The Coherent Body

There’s a record the body keeps that our minds can’t edit.

The record in the body is not a curated story.

Not a refined production of appearances (aka self managed and controlled imagery online and at the office/supermarket/school-drop, I mean who are we kidding).

Via research we now know ~ the body does hold everything: each emotion, nutrient, movement; what has been enjoyed, survived, or overridden.

And somewhere deep inside we can feel,

This is mine.

Photo by Liberty Ann on Unsplash

In my early twenties my body stopped cooperating.

Not dramatically.

Not permanently.

But it collapsed completely and it was not negotiable, I couldn’t avoid, escape or look away.

For someone who had always lived inside physical capability; the experience of an unwell and immobile body was more than anything, confronting. And then ~ curious.

I watched something I had always taken for granted go quiet.

What does it mean to be inside a body that has simply stopped?

The lesson of this experience has underpinned everything since: everything we ingest: physically, mentally, emotionally ~ lands somewhere.

It has an imprint.

I migrated myself back towards movement (and later to teaching), because I noticed my body was in pain, like all the time.

I had been writing my PhD: sitting immobile for hours. When I became unwell it was a kind of relief. My body said, “This is bullshit, let’s take a break. You’re not enjoying your life.”

Our body is not separate from the life we carry it through.

And eventually (after knocking out the doctorate), I became a movement teacher from inside that knowledge.

I never wanted to teach from a position of physical mastery because I already knew what a struggling body felt like.

Even though I had been a dancer in my youth (something I deeply regret not pursuing as a livelihood), my illness closed the gap between dancer and typical body before I returned to movement and teaching.

And what I saw in other bodies confirmed what I’d learned in my own.

A small body is not automatically a capable one. Or a healthy one.

The body responds to how you’ve lived. Not to how it looks from the outside.

I have worked with tight, dry, misaligned bodies that were slight. Bodies that had been starved of both nourishment and care. I have worked with larger bodies that were open, flexible, strong, and free.

Size is logistics. Range is subjective.

The Expanding Body

Pregnancy taught me logistics in the most literal sense.

Moving from a ‘small’ trained body to carrying large babies was not a loss, but a reorganisation of available proprioception.

Temporarily, I could not touch my toes.

Not because the capability disappeared, but because the geometry changed.

There is something quietly unusual about knowing exactly what full range feels like and not having access to it. There’s a sweet and funny softness to lean into the body changing.

The imagination of movement can travel outside of the body; akin to watching dance and feeling the movement as one’s own (I don’t know if others experience this ~ but for me when I watch live or recorded dance I can physically feel the choreography).

It creates a stop to confusing the map with the territory (my favourite idea in art btw).

If we confuse the map (the surface simplification) for the territory, we miss out on the experience.

The body is always being in something specific, in response to something real. The body is not an ‘extra’ in life that we carry around. It is us.

And by that I mean: so many of us think we are the inside version of ourselves ~ our thoughts, emotions, beliefs, values.

When in fact the embodiment is the whole.

It is the territory.

Photo by Velizar Ivanov on Unsplash

My personal baseline is no pain. I attribute this lack of pain to being hyper aware and focused on the health of fascia ~ our web of connective tissue that wraps and supports the entire body.

A normal day in my body is now painless (as I remember it to be before becoming unwell and working on a computer during the PhD years).

I understand that this is not everyone’s experience, but it is mine, and it means that when tension arrives, I notice it immediately.

During the years I ran a 500m2 wellness complex with 40 instructors, 7 practitioners, 2 young children: a business I was holding alone ~ pain appeared constantly. Not acute. But as a constant, nagging, background hum.

Quietly.

Persistent.

The fascia was recording what my mind was ignoring.

I was teaching fascia release and nervous system regulation to rooms full of people while my own system ran on empty.

The body keeps score whether we are paying attention or not.

The Coherent Body

When the world stopped in 2020 my body finally got the pause it needed and hadn’t been given voluntarily.

What I noticed as the contrast was this: a regulated body is soft.

Not weak: soft.

And from that softness, genuine strength becomes available.

Not force.

Not pushing through.

Strength from a centralised place.

This is what I now understand as the actual goal. Not for performance, or aesthetics, but for longevity.

Strong and flexible. In body and in mind. Not as the same thing: they are independent (though linked).

Despite all the quotes on social media; A flexible body does not automatically produce a flexible mind. A strong mind does not automatically live in a strong body.

But when both are present and developed consciously ~ something shifts.

The body stops being something to manage.

It becomes something to live inside.

That’s the coherent body.

Not optimised. Not recovered. Not curated.

Integrated.

Held by its own architecture.

This body has always been keeping a record.

The work is learning to read it, lean into it and experience ourselves completely.

Coherently.

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Thanks for reading! I drink a lot of coffee. One a day, but it’s a triple espresso (seriously), and I live in Australia, coffee is spirituality here. If its your vibe, I appreciate the support.

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