Keep moving forward.
After learning and slaying some choreography, our dance instructor asked the class what makes us happy. To my relief, she had someone on the other side of the circle answer first. I unexpectedly had a blank mind when I first heard the question and mild panic set in. Slowly ideas popped up and my thought process was as follows: there are so many things that I feel happy doing. Why can’t I think of an answer to this question? What am I happiest doing right now? What keeps me up at night and gets me up early in the morning? Once I posed these questions to myself, while listening to the other dancers, I knew my answer. Movement is what makes me happy. Movement in every possible way but my favorite types of movement are emotional, physical, mental and social.
Sometimes movement is hard
The statement “movement makes me happy” is simplistic and does not paint the full picture of my experience. The end result of engagement with various movements is generally happiness, but working through the motions and in some cases just getting started is the hard part. The past few weeks are a perfect example of the difficult feelings that go into movement for me. I’ve been feeling stuck in more ways than one and have been stagnant emotionally, mentally and physically. Because I know what it feels like to move and release emotionally, mentally and physically, I crave it. This makes feeling like I can’t move unbearable.
As I go through my day, I feel and see everything moving and growing around me but I am not moving. Rather, I feel like I am going through the motions and life has a hold over me. It is a strange sensation for me since I usually absorb energy from my environment and find it encouraging.
Movement through time
This post was written over the course of three weeks because each time I returned to writing, I felt stuck. I talked about how I was feeling with friends and my counselor but nothing would budge.
Mentally, my mind was filled with so many thoughts that I was not able to sort or move through. Each thought was taking up a large amount of mental space and seemed to big to handle. This led to me feeling anxious and stressed every day which bled into other aspects of my life. Emotionally, I was out of tune and could only identify feeling overwhelmed and tired. Physically, I was not practicing my night routines and getting poor quality sleep. I would wake up late and skip over potential morning yoga. I was not being mindful about planning meals, I ate emotionally, and I ate a lot of foods that added to me feeling awful. Socially, I bailed on plans with friends, spent time with family and friends sparingly and retreated into myself.
While feeling stuck and low is not a new experience for me, it does not make the experience any easier. I desperately wanted to feel better and to flow emotionally, mentally, physically and spiritually again.
Getting re-aquatinted with movement
Mental
After allowing myself to sit in my feelings, I slowly found small ways to create movement during my day. I reintroduced meditation during my commute. Each time I tried doing a guided meditation, I would lose my focus and couldn’t still my mind. I took another approach and listened to music and chants instead. For those 8 to 40 minutes, my mind let go and would flow with the music. Each session was short lived, but it was enough for me to get a taste of joy through mental movement.
Emotional
A conversation with my sister was the catalyst for emotional movement. I explained how I felt overwhelmed and tired and she reminded me to practice gratitude in those moments. By taking time to focus on and give attention to the fact that have a family that loves me, an adorable dog that lights up my life, a job that I enjoy that challenges me, and friends and a therapist who help me grow, my volatile emotions and thoughts began to calm. I took practicing gratitude a step further and was intentionally mindful about my basic needs being met, feeling the earth beneath my feet, and listening to the sounds around me. Gratitude and mindfulness grounded me and created a path for me to attune to my emotions.
Physical
With poor sleep hygiene in full effect, I felt lethargic and was running on fumes. Reintroducing physical movement started by taking the stairs rather than the escalator during my commute to get my blood flowing. At work, I increased my number of walks to the water cooler during the day and through the park during my lunch break. The increased blood flow didn’t always result in happiness, but it felt good. Next, I started to plan my meals again and only eat foods that I actually wanted when I felt hungry. Lastly, I found new ways and times to move physically. I tried yoga and night and starting my commute with a walk instead of driving.
Social
Having a better sense of how and what I felt made it easier to engage with family and friends. When opportunities presented themselves, I said yes and actually showed up. I eventually started to initiate plans to see and do activities with friends and showed up as my authentic self. I didn’t sugar coat or hide the difficult feelings that I felt and shared how I was working through them, when appropriate. I spent time with my goddaughter and other small kids who just have a way of making everything better.
Movement continues
As I come to the close of this post, I want to be transparent. They way I wrote about movement and the stagnation is very organized and forward moving. It is not an entirely accurate representation of my lived experience but I did my best. Moving through mental space is hard work, moving emotional and physical can be exhausting, and social movement can be draining. It is not always straightforward or following an upward trend. In all truth, it is messy.
Something that I say to friends all the time and occasionally forget is that “growth is not linear or directional. As long as you are not in the same space emotionally, socially, physically or mentally as yesterday, that is a win.” Be gentle with yourself. Allow yourself to move in any direction, not just forward.
Call to action
If you’ve been experiencing stagnation in your life and want to start moving again, take a look at this week’s challenge “movement and stagnation“
