Kittens,
The bod speaks. Are you listening?
PeaceBang has noticed that over the past couple years, her body is telling her that she’s carrying too much weight and not moving enough. Her hips get achey, her lower back gets tight, her chest muscles twinge and zing from too many hours spent hunched over reading or typing, and her feet and knees take turns grumbling like arthritic old men on a rainy day. “Oy, the moisture!”
So this is not good.
PeaceBang does not want to write a long exposition on the subject, mostly because she wants to go to sleep, but she wants to encourage you to heed the bod. Stretch every day. Swim. Walk. Don’t fall into her bad habits of ignoring the bod and ignoring physical pain — it’s easy enough to live that way until some more serious disease than just being old and fat stops us in our tracks and demands lifestyle change, but let’s not.
For people with such busy, vibrant inner lives, it’s all to easy to tell the body to hush up and go back to living from the neck up.
Don’t.
I’ll try, and you try too, okay?
Blessings on the journey, darlings.
Dear PeaceBang,
I love your blog, and think that listening to your body and giving it some chance to move about is an excellent message (I’m in academia, and spend far too many days like you hunched over my keyboard). But I wish you would change the phrasing of ‘until some more serious disease than just being old and fat stops us in our tracks’. Being old is not a disease, and being fat is not a disease. As I’m sure you know, fatness and thinness are not particularly good predictors of healthiness. As you suggest, listening to our bodies and living in them as healthily as we can are much more important things, and can be done to advantage by all of us, including those of us who are old and/or fat! [Thanks for pointing this out — it’s really just bad writing on my part! I do NOT believe that being fat and old are diseases, but my phrasing suggested that I do. – PB]
Amen. I’m only carrying about 7-8 lbs above my ‘normal’ BMI, and not that worried about that. But I don’t cope well with stress, and that creates killer headaches where I don’t want to eat (which exacerbates the killer headaches). Trying to take good care at an extremely stressful time.
Although I was already diagnosed with hip arthritis about 5 years ago (aged 33 now) I started running on a regular basis a year ago.
Well- as long as I run every second day everything is ok. But I had some lazy weeks in Feb/March and the pain came back.
So- exercise and move!! That´s the best medicine.
Today´s sucess-story: I went horse riding without pain killers. Yeah!
so so true. I didn’t lose weight when I was working out regularly, but the aches and pains stopped entirely! Gotta get back into it. . . .
I’m about to go out for a run, a new habit for me. I am always surprised at how great I feel moving my body in the great outdoors. Why do I so easily forget how pleasurable and healing that is during more stressful times?
I am heading to my exercise bike right now. Really…I am.
I am amazed at what water aerobics has done for my arthritis, and how moving my body helps my mind and soul. Good reminders, PB!
Yoga is a wonderful physical compliment to the inner life ~
Finding things that we love is key… I’ve recently become a fan of Zumba classes– dancing, booty-shaking, and a racing cardio workout. I joined my first gym to take the classes there every week. It’s fun, it’s frenetic, my heart rate goes up, and my muscles are sore the next day. And, most important– I keep going back for more.
The BEST exercise is one you keep going back to. Yoga for meditative stretchiness, Zumba for booty-shaking cardio, running for pound-the-earth free time– whatever works.
Keeping healthy and happy…. <3
If I might put in a shameless plug for my mentor pastor – he has a fb page called “fit under the collar.” He is passionate about motivating clergy (and others) to care for their bodies as well as their souls.
It might be a place to find some inspiration and encouragement to become more fit. I know for me personally, it is a challenge and rebuke. And now that Peacebang has joined in that challenge, I guess I really do need to get off my lazy behind and move! I’m too young to feel this old!
I totally agree with Sarah K. Check out lesmills.com for classes in your area. I recommend BodyFlow (yoga-esque) and BodyVive, for the Boomer generation. It will kick your ass, in a good way, and burn the fat. And even someone as uncoordinated as I am can do it. Jazzercise is good too.
I’ll third what Sarah K. says!
Find whatever works for you.
I’ve gone through periods of time with martial arts, yoga (I prefer yoga that focuses on building core strength and strength in general), weight lifting, kettlebell, elliptical machine, bellydancing, and jogging.
It’s not that I’m in great shape–It’s that I do whatever holds my interest at that time. 🙂
And I just heard a speaker who is an Episcopal Christian who also learns from some Buddhist teachers. One of three points she made about contemplative practice is that it is *embodied*. We travel through this life in this body, and the purpose of meditation is not to leave this body or ignore it, but to listen to it. To be in touch with it and to *not* judge (yoga helped me immensely in NOT judging, but YMMV). She linked being in touch with your body in this way to the incarnation.
If you can find Anusara yoga, that’s the best–for me, the Episcopal priest, at least, because it is very incarnational. All about opening the heart to be a conduit of God’s love to the world.
I have arthritis too. I go to aqua aerobics twice a week and walk 2 miles most other days, have arthritis meds & take supplements. Arthritis is much better and I’ve lost inches but not pounds. As a side benefit the aqua aerobics has improved my balance greatly.
Once you get used to it you’ll keep wanting to go.
So true, so true. This reminds me of advice that a friend/colleague gave to me a few years ago when I was feeling drained. She asked if my “spine” was healthy. After a strange look from me she explained it was advice she had received from a mentor:
Spiritual
Physical
Intellectual
Nutritional
Emotional
To make your “spine” healthy all of these necessities of life need to be in balance. And if you’re feeling “out of whack” than perhaps one has been neglected. I thought it was pretty good advice – and a neat way to remember too 🙂
And for the extra weight the body carries…I cannot recommend highly enough Women, Food and God by Geneen Roth. Beautiful. And it works (in many, many ways) if you work it. [I am one of the few who found very little to work with in Roth’s book. She lacks a feminist analysis, she doesn’t touch on rage, and her model of femininity is still very traditional. In fact, her book made me angry. However, she is the prevailing expert on women and food in our time, and most BTFM readers will likely find a lot of wisdom in her insights. I’m waiting for another level of this conversation: one that includes rage, unapologetic enormity of personhood, insatiability and ravenousness, sexual frustration, power, generational hatred and body-control between women, and did I mention rage at the misogynist planet we live on? – PB]
Peacebang, that sounds like a book you need to write. (and that we will buy, gratefully)
Also would recommend “Body Clutter” by Marla Cilly which can be a great help figuring out eating patterns and exercise etc.
I have chronic pain, at best bearable and worst pure hell. I walk for exercise and for my mental health. I live in the boonies, so I can have a power walk or a strolling pity party complete with tears. Either way, I need that walk everyday for me.
survivors of trauma gain weight–almost immediately, unless they are anorexic–and they have lots of pain issues.
I’d say that as clergy we bear the pain of others and our own pain, and we often have no way of addressing it. What we do is SO countercultural on so many levels.
I really, vehemently disagree with the comments that suggest that your concern for a more professional appearance are some way in conflict with your comments on weight. Perhaps because I share your perspective, but also because you are all about “do what you do on purpose” and so much of the look of the clergy is about the path of least resistance. I’ve been there too.
I agree that you have a book in there if you want to write it.