At the end of last week, I walked out of work feeling my left ankle hurt. The history with my ankles and physical activity is as follows: I started dancing at age 5 with classical ballet training, from age 12 to 17 I was in competitive rhythmic gymnastics, practiced Gong Fu in my 20s as well as continued dance training and performance till I was 30, since my 30s I have been practicing Qi Gong, Tai Ji Quan and Yoga regularly. To be honest, my feet were not meant to be put into pointe shoes and standing on my toes constantly as is required in ballet and rhythmic gymnastics. As such I paid the price with injuries and strains during my time as an active dancer and gymnast, and still do. My ankle is my gauge for many things: the weather, the physical activities I can be doing, the shoes I wear, which will determine the clothes I will wear on that particular day and most recently, what I eat or don’t eat, as I am finding that certain food affects my joints. This got me thinking about life and how our choices affect it.
So often, many of us go through life without ever thinking about what we do to our body(mind). We push, bend, twist, slump our bodies, overfeed or underfeed it with food and water or with other substances. We expose it to many things, like the weather - cold, hot, damp, dry, to digital, chemical and mechanical stimulation for long periods of time. We humans do lots of things to our bodies and often do not think or imagine that our bodies might be keeping track of all the things we are doing and exposing it to. I came up with a theory, as I walked with a limp through the streets of Basel last Friday. We are living on credit, credit that our bodies give us to go through life. We imagine that it’s all for free; those late nights we put in at work and then on to a party, with lots of booze and having to go to work the next morning, without having slept at all, but we’ll catch up on sleep on the weekend, no problem. The “trouble” is, the body does keep score. We may have been in our 20s then and we bounced back fast after a weekend of sleep or a little more coffee, but deep in our bodies, there is a hypothetical counter calculating what was taken out and what was put in. What happens when we run out of credits? That often comes at the Changing Years of Midlife (Menopause or Andropause), our bodies tally the midlife accounts, having tracked our withdrawals and our credits till that point. It relays its findings in signs like pain, weight-gain, fatigue, etc and we are baffled. Why is my body reacting like this? I haven’t done or eaten anything different. What did I do to deserve this?
The point is this, our bodies have been bouncing back from life’s challenges since we were born. When we are young, according to Chinese Medicine, most of our bodies are filled with an abundance of Qi, Blood, Yin and Yang energy; our bodies are like rubber balls filled with enough air, that bounces easily and lithely back up after falling down. But as time passes, the material of our ball is affected by wear, from our environment and repeated use, and the air (substance) inside the ball needs to be pumped up regularly. If regular maintenance and care are not done, we can’t bounce back efficiently, and this creates more wear-and-tear. Our ball starts to deteriorate from the inside and out. What used to be easy becomes difficult. It’s like there was a time when you were young, you could eat pizza every night of the week and there were no issues. Then comes a point in time where the body says, “Stop! I was digesting this stuff you call food and not complaining. But now it’s gone on too long, I can’t digest this junk anymore and I need real food.” The body shows us by creating pain in the abdomen, bloating, diarrhea to release the stuff it didn’t want to absorb anymore. If we understood what it was telling us, we stopped eating pizza and put some real food into our bodies; an occasional pizza can be tolerated, just not every day.
I feel like I am now paying the price of having had an active first 3 decades of life with intense dance and sport. I made choices as a child and young adult to do certain things that strained my body, in particular my feet and ankles. Now I pay the consequences for these actions. I may have used up some credit for my ankle and am now required to pay for the deficit. Of course it is not only negative consequences of my choice; I have gained many skills and experiences as a dancer and mover, like discipline, coordination, flexibility and balance that I will keep till the end of this lifetime. I understand many things about the human body and life, because I myself have moved and experienced. I have learned to listen to the subtle language of the body, sometimes not so subtle as it speaks to me in pain or immobility, or notice the whispers of imbalance before it occurs. My body has taught me to respect the healthy limits of movement and life, to do the care and maintenance that it requires to maintain itself through this lifetime.
Image by Vladislav83 on pixabay.com
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