Looking at health prescriptions nowadays, I constantly see lists of action items we’re supposed to follow:

- Eat more (or some specific quantity of) vegetables,
- Exercise daily (for x amount of time),
- Stop smoking and drinking alcohol,
- Reduce stress,

Some publications or pundits are more or less specific, focusing on only one of the variables.  But then there’s a list underneath that special category.

- Eat more vegetables…and…

- Especially (some quantity of) green leafy ones…
- And some quantity of red ones,
- And another quantity of orange ones,
- And avoid white ones (or some other variety).
- * And make sure they’re all organic.
- ** And make sure you cook them a particular way.
- *** And when cooking them, don’t forget to use a certain type of oil, or water, or cooker, or cooking process.
- **** And while you’re at it, go read Dr. Jabba-The-Hut’s book about stress reduction and follow his guidelines (but for god’s sake don’t follow his dietary advice!!!).

A Personal Interlude
I had a unique experience growing up.  For various reasons, from the time I was 5 until I was 12 I changed schools every year.

New school, new teacher, new environment, new friends, new teaching styles.  Everything new.

I learned to look at “things” differently from my peers.  I didn’t realize it until much much later, but having that early experience kept me from learning a lot of categorical knowledge.

Categorical knowledge is the way a culture ascribes meaning to differences between things.  How that culture creates “categories.”

The classical test in our culture of categorical knowledge is in analogical reasoning:

“A is to B as B is to __.” Or, “A is to B as C is to __ .”

I did poorly at those tests.  The possibilities seemed endless to me.  “A is to B as C is to __ ?”  Which quality of A, B, and C?

And whenever I’d see the answer, I’d think to myself – “What about everything else?!”  I still do.

Cultural Conditioning
I missed some of that cultural training – “Focus on these things, not those things.”  “This is what is important here, and this is what is not important.”  “These things “automatically” go together, and these others do not.”

I still struggle with this, obviously.  But it gets worse!

My childhood also lacked good role models for the “specialist” mindset.  I wasn’t subjected to adults who engaged in isolationist approaches to…well, anything.  Problem upon problem!

It wasn’t until very recently that I learned that what I’d missed was cultural knowledge, and not “inherent truth” (which also explains why I was so good at mathematics – numbers are straightforward in analogical regard…until you get to advanced mathematics, 1 always equals 1).

What about everything else?!
Seems like a valid question to me.  But, of course, I’m biased.  It’s one of the reasons the Exuberant Animal Mandala appeals to me so strongly.  The Mandala is inclusive.  Should we consider Mind without Body and Spirit?  We can, but should we?

And what about Land, Tribe, and Ancestor?  What is gained by considering our habitat, and our evolutionary (personal and species-wide) history when we approach problems in life?  What is lost when we do not consider those things?

Our cultural stance is toward atomism, reductionism, and specialization.  We seek “the best way” to do things, based on recompiled statistical averages and time-bound analyses of minute aspects of multi-factorial behaviors.

Since that is our cultural value of things, it is also the way we teach, the way we grade, the way we appraise one another’s “intelligence,” or the value of an argument.

So don’t get me wrong when I complain about endless lists of “qualities” that we’re “supposed to” follow (completely against the thrust of environment, culture, media, and our school-based learning experiences).

I don’t know what I’m talking about.

An hour of basketball feels like 15 minutes. An hour on a treadmill feels like a weekend in traffic school.

David Walters

The beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms.

