A Tiny Little Co-Star has Joined Us to Help Me Out Today
V-Log: Movement is synonymous with Life….Exercise!
As you find yourself constrained in your life and in your home, working from home or barely working, are you finding movement that makes you happy? Does a walk in the park or a hike up a trail get your endorphins flowing? All our parks and hiking trails are closed due to the current lockdown. How are you managing this loss if it is also happening where you live? What other types of movement make your heart skip a beat? Capoeira, yoga, pilates: what is helping you deal with this confinement? Does gardening or cleaning help?
For some people, like my good friend and trainer Patricio Manuel, staying connected to his body keeps him grounded and joyful. I have seen him ecstatic once when he came for our training session, black eyed and swollen faced from a fight in the boxing ring that he had won the night before. Just joyous. As a way of keeping community connected he is doing online training with detailed instruction while confined to his home. I’m very lucky to be starting one-on-one face-to-face sessions via video with Pat next week. I am in no way touting his work but you can find him on multiple social media platforms.
Are exercise and I pals? Not so much. I have only in the last decade learned to live in my body, which is often a very physically and mentally painful proposition. Thanks to Pat I have learned to move in ways that I can be tender with myself. We have walked when I could, or done body-wide stretches when I couldn’t walk. During a short period of extra energy two years ago I began lifting 2-lbs weights for bicep curls. During an even shorter period of extra enthusiasm, Pat began to teach me boxing. After three weeks of throwing jabs and punches at his hands had left me breathless and sleeping all afternoon, that adventure came to an abrupt stop.
My favorite way of movement is to blast some new hip-hop style Bollywood music and move like there’s no tomorrow. I throw my arms in the air like I just don’t care, my shoulders shimmy, and my hips go round and round the world in figure 8s. My hands are usually doing intricate blossoming-flower-like motions, as we all do to Hindi music. I usually do this in my kitchen while washing dishes or chopping veggies at the counter. My kitchen window looks out onto the street, and many a neighbor has stood and watched me dance as they smiled and waved, their dogs impatiently pulling at their leashes. <The dogs’ leashes, not the neighbors’ leashes. Just to clarify.>
The video today? That’s my little punkin pudding pop, my little grandbaby who I haven’t seen or held for 16 days now. When this crisis is over, we’re going to do push-ups together!
You can email me at goodnewsdaily.medium@gmail.com or leave your contact info in comments or in a private note. Let me know if you’d like to book a day/time on the one-on-one video call calendar. I will try to get back to everyone as rapidly as I possibly can. Let me know if you would rather not be tagged in future vlogs otherwise you will continue seeing your name in this sea of green. 😊
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