Its all about full embodiment, fully inhabiting our body vehicle and movement is a total key here, because life itself is eternally on the move.

In many spiritual traditions the body (intimately tied with our emotions) has traditionally be viewed as somewhat lower in value than the mind and that’s in my opinion nothing but outright brainwashing in compliance with a left-brain oriented culture that values rationality over feelings.

The reason I consider movement so essential for our sense of well-being is that I literally lived inside my head for most of my life until around 27 years of age when I left Germany and moved to London. And here everything changed. I had Sex for the first time in my life and I started working as long distance push-bike courier. What was shown to me with unmistakable clarity was that you can be literally disembodied (and societal structures are lending themselves to push this phenomena collectively) and that movement of whatever type can break this spell.

Up till this point in my life I avoided sensing my body at all costs to the degree of using my car to pull up 400 metres to the next petrol station fromwhere I would get my bulimic junk food supply for the next throw up)

Since then, there were many more finer layers of dissociation I have shed through years of dedicated mindful physical practice.

As a qualified yoga teacher (who practices but doesn’t teach (officially)),

I genuinely believe that your body with all its symptoms of illness and discomfort simply tries to get your attention of where things are out of balance and instead of medicating over these symptoms we are well advised going deeper and finding the root.

Movement can be an invaluable companion here, as in learning to work with the pain/ symptoms. Conscious Release of ongoing judgment of “how it is supposed to look and feel and why I can’t do something when apparently I ought to because whoever else can do it or I could do it yesterday” is an absolute necessity when you are serious about

Sustainable achievement and progression towards holistic health.

I have found that even in the so called so awake Yoga community, spiritual Ego is rampant, so is an anal retentive attitude that is much infested with control as it is with dogma and the apparently superior “enlightenment pathways of the Mind” to a more heart centered approach and/ or the combined balance of both.

A few more things to consider:

With movement I quite literally mean ANY TYPE OF MOVEMENT you enjoy doing.  The key again is daily practice rather than exhausting one/off sessions that you do in a forced and resentful manner once in a while. Your frame of attitude will feed and nourish your body or deprive it further. Its up to us, which way we turn!

You can clean your house and stretch you ligaments wide and far, using breath and simple awareness, you can stand in line in the post office and “swim brest stroke style” or do some simple squats until you are being served, you can use the stairs instead of the escalator, your own two feet instead of your car etc. I also love to use my actual physical environment as a form of inspired prop to get moving, aka the lamp post next to bus stop you are waiting, the holding poles in the metro or the balcony of wherever you are enjoying the views…you get the drift I guess.

Our bodies store traumas on a cellular level and especially if there is sexual/physical trauma present, you MOVING is breaking up the crystallized terrors in your internal waters. So yes I’m known to militantly moving my body No matter how I feel and especially when I am re-triggered. This was an invaluable tip from a dear friend that helped me enormously to shift a state of freeze/ paralysis I have carried around for most of my life.

Over the years, I have learned listening and yes, speaking to my body with its very own type of intelligence, especially when it comes to discomfort and pain.