Socrates

So you’ve been on the couch for the last couple of decades and one day you wake up, look in the mirror and recoil in disgust. You’re shocked at what you see and disturbed by what you feel. Disgusted with your lumpy, spongy form and its appalling lack of function, you resolve to turn things around, get back on track and whip yourself into shape. Your desperate mind searches for a remedy and quickly seizes upon a solution. That’s right, you’re going to exercise!
Swept up in a fever of enthusiasm, you launch yourself out the door. You buy some new clothes, fill your bag with supplements and sign up for a program at the local gym. You’re ready to seize control of your fate and make a comeback.
But sadly, you’re off on the wrong foot and your mission will almost certainly fail, possibly within days, but definitely within months. If you’re like most people, you’re going to wind up back on the couch before you know it, nursing a beer and crafting a rationalization.
Your problem is that you called the thing by the wrong name. That’s right, you used the word exercise.
If you had thought it through a little more carefully, you might have had a better idea. That is, you might have realized that what you really needed was not exercise as such, but more physical movement.
To some, this may sound like a case of academic hair-splitting, but there’s actually a vital difference here, one that’s lost on most Americans as well as a great many coaches, trainers and PE teachers. Understanding this distinction will take us a long way towards regaining our lost physicality and maybe even improve our relationship with the world at large. By the end of this essay, I hope to convince you to give up on exercise and start getting more movement into your life.

exercise is abnormal

The problem with exercise becomes apparent as soon as we begin to describe it. That is, exercise consists of doing abstracted movements in a stereotyped, repetitive pattern. In essence, exercise is a specialization extracted from a larger whole, an activity taken out of its natural context. Just as white flour is an extract derived from a more complex natural grain, exercise is a behavior that is stripped down and removed from its original setting. In effect, exercise is white movement.
The problem comes into focus when we take the long view of human history. When we stand back, we begin to realize that exercise constitutes only a tiny fraction of the human movement repertoire. The human physical experience includes a vast range of kinetic behavior: locomotion and exploration, play, hunting, gathering, scavenging, climbing, sex, dance, labor, gesturing and expression. Exercise is only a very recent and minor subset of all possible human movements.
Exercise also stands out as a glaring exception in the natural world. Across the entire range of non-human animals, we see no case of anything resembling exercise, especially in the wild. Yes, rodents will run on wheels in their cages, but this is mostly a matter of incarceration and frustration: put a running wheel into a natural, grassy field and rodents will not be lining up to run on it. In wild settings, animals will play, hunt, graze, explore, fight and mate, but never exercise. Even chimps and bonobos, our closest primate relatives, don’t display anything that looks like our version of exercise. They get plenty of action playing, exploring and chasing one another around the forest.

boring

The main problem with exercise is that it’s all about sets, reps and mileage: just keep grinding them out until the clock runs out or your trainer tells you to stop. This, of course, is a recipe for physical monotony. And physical monotony, like any kind of repetitive behavior, tends to be hard on the bodymind and tissue. Keep stressing a joint, tendon or ligament in an identical pattern and you’ll promote inflammation and a lasting relationship with your physical therapist. Even worse, this sensory-motor monotony soon leads to a deeper, more disturbing psychospiritual monotony. Boredom deepens and the spirit becomes depressed. Resignation and apathy soon follow.

can we play?

Exercise also fails because stereotyped reps tends to drive out play. This is why it’s so hard to get kids to exercise. Their bodies are simply too smart to allow it. Treadmills are boredom machines; no healthy child will spend more than a few minutes on one.
The contrast is clear: Exercise is about repetition of known patterns, but play is about exploration and discovery of new patterns. Exercise is about enduring unpleasant sensation while play is about finding delight in diversity. Exercise is about repeating the known, but play is about extending into the unknown. Exercise requires external motivation to maintain participation, but play is inherently rewarding and reinforcing. Exercise is about labor, suffering and denial, but play is about wonder and imagination.

adversarial

Because of its repetitive, predictable and unpleasant nature, exercise ultimately becomes an adversarial experience: it’s us against the experience. Faced with the prospect of mind-body boredom, we start looking for motivation and incentives. Thus, the proliferation of boot camps, TV’s, carrots and sticks that we now bring to the exercise experience. We’ve even taken to programming artificial voices of encouragement into treadmills, stairclimbers and other exercise machines. And so, exercise ultimately makes a perfectly logical companion to that other famously adversarial health experience: dieting.

