Body Wisdom

It’s 5:57am, cold and dark, and I’m pulling up to the krav maga gym again. I’m here three times a week for conditioning class — 45 minutes of intense training that has turned into a consistent weekly ritual. I’m not naturally a morning person and never considered myself athletic. I’m enthusiastic, but growing up I was a middle-to-last finisher in sports. It’s cool, I’ve made my peace with it.

Learning Krav Maga is not a small feat for me. Three years ago — right after getting engaged — my body was beginning to give out. I had been in denial about my health, particularly since it was the chronic fatigue, hard-to-diagnose variety of illness.

Exhaustion is not something western medicine does a good job of diagnosing or treating. I’m not down on modern medicine — I’d like to survive a car accident or heart attack like anyone else. Thing is, western medicine does a shitty job of providing guidance for long-term, idiosyncratic health issues — which is what I was trying to cope with.

My three-year recovery was a beast — I had to make some radical changes to my life like removing toxic foods (mainly sources of sugar and alcohol.) I spent years with a chiropractor, a nutritionist, a massage therapist and an acupuncturist. At one point, I had to stop exercise almost entirely. I had so many angry conversations with God.

As I started to turn a long corner, my life got reordered, too. I left 15 years of working on high stress, high pressure political campaigns. As it happens, fighting the good fight can destroy your health if you’re not paying attention. But I’m stubborn. I clawed my way back.

In September of 2015, I finally felt like I could test whether or not I was healthy enough to get back to an exercise routine. The test was this: could I go to class and not flip out emotionally or be wiped out physically for days on end afterwards? I found a Krav Maga gym because before I hit health-bottom, I had taken a month of classes and loved it. Krav Maga — a self defense system that literally means “contact combat” in Hebrew — is a street fighting cousin to boxing. My friends who practice boxing all raved about how that type of high intensity training could rapidly pull your body back into shape.

The gym I found reflected my values in all sorts of great ways. It’s owned by a woman, was a reasonable distance from my house, and didn’t have any mirrors. The other students were outgoing and friendly, as were the instructors. Everyone (instructors and students alike) would lovingly bug the shit out of people on social media, providing a lot of positive motivation to get to class. I felt I had joined a community, not become a gym rat.

Seven months later, I’m at this gym almost every day.

I never take any of these days for granted.

The most unexpected thing about training there is the emotional benefit. There are times — usually in the middle of a hellishly demanding interval — where I get to an unlikely state of grace. I can only explain it as something that feels like deep emotional release.

Jason does this brilliant thing of stacking high intensity interval drills in a way that facilitates that release for me. Usually there is a kicking or punching drill with sprawls or squats, followed by some drill that works the core (and might put you in a slightly cranky mood), followed by a drill that involves punching the shit out of an alligator body bag or other heavy object.

I’ve been stunned by the number of times —while aggressively kneeing or tackling one of these heavy objects — that I’ve found my way to an emotion that feels like forgiveness. Usually it’s forgiving some person or shitty situation in my life. It’s an odd and amazing contrast of (external) intense physical contact met with (internal) gentle, peaceful release. It’s not a runner’s high — I don’t feel invincible. The only way I can describe it is to say it feels like a meditative state that allows me to fully let go. Anger just evaporates. And that state of peace lasts for hours after class.

It’s a thing of wonder to finally stumble on something that feels like enlightenment. In a Krav Maga gym, of all places.

I’m not unfamiliar with meditation or prayer. I was a youth missionary with my church. I studied Bikram daily for two years. I try to get a few sun salutations in every day. I’ve joined meditation circles. I’ve sat on a cushion for hours. I’ve read all sorts of books and memorized versus of spiritual texts and poems from any number of religious walks.

But the place where I felt the release — that deep forgiveness in my bones, that body wisdom, has been in those damn 6am classes. Messy, sweaty, intense classes — grinding through drills with angry punk music blaring. Sweating my guts out in a humble and fierce gym with a bunch of lion-hearted humans.

This is where I’ve rebuilt my health.

This is where I find a state of grace.

This is where I reclaim my joy.