Take a Walk
You are made to be strong, confident and capable of doing hard things as a process of being in the flow of who you are created to be. So why is it that when the challenge is physical, when you exercise your body, that you accept panic, pain or punishment? Or do have a list of excuses for why you don’t do hard things at all?
Doing hard things does not have to equate to suffering. In fact, it very well shouldn’t. In the same way, physical exercise should not be a battle against your own body. It doesn’t need to feel like a raging war. You don’t have to hate it.
When you learn to breathe - when you learn in your inhale the action of your exhale and the way to follow the beat of your heart - it can (and will) feel like joy. This can be true even in the very heat of the most intense of circumstance.
It’s not just an ideal.
What does it mean to be a “mouth breather”? The mechanisms by which the body functions when breathing occurs through the mouth is akin to the reaction of the sympathetic nervous system, commonly referred to as the “fight or flight” response. This mode of survival is the same instinctual response that you would experience in a physical assault or attack. Although moments of assertiveness are essential to living, a perpetual existence in this state of being begins to have a tremendous impact on the mind and body. The symptoms begin to look like chronic fatigue, pain, injury, illness and disease - we often call it stress.
On the other hand, breathing through the nasal passages associates to the autonomic functions of the parasympathetic nervous system, also known as “rest and digest” or “feed and breathe.” Nose breathing operates the functions of the diaphragm, increasing capacity in the lower region of the lungs to better oxygenate blood flow and produce a physical environment of restoration and growth. With increased production of neurotransmitters including oxytocin, serotonin and dopamine, this is often the physical environment referred to as a “flow state.”
For many people, exercise becomes a process of self punishment, self loathing or escape. Practicing the physical body becomes a practice in fear - some fight it, some run from it and others feel victim to it. Some will find reward in the outcome of success, yet few truly learn to love and enjoy the actual process. The evidence of this is just beneath your skin, it’s imbedded into the very shape of who you are and the ways in which you carry yourself. It’s evident in the way that you breathe.
Your breath and mobility are intricately related. Your capacity to operate your nervous system is in direct relationship to the capacity of the space your body can occupy - if you can’t breathe in or through a position, you don’t belong there. Failure to heed this truth in exercise results in injury; failure to heed this truth in life results in pain.
This does not mean that you aren’t designed for intensity and boldness in the action that produces change. But it must be within the scope and with given respect of your present mobility. Too often the injuries of the ego become the shame and excuses of the lame, paralyzed by the changing tides of identity. Dissociating from the pursuit for anything better as if it were no longer possible to grasp, they become stagnant to evolution - feeling insecure as they watch their world keep moving by.
Until you know the safety of the space you can currently occupy, until you know your mobility, until you know who you are right now, real growth becomes impossible. The high experienced from the achievement of short term goals will be painfully humbled by the reality of grief when at last it meets the statues of pride.
Take a walk, take a run, take a ride - and breathe. There are intense truths waiting for acceptance, but it begins at surrender.
Awareness can begin at a single breath. The cost is that you must pay your attention.