a non-solution

Exercise is commonly promoted as a cure for everything that ails our bodies and our spirits: obesity, diabetes, heart disease, depression and all the rest. “Just do more exercise” is the common prescription offered by both professionals and lay persons alike.
But if exercise was actually the solution to our public health crisis, wouldn’t we be seeing better results? After all, experts and celebrities have been promoting exercise for decades and the state of the human body continues to deteriorate. In fact, if we looked at the trajectories of  lifestyle disease and exercise promotion, we would find that they track pretty closely with one another. If we looked strictly at correlation, we might even come to the conclusion that exercise promotion causes atrophy, obesity and poor health.
Exercise advocates are quick to point to success stories. We hear about pounds lost, blood sugar normalized, heart disease prevented and bodies transformed. We hear about people who fought mightily against physical apathy and dragged themselves to the gym for weeks, months and years. And yes, they got results.
What we rarely hear about are the multitudes of people who tried exercise, found it to be a dreadful bore and dropped out. In fact, the entire health club business model is built upon the assumption that a substantial proportion of members will stop coming to the club shortly after signing the contract. In other words, failure is assumed, institutionalized and implicitly encouraged.
In short, exercise has been a spectacular public health failure and an immense waste of human potential. The biggest consequence of exercise promotion is that we have managed to make millions of people feel guilty about their failure to do something that is inherently unpleasant.

start a movement movement

So exercise fails. Do we have a better idea?
Yes, in fact we do.
The answer is authentic, joyful, functional movement.
For those who have never seen or experienced it, authentic movement looks and feels nothing like exercise:

• Exercise tends to be single plane; functional movement is multi-joint and multi-plane.
• Exercise is monotonous; movement is engaging.
• Exercise is specialized; movement is diverse.
• Exercise is scripted; movement is authentic and intuitive.
• Exercise is performed according to a program; movement is opportunistic.
• Exercise feels mechanized and forced; movement feels expressive and creative.
• Exercise is a means towards an end; movement is an end in itself.

Movement is better because it’s expansive and offers more options for physical creativity and expression. There’s more possibility and more room for the imagination. It’s more inviting, more engaging. And best of all, it’s less adversarial.

off the couch

So maybe it’s time to go out for a walk and re-think your entire mission statement for the coming year. Your best bet is to give up on exercise right now; you’d be doing that soon enough anyway. Instead, resolve to get some more movement into your life, by any means possible.
Of course, this emphasis on movement over exercise doesn’t get us off the hook: vigorous physical engagement is still essential if we want to improve or maintain our health. Sweat and exertion are still necessary if we want to reap the health and performance rewards. We still need to challenge our tissue and push our personal comfort zones.
So start by diversifying your efforts. Look for movement of all varieties. Be a movement opportunist; look for movement at home, in the workplace, in parks, airports and in the parking lot. But most importantly, look for dance. Dance with terrain, with gravity and with other human bodies. Dance with dumbbells, kettlebells and sticks. Dance with imaginary opponents and shadows on the ground. Dance with water, with bushes and with trees. Dance with finger cracks, faces and alpine ridges. Dance with stairs and sidewalks.
And remember, if it feels monotonous and boring, it probably is monotonous and boring. And if it’s monotonous and boring, stop doing it! There are countless variations, combinations and permutations that are engaging and exhilarating. So mess around, play with the possibilities until you find a combination of movement, speed, resistance and frequency that works for you.
You just might find a lifestyle that’s truly sustainable.

When people hear the word “proprioception,” most dismiss it as yet another body-buzzword and let it go at that. Some consider it an anatomical detail and others find it relevant only in the context of physical therapy and rehab. But muscle (in combination with mechanoreceptors in tendons, ligaments and joint capsules) is just as much a sensory organ as eyes and ears. As the Barefoot Sensei likes to remind us, “Muscle is the biggest sensory organ in the body.” When we move, we sense our world and ourselves. This sensation is vital for performance and our state of well-being.

From this perspective, we begin to appreciate the catastrophic effects of sedentary living on the modern human. To take away movement is to take away sensation and self-knowledge. When we create such a sensory deficit, we begin to feel anxious, uncertain and ungrounded. Our modern epidemics of distorted attention, depression and anxiety all make sense in this context. We can medicate people all we like, but in the end, we have to start moving to remember who we are.

