4th Gear

So this week in order to promote my business as an LMT, I write a blog making a case that many of us are lacking in frantic movement. I imagine you are suspicious of this. Classic scam you might say. Advocate for something that will result in injuries, then make money treating those injuries. Well, that is not my intent but why should you believe anyone on the internet. So to honor the spirit skepticism I present my theory.

When I was going over my other 3 gears there where analogs in other movement schools. There are yogas and meditative poses for gear one. Tai Che for gear 2. Any Aerobic, Zumba, or Cardio kickboxing class fits into the gear 3 class. Now we go off road into uncharted territory. Full Intensity movement is found in sports, fighting, self-defense, but it's not really found in any structured movement practice that I'm aware of. I want to make a case that we should sort of tame our most frantic movements not by dampening the energy behind them, but by ensuring the neuromuscular templates that we established moving at slower speeds are precise enough to allow us to safely operate out bodies at it’s full capacity. Safely navigating this territory, I believe, allows us to access experience a catharsis that can be healing on the deepest levels.

Once we acknowledge and take precautions for any inherent danger, let us examine movement as a source of healing that can go beyond the physical. Many traditional cultures use dance as a method of healing. Even today living within our disconnected culture people will often intuitively take someone out for a night out dancing if they are going through some trouble. In more traditional cultures dance can be more intense than our casual night out clubbing. It can last for hours, exhausting every cell of people who are no doubt healthier than we are. Through this exhaustion, we tend to have moments when we lose ourselves in the commotion. We have short spurts of time when an intense amount of energy is channeled through us. We flail about often unaware of what we are doing. These moments remind me of the old soldier's adage, "trust your training." Our body reenacts the patterns we taught it at a pace that the mind cannot follow.

Many cultures have different ways of expressing this basic idea of people succumbing to their muscle memory. People talk about being "possessed" or "ridden by spirits". While some of this may seem superstitious to our scientifically bias ears the mere fact that these ideas are found in so many traditions that were historically disconnected from each other proves to me there is a strain of validity within it. We may engage in movement patterns we have not used since we were a child. We may embody the movement pattern of our friends, family, and ancestors. At times our movement may transcend our ideas of our physical limitations. Can we not see this as a sort of possession?

When we look at this phenomenon even deeper we can see its analog in the animal realm. While animals may not lose themselves in a dance they do shake after traumatic events such as predator attacks or a bath as their way of burning off stress hormone. There's a growing school of thought that view trauma as something that is held within and need to be released physically from the body. Whether we are in the thrall of dance or vigorously shaking there seems to be a nerve reintegration that happens within full intensity movement. In those brief moments when we let our bodies take charge of our nervous system and do what they need to do to cleanse us of faulty patterns that we established through trauma.

The word war is rooted in the Germanic word verwirren meaning to confuse. On a social level war muffles our ability to communicate we mean no harm. In this environment where safety is not a giving, everyone is tense. Unprocessed trauma creates a microcosm of war within our body. Our muscular becomes disconnected from itself. It too is in a confused state. Our body loses its ability to coordinate. Our trauma-informed postures can dominos a series of compensation related injuries, or collateral damage. Our bodies easily become overly defensive which can easily cause us to become emotionally and psychologically defensive forming a detrimental feedback loop. Freeing ourselves from these patterns for me at least requires all our energy, which is why I include it in my movement practice.

Anthony Bruni