What if this was the year when you finally got into allyship with your body?
What if this was the year when 'loving your body' or 'loving how you feel' stopped being empty platitudes and started to click? When pain stopped being an adversary and started being a valued advisor?
What if this year you had some of those moments you remember having as a kid, and you hear about from other people, when the physical sensation of moving your arms and legs made you down-right giddy?
...like riding full-blast downhill on a bike? ...or turning a corner on a trail to behold the most incredible view? ...or, after finishing something that really tested your body, lapping up the wave of relief and joy that follows?
I, Will Belew, am convinced that within each of us there is a treasure trove of sensations--pleasurable, painful, insightful, novel and familiar--that already include allll the answers we need to navigate toward this kind of relationship with our body.
Finding those sensations isn't too hard, even if they are obscured behind snap-judgements we have about ourselves (like: 'no pain no gain! So this workout must not be doing anything…' ← this is poppycock).
At the same time, if we're talking about pain, there are some sensations that are almost impossible to ignore.
Either way, positive or negative, seeking out the information our body has to offer is something that can happen right now, just by settling your focus on what you feel.
We just gotta do it (and want to do it 😉).
That 'doing it' part, especially as weeks roll into months, years, and decades--that's the real sticky spot. Hanging in there with those sensations--good or bad--and valuing them enough to let them shape your actions.... now that's tough.
It's tough for a whole litany of reasons, like the fact that us humans love to find the fastest way to a goal (and miss important scraps of info along the way), or that we've practiced the habit of dismissing our own sensations, over and over, in favor of what our culture tells us to think and feel.
Whatever the block or blocks might be, the pie-in-the-sky 'transformations' we dream about will run into rough patches, and we'll get stuck.
So, after years and years of coaching people before, during and after 'resolution season', I see now that what we need, much more than any single spurt of motivation or magic bullet, is an approach that will help us work through those blocks by:
Arming us with tools to find and understand the vast sensory information from our bodies
Providing support and structure for us externally, like scaffolding, until we have sufficiently established that stability internally (and even then, external structure can be a huge leg-up)
Not just offering us 'someone else's' approach to 'try on', but is actually self-guided, self-directed, and able to shift with us as life happens (cuz, ya know, life happens)
And we all need these things.
Whether your goal is to feel confident getting up off the floor or winning a gold-medal, your efforts will always be dictated by one thing: the relationship you have with your body.
Here's to finding your gold, this January and beyond,
Coach Will