In today’s workaholic world, things are getting pretty uptight. In disciplines ranging from athletic training to classroom education, there’s scarcely any room to move. Every detail of our curriculum is now pre-meditated, measured and monitored. We have become hypnotized by the illusion of our expertise and we have excessive confidence in our knowledge. In our quest for professionalism and results, we tighten up our acts to the point that people can hardly breathe.

If all this screw-tightening actually worked, that would be one thing. But it doesn’t. Our top-down delivery of expert knowledge actually deadens the learning process and inhibits personal ownership of education and health. And, from a neurological point of view, rigid programs may actually be inferior to messy, random and diverse practices.

Consider this masterful presentation by Gary Avischious, head coach at CoachingSchool.org. As Gary demonstrates, motor learning works best when it includes variation. And, not only does this principle apply to motor learning, it also becomes a metaphor for learning on any scale.

Coach Gary’s perspective is reinforced by a recent New York Times piece How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect. The short story is that violations of patterns and expectation actually stimulate the brain to seek out meaning. In this respect, play and modern art both activate the brain in new ways and keep our minds active.

Now obviously, we can go overboard with play, diversity and randomness. An over-randomized program doesn’t stimulate any training effect and simply wastes time. Nevertheless, it’s time to loosen up our training and embrace some variation. Not only does it work better; it’s also a lot more fun.

Proponents of natural fitness have long been interested in the idea of biophilia, the innate human desire to affiliate with natural landscapes and living systems. Intuitively, this idea makes perfect sense, but the research on biophilia has been rather sparse. Some studies show that hospital patients recover faster when exposed to nature views, for example, but more work is needed in this area.

Last week we found confirmation of the biophila hypothesis on Jonah Lehrer’s blog, The Frontal Cortex.  In a post called “Nature and Compassion,” Lehrer cites a study that found increased pro-social behavior in natural settings. This makes great sense from two perspectives: On the one hand, natural environments calm the body. Neuromuscular and sensory systems operate most effectively in their natural context; of course the body would relax and become more social in its ancestral setting. But if we isolate the body from the natural world (by incarceration in buildings, cubicles and vehicles), our bodies lose their normal reference points: anxiety, depression and anti-social behavior become more likely.

This is yet one more argument for getting out of the gym. If we’re really interested in developing the totality of human potential, the best place to do it is outdoors.

Thanks to Jason Atwood at Playthink for finding this!

The “friking amazing” persistence hunt video is going around and you’ve really got to see it. It gives us the flavor of an authentic persistence hunt and is obviously useful in giving us a sense of primal human experience. But don’t get lulled into believing that this is the ultimate look at our ancestral heritage. These are true !Kung bushmen, but they are moderns and this is a re-creation of a historical event. Please note the shoes, the plastic water bottle and the metal spear. Not only that, we have to remember that this is only one hunt by one tribe in one bioregion, in one moment in time. Any conclusions that we might draw from this movie should be tentative.

Obvious flaws aside, this video gives us some good ideas for speculation. Most obviously, note the high level of environmental awareness. These hunters make every movement decision on environmental grounds. There are no highway cones, no white stripes painted on the concrete, no volunteers with stopwatches. Every single physical action is tied to terrain, plants, animals and weather. There are no arbitrary physical movements. Everything is in context. Everything is a judgment call. Walk? Run? Sit in the shade? All of these movement decisions are intimately tied to natural conditions. This is something we can take to heart. Instead of charging off down the road like a machine, we might do better to look around first.

“…I see that everything in nature arises from the power of free play sloshing against the power of limits.”

Stephen Nachmanovitch
Free Play
Improvisation in Life and Art

“The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.”

Arnold Toynbee

Physical enthusiasts continue to grapple with the role of freedom and discipline in fitness and health. Some lean towards highly disciplined “work outs” while others prefer more intuitive “play sessions.” As always, advocates for work and play will continue to call each other out, but the conversation may actually be moving to a higher level in pre-school classrooms.

It may seem strange to draw comparisons between physical training and early childhood education, but that is precisely where the future lies. We get a glimpse of this trajectory in Paul Tough’s recent New York Times article: Can the Right Kinds of Play Teach Self-Control?

