Moving Your Environment
The Traveling Jujitsu
“I wasn’t born for a corner, nor as a tree. My homeland is the entire world.” Seneca
A few years ago I encountered an interview by the incredible Katy Bowman, a biomechanics expert, that talks about the importance of movement integration in our lives.
After a year of “traveling” I’m beginning to understand Katy’s message from a different perspective: how vital is movement in our lives in respect to our environment.
Our environment needs to be moving, a lot!
Katy (and other movement teachers) talk about the importance of having a “movement diet”: this can include things like walking, surfing, climbing, dancing… What I found missing from my “movement diet” was one key element… Traveling!
Traveling is the ultimate movement: the movement of the whole organism from one place to another. Usually creating a need for an adaptation to occur, to navigate the new environment successfully.
“Movement, on the cellular level, is the mechanical stimulation that gives the cell context on how to rearrange its DNA within the nucleus, that creates the body that you have.” Katy Bowman
Physical movement informs the body on how to rearrange its parts. The mental and emotional movement caused by traveling, informs the reconstruction of character and personality.
I haven’t met a long-term traveler that wasn’t affected by the “traveling input” he had experienced. This leads me to believe that our character is context dependent, and needs the exposure to different environments and cultures, to fully form into a “supple character”.
The traveling stimulus can provide us with enough variation in experience to create adaptations and even complete character transformations.
Housing
Living with other people has to be the number one factor in the changes that I’ve experienced this year. Traveling offers various living situations, each exercising the character in different ways.
Hostels: mostly a short-term solution that can house you in a dorm with 2–8 people (mostly), privacy is narrowed down to the bare minimum (a bed and a locker). This experiment provides you the opportunity to test every notion you have about comfort and sharing a space with others.
Aside from the mechanics of staying in a bunk bed like a sardine, the big advantage of a hostel is the people in it. Over the last year, I had a chance to share rooms with people from all over the world. Staying for example in a room with people from Korea, New Zealand, and the Czech Republic, created an interesting mix that has challenged my character to navigate the varying personalities and cultural differences.
Airbnb/Couchsurfing: A longer-term solution that can integrate you into the local culture immediately. Can vary from a private room in a family home to being a roommate with five people in an apartment.
This option challenges you in ways that are absent in a hostel environment. Staying long term in a place with others requires a degree of trust and the capacity to form healthy partnerships.
Over the last year, I had the chance to live with four local roommates in an apartment in Paris for a week, share an apartment with a guy from Venezuela for two months in Buenos Aires (Argentina), and recently live with Brazilian and European roommates in Medellin (Colombia). Each of those living arrangements brought its challenges, and my character was developing to accommodate those scenarios.
The critical factor about the “traveling living arrangements” is the measure of time spent, and the varying conditions you share with others.
Katy speaks about the measure of time we need to spend moving, to create adaptation in the body: “You can’t undo what you do for 8 hours a day for what you do more vigorously one hour a day”.
Exercise doesn’t fix the lack of movement that dominates our lives, and similarly, our personality will not respond to minimal social input to create real change. Going out once on the weekend will not compare to staying in a hostel for a week or living in an apartment for a few months as an exchange student.
Range Of Thinking
Katy describes brilliantly the need for movement to create a resilient body: “If you spend your time within a narrow range of motion, you become the position that you frequent the most.”
Without receiving new information (stimulus), the body will fixate in one position. From my experience, the same thing tends to happen to us mentally as well. In all my years in Tel Aviv (Israel) my mind was forming a fixed position, a way of perceiving and thinking according to that single form.
Range of motion is critical for creating a capable body, and practicing a wider range of thinking will create a healthier and stronger mind. To facilitate this practice, we have to challenge ourselves in different contexts. The different environments will challenge our thinking and will create a “stretching” of our usual mental models.
Navigating my reality in Tel Aviv Israel for the last few years required a vastly different mind-ware than living in Buenos Aires or Medellin in South America. My previous “ thinking software” had to morph according to the new environments: language, currency, transportation systems, culture costumes. Endless factors that will hit your thinking engine on day 1.
Starting The Path
To create change, we need change, that’s the issue with initiating any change. I sat countless times in my apartment in Tel Aviv, thinking how am I going to create change in my life… and nothing was close to happening.
Only when I took my initial “trip” to Europe for three months, I began to feel that my mind was switching positions. There was one central position that was dominating my mind for too long. Without the new input, I couldn’t behave differently.
To initiate any change, we need input, and movement is the engine of input. You move your environment enough, and you will be forced to generate some internal movement in your thinking and how you view your life.
“We need to bring back into our lives greater ranges of motion so we won’t have to re-mobilize and repair the damage.” Katy Bowman
Healthy motion invites more movement and allows greater ranges of motion. In my case, the last five months in South America wouldn’t have been possible before the months I spent in Europe and North America.
Facing the challenges of this continent: the language, the new culture, the security, would’ve been impossible to my previous mindset. We need to continually invite further input for the software of our minds to develop. The more we challenge ourselves with new data from different angles, we can create a software robust enough to face life.
Brazilian Jujitsu
The martial art of Brazilian Jujitsu is one of the greatest disciplines for coping with movement on the ground. Life has a similar quality to it: we find ourselves on the ground a lot, and sometimes we need to move while facing the floor.
“One way or another we’re going to hit the ground and we’ll be in my world. I am a shark, the ground is my ocean, and most people don’t know how to swim.” Jean Jacques Machado
Traveling is the ultimate Jujitsu opponent: it constantly puts you in different positions, and you have to respond accordingly. There is an interplay of the outside movements (the changes of environments) and the internal movement that have to follow quickly.
To be a traveling “shark” means to be able to move with the changes that are happening, and not be manipulated by them. I found myself “on the ground” during this year: emotionally, physically, mentally… and I had to re-position my way back to balance.
Recently I was almost robbed in Medellin Colombia, after managing to run away from 2 men on a motorcycle (carrying a knife). This experience introduced me to a more complicated side of South America and traveling in general. Having to reform my sense of security outside has been a challenge over the last two weeks.
This Traveling year has tested me with countless challenges, making my character resilient enough to befriend the “on the ground” moments, and understand the value in those adversities.
Integration
Unlike Jujitsu, there is no traveling Dojo, and no black belts to deliver classes. To grow your skills, you have to go on your own journey and look for others who can share their knowledge with you along the way.
Precisely in the same way Katy talks about movement integration, I believe that traveling should be integrated into our lives. It can take many forms: studying or working abroad for a while, doing volunteering work or backpacking. As my journey continues, I‘ll have to evolve my concept of traveling and see how it will be integrated into my life these years to come.
Movement Menu For 2017
Climbing, yoga, hiking, salsa, martial arts, and… Traveling!
What’s your movement menu? And how is traveling going to be a part of it during this year?
If you liked this post: press the heart/share, and like the Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/vagaex/ so it can reach more people.
If you didn’t like this post and you hate traveling: this is not the right blog for you, and I would recommend extensive therapy :)
