

I woke up this morning with anxiety. Heart racing. Teeth clenched. It took me a minute to catch my breath. I gulped down the water I left on the nightstand last night, thankful to last night’s me that takes care of tomorrow morning’s me. I sat there trying to figure out what caused the anxiety. A bad dream? Stress about something specific? Stress in general? Or perhaps I had become dehydrated in the night causing my body to send distress signals. My body doesn’t know the difference between a physical attack, an emotional attack, or its own systems malfunctioning (and neither does yours by the way) so it sends anxiety to let me know something is off. Tracing that back is a challenge, however.

So after taking care of bodily functions, input and output, I stilled myself in meditation. It took the edge off. Anxiety still present but duller, and that is when I sighed because I knew what I had to do.

Move.

Two years ago I was in a car wreck. It was the scariest and most devastating thing to ever happen to me. I was rear ended in excess of fifty miles an hour as my foot was on the break. When we finally came to a stop their front bumper was in my back seat. Our bodies are not designed to take impacts like that. That morning before getting in the car, I took my dog for a casual two mile walk. After the accident, I was on bed rest for five weeks and it would be months before I could walk down the street again, let alone miles.

That car wreck taught me a lot of lessons, but the biggest one it taught me was to move. It’s a funny lesson on the face of it. Especially, because I was on bed rest for so long. But movement became my antidote.

Months after the wreck, my injuries turned into chronic pain. When you are in eye watering, blinding pain, when you are in pain that is so loud that you cannot hear or think, you become a wounded animal. All I wanted was to curl up on the couch and scream. I became a heap on my couch in blinding, screaming pain. I lay there and throbbed.

Turns out that animal instinct is wrong. It is, in fact, the worst thing thing I could do for my pain. It turns out that movement is what I needed. I learned from doctors, a physical therapist, and a personal trainer how to move my battered body. I learned that whenever pain overtook me, the only option I had was to get up off the couch and move. It might be a massage with therapy ball or a stretch or a mobility exercise or a walk or a workout. Something. Do something. Anything. Move. And like a miracle, after moving, I would feel better. Every session with my physical therapist or personal trainer was grueling. But afterwards, I would be in less pain. My brain couldn’t wrap around this perverse logic. I’m in pain so I don’t want to move and then I do this workout that hurts but afterwards I’m in less pain? How does that make sense? It was strange and enraging.

How could movement be the answer?

All I wanted was to curl up on the couch and cry and scream, but instead, when I overrode that instinct and forced myself to move, I found relief.

Now I’m forcing myself to make movement a habit. I don’t like it. It doesn’t come naturally to me. But I am doing it. And I know when I haven’t kept up with it because the chronic pain returns with a vengeance. It is now the crack of the whip that keeps me going. If I do not commit to movement, I am surrendering to pain.

The funny thing is that this movement cure works not just on the physical level. It is mental, too.

So when I woke up this morning with anxiety, I knew what I had to do. I threw on some clothes, got my dog in the car, and we went to our local park for a little nature walk.

As we walked through the trees my brain grumbled and rumbled. It chewed on this problem and that issue. It worried about how this one client will resolve that big issue and worried about will I hear back from that store about a vending opportunity. It chewed and chewed on the knots and the to do list. Until the trees distracted me. Until the feeling of my feet against the ground felt solid. Until the smell of fresh air filled my nose. Until the blue sky peaked out from behind the clouds. Until I noticed the strength of my body as we walked each step of the mile and a half route. Little by little, my brain stopped grumbling. I could breathe deeply. I no longer felt haunted, hunted, or hurt. The anxiety I woke up with dissipated. My body felt strong and sure.

And funny enough, this movement thing works for everything. When I’m feeling stuck in my life, I take a movement, any movement, a tiny step towards making my life better. It might be tidying up one corner in one room. It might be brushing my teeth. It might be calling a friend. It might be a tiny step towards a big goal. And I’ll be damned if starting a little bit doesn’t make the whole thing just start running.

Like the Avoidance Journey, just the act of writing down what I was avoiding gave me the movement I needed.

It’s the flicking of a pebble down a mountain that hits a larger pebble then the two pebbles begin rolling together that hit a stone and then a rock and then suddenly there is an avalanche of movement down the mountain.

I don’t think there is anything special about me. I don’t think I have super powers or that I’m gifted in a way that others are not. I had incredible resistance and toddler type temper tantrums about all of this. Every workout with my trainer I would say ‘I can’t believe this is the fucking solution. I hate this.’ I didn’t want to move. I didn’t want to do. I didn’t want to try. I wanted to remain the wounded animal curled up on the couch. I allowed my world to become small and trapped. I didn’t want anything good to enter my world.

As I look back at that time in my life when I felt small, wounded, trapped, and like there were no solutions, I tried to understand and figure out what changed? How did I get from that small trapped place to the rolling, flowing place I’m in now. I didn’t just wake up one day and say today’s the day for change and now I am going to start! Hooray for movement! Yay! I can do it! It didn’t look like that at all. It was remaining consistent with my personal trainer and having accountability. It was finally finding a really good therapist and facing the fact that I have PTSD. It was seeing the example of Jen Butler doing her Avoidance Journey. It was friends checking in on me and inviting me to do things.

In so many movies and good stories, the protagonist wakes up one fine day and just does the thing! Real life isn’t like that. Real life is flicking multiple pebbles down the mountain and seeing which one starts things moving. Anyone can flick a pebble down a mountain and see what happens. It takes multiple flicks of multiple pebbles, flicking the same pebble over and over again, community support, rising and falling, and rising again.

For me, many small tiny movements.

Movement looks different for every body. It looks different for the various mental and physical health journeys that everyone is on. In my case, a walk in a nature preserve with my dog shifted everything. In someone else’s case movement might be watching a nature live stream from bed or finding a therapist or calling a friend or asking for help or cleaning up one corner of one room or making a doctor’s appointment or filing for disability or or or or. Nothing is one size fits all and movement is particularly not one size fits all. It’s not about pressure, bullying yourself, or bullying by others, to just move damn it! It’s about what tiny shift will be the pebble that you can flick down the mountain to start to flow in the direction you are hoping to go.

So this letter goes out to you, you who might feel trapped or stuck or in pain. I hope you know that you are not alone and I hope you find a pebble that you can move today.