The central issue of the story is “executive function” in young children. This phrase refers to the general ability to control one’s thoughts and behaviors. Specifically, it means the ability to dampen or inhibit impulses coming from the emotional or limbic centers of the brain. Obviously, this is a fundamental skill when attempting to master literacy and scholarship, but it’s also essential to skill development at any age and in any discipline, from chess to sports to business. (See also Daniel Goleman’s work on “emotional intelligence.”)

The finding reported in this story suggests that fantasy or pretend play, when conducted within limits, leads to the development of self-control. Students who play out fantasy stories and situations learn to master their own brains and channel their copious energies. This practice is described as a blending of play and work.

Successful students in almost any discipline know the paradoxical truth: progress requires a blend of both freedom and discipline. Improvisation is essential; so are limits. Copious research into the nature of talent and skill has proven that immersion, engagement and deliberate, intentional action are essential to moving brains and bodies to higher levels. Recent books such as The Talent Code and Talent is Over-rated make a compelling case for deep and deliberate practice. It’s not grinding labor, nor is it frivolous dabbling: it’s improv within limits.

This is why the martial art model is so famously effective in promoting self-control and regulation, in both children and adults. Martial art is all about participation and engagement. The sensei lays down the limits and enforces them consistently. Practice sessions are full-immersion experiences and are highly physical. Within those limits, play is encouraged. Students learn to control their bodies, their behavior and their own cognition.

Our schools and our gyms could learn a great deal from this kind of practice.

“If you can’t fly, run. If you can’t run, walk. If you can’t walk, crawl. But by all means, keep moving.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)

In late August of 2009, I was blessed with a powerfully disturbing experience, an adverse event that challenged my patience, my endurance and my exuberance.

My original plan was to fly from Seattle to London to teach a weekend seminar on exuberant health and play-based fitness in partnership with WildFitness. All was well until I arrived in London and approached the Heathrow airport immigration counter. The officer checked my passport and told me that I lacked an obscure but essential legal document and that I would be detained for further investigation.

At first, I had no worries. Surely the authorities would see that I was a mere innocent, a physical educator with no nefarious motives. All I wanted was give a slide show, lead some movement games, walk around London a bit and go home. Once they looked into the matter, they would surely find my story credible and let me go my way.

But the authorities were unconvinced. They investigated my story, but remained unsatisfied. So I was escorted into a back room, searched, held in a lockup for 6 hours, interrogated and finally escorted onto a flight back to the states. Before I could say “Buckingham Palace,” I was back in New York and then off to Seattle.

My entire mission was destroyed, my hopes for a great event dashed. Weeks and months of preparation were wasted, as was a substantial investment in airfare, hotels and related gear. Within a few brief hours, I went from being an exuberant health activist to an international outlaw and border crasher.

In the annals of human catastrophe, it wasn’t a true disaster of course. My life wasn’t threatened and I didn’t suffer extreme abuse or physical hardship. I still have a place to live, food to eat and friends to play with. Nevertheless, it was a powerfully upsetting experience that I would not care to repeat.

By all rational calculations, I should have been angry, distraught and just plain pissed off. After all, I had good reason. I was treated unfairly and rudely. The experience might well have been a blow to my disposition and my spirit; it might have derailed me for weeks. I might have become depressed or I might have wasted a lot of time trying to strike back at the powers in question.

But none of those things happened. Instead, my training paid off. I bounced back from the adversity in remarkably short order. Within a day or so, I was back to my quest, plotting my objectives and fleshing out my Plan B. Aside from the physical exhaustion of a nearly continuous Seattle-London-Seattle flight, I arrived home in a surprisingly balanced frame of mind. Sure, the trip had been a catastrophe, but somehow, I managed to maintain most of my equilibrium and in the process, I began to understand some of the elements that go into a successful rebound.

things fall apart

The whole process begins when life deals a surprise blow, an insult or a tragedy. An asteroid falls into your life and your most cherished ideas, beliefs and dreams are smashed to pieces. A divorce, a death, a job loss, an immigration fiasco; we’ve all had our share.

In the early moments, you’re flooded with raw reaction and primal emotion. You scramble to make things right, but your predicament is bigger than you are and events are beyond your control. At this point, you are shocked, traumatized and stressed.

As the catastrophe begins to sink in, your limbic system leaps into action. The fight-flight response goes into overdrive and stress hormones flood your bloodstream. Your emotional brain fires up and keeps on firing with a flood of anger, remorse, hatred, jealousy, bitterness and resentment. But it’s all to no avail. Your world is crumbling before your eyes and you are powerless to stop or even steer the course of events.

Eventually, the immediate threat and emotional reaction begin to subside, but now the mind steps in to review and replay the event. You call up the most impressive images, sensations and emotions. You relive the entire experience, over and over and over.

In many cases, we get stuck at this point, as our minds play back an endless loop of reruns. Over and over we rehash the event, retrieving the most disturbing moments from memory and solidifying their neural base. This replay process is perfectly normal, natural and healthy, but only for so long. When memories are retrieved, they become stronger and begin to take on a disproportionate life of their own. The more we rerun the event, the more real it becomes to us.

tell the story

Sometime later, we begin to translate our emotional experience into words and in the process, we start to tell a story to ourselves and to others. We may not think of it as a story in the classical, once-upon-a-time sense, but it’s still a narrative, an explanation of what went wrong. There are characters, events and tone, but most of all, there’s causality and responsibility, an explanation that helps us put our experience in order. Emotion will still play a part, but now our experience is mediated and expressed in words, paragraphs, chapters and volumes.

Our stories can help us rebound, but success depends in large measure on the tone and character of our narrative, our explanatory style. Cognitive psychologists have studied explanatory styles in detail and have discovered some intriguing and powerful patterns.

The most notorious is the depressive explanatory style. This kind of narrative is marked by statements that are personal (“It’s all my fault.”), pervasive (“I always screw things up.”) and permanent. (“I’ll never be any good at this.”) People who tell stories in this style are prone to ineffectiveness and depression. After all, if things are always my fault and will be so forever, what’s the point in trying to change? Our language sculpts our spirit, our behavior and our ability to rebound. If I had used this sort of explanatory style in telling my story to myself or others, I would still be in a state of depressive stress. My rebound would have been weak or non-existent.

In contrast, the optimistic explanatory style tends to be transient (“This thing is temporary. It will all be over eventually.”), controllable (“There are things I can do about this.”) and specific (“It was a really stupid situation, but it was a freak, one-off event.”) People who tell stories in this optimistic style tend to be more effective and resilient. Their language gives them a sense of control and possibility.

Unfortunately, many of us settle into a single explanatory style in early adulthood and stick with it throughout life, thus perpetuating patterns of reactivity and ineffectiveness. The danger comes when we get stuck on one level of explanation, one style of language or one level of abstraction. Our self-talk solidifies into a single point of view, a single flow of causality and a single tone with recurring themes. Static narration leads to static behavior and spirit; we become stuck.

The key to a successful rebound is to get some movement into our words and our narratives. Don’t bore yourself or your audience. Keep your language mobile and dancing. If you’re stuck, it might be because your language is stuck. Play with your words and see if things don’t go a little better. Describe your predicament from several vantage points and see what you like. If you’re not getting the result you want, tell a new story from a fresh perspective. This may challenge your beliefs about the true nature of the event, but stories are free and it will cost you nothing to entertain some new ideas.

“this will make a great story”

For me, the key rebounding moment came in a phone conversation to a good friend on my return to the States. I struggled to explain the fiasco to her, trying to capture the essential nature of the farce. Finally I concluded, “This will make a great story someday. Not yet. But someday.” And suddenly, I felt liberated from the grip of my predicament. I knew that sometime in the future, I would be telling my story and laughing at the absurdity of it all. But if I was going to be laughing about this event a year from now, why not next week? And if next week, why not right now? I laughed at this realization. Things really weren’t so bad after all.

key questions

My rebound also hinged on a couple of key questions that helped me reinterpret my experience. The first – “Where’s the compassion?” proved extremely powerful for me, right in the midst of my interrogation. As I sat in a small room, on a chair bolted to the floor, I observed my immigration agent as she pored through my documents, casting a suspicious eye on my health-related papers and books. “Did you write this?” she glared, as if I was trafficking in national secrets. My mind reeled at the absurdity of the question, but after a moment, I began to think about her predicament. “What a shitty job she has, with such slavery to rules and bureaucracy” I mused. “She has to dig into people’s lives all day, treating everyone she meets like a proto-criminal.” Suddenly, I was seeing things from her perspective. “This poor woman. I wonder what her life is like outside of this interrogation room. I wonder who her husband is and how they live. How very sad.” Suddenly, I felt that she, not I, was the real victim of this preposterous system. This insight was profoundly relaxing. No matter what happened that day, I would eventually go home and back to a meaningful and creative life, but she had to live inside this Kafkian madness every day. Compared to her predicament, mine was a cakewalk.

A second question also helped me survive and rebound – “Where’s the comedy?” This was easy because my situation was saturated with hilarious material. I could just see the headline in the morning papers: “UK immigration officials keep country safe from threat of health advocacy and exuberant movement.” And that was just the beginning. Every detail of the event was ripe for comedic interpretation and even now I can hardly keep from laughing. Fortunately, I managed to keep my mouth shut during questioning. Laughter does not go over well with grim, highly-stressed law enforcement officers.

social support

Like all good rebounds, my experience included some powerful social support. Even as I faced the reality of deportation and another endless flight across the Atlantic and North America (and another round of semi-edible food-like substances), I knew that I would soon have some great phone conversations with friends and family. The story would be a howler and people would get behind me as I told them of my plight. It also helped enormously to have the WildFitness team in my corner; I later learned that Tara Wood and Edward Drax had done some truly heroic pleading with the authorities. I was not alone in my plight.

expression

I also got a bounce from the knowledge that I would ultimately have a voice in the midst of it all. As soon I was loaded aboard the flight back to the US, I began taking notes, sketching out my experience in the margin of a book. I knew that I would tell this story in one form or another and that realization gave me power. Even a blog post would get my words out. In other words, I was not helpless.

experience counts

Finally, I realized that resilience often comes down to a simple matter of prior experience or what my sensei used to call “time on the mat.” I’ve been blessed with some wonderful adversities in my years and I’ve learned that I always manage to come back. All of us suffer through traumatic events, but things eventually run their course. The body calms down, rebuilds and relaxes its vigilance. Systems return to normal. If you’ve been around the block (or the planet) a few times, you know how the process works and you begin to incorporate resilience into your very sense of identity: “I’ve rebounded before, I’ll rebound again. I can weather this.”

So, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. In the process, I’ve come to realize that if we want our training to be truly holistic, it’s essential that we become students of rebounding. After all, life is filled with capricious immigration officers and other jokers in the deck. We can’t predict everything that they’ll do, but we can learn how to bounce back from their trickery.

And whatever you do, make sure that you get all the obscure paperwork in order before you approach the immigration counter at Heathrow airport. And please don’t mention my name. It won’t help you a bit.

recommended reading

Narrative Medicine: The Use of History and Story in the Healing Process by Lewis Mehl-Madrona, MD, PhD.

Opening Up: The Healing Power of Emotions by James Pennebaker PhD.

Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life by Martin Seligman, PhD.

When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times by Pema Chodron

In mainstream physical education, nobody seems to know what to do with dance. Sure, it’s exuberant human movement and people get sweaty and their bodies get healthier and all, but it’s just not our thing, you know. We want sets, reps and labor. And most of all, we want to be able to quantify everything that we do with bodies. We want to be able to claim scientific expertise and certainty. But dance resists quantification and thus it’s hard to manage, track, administer and control. So while dance may have its merits, we’d rather not deal with it.

But now it’s starting to look like dancers really have the edge. All that training they do pays off in great neuromuscular control, integration and coordination. And even more to the point, it pays off in injury-resistance, a quality that many conventionally-trained athletes would dearly love to posess. For proof, see the recent New York Times piece by Gia Kourlas. Research at the New York University Langone Medical Center’s Hospital for Joint Diseases suggests that dancers’ landing technique is superior to that of the typical athlete. See  “New Leaps in Research on Injuries.”