When you see the word movement, what comes to mind? When I first think about it, I think of walking, running, biking, etc. Something that is getting my heart rate up and I’m putting a lot of purposeful effort into it.
Movement is great for so many reasons - especially for our physical, mental, and emotional health. I feel my best during the week when I get on my indoor bike for 30 minutes and later in the day go outside for a walk, and when I hike on the weekend. Physical movement helps me to get my mental and emotional movement going for that moment so that creative ideas can make their way in. But, this isn’t enough for clearing my mental or emotional stuff that’s still stuck behind there.... the stuff I’m ignoring.
There are other types of movement that need my exploration and attention.
Sometimes we need physical rest and this is where our mental and emotional stuff that hasn’t been cleared by our physical effort makes its way up. Why do you think our world keeps in constant movement? We don’t know what to do with our mental and emotional stuff except for trying to meditate or medicate it away, or ignore it by keeping ourselves physically moving. It’s still there.
Our world is in trauma because we don’t know movement beyond this. This is our human pattern.
As I’ve talked about before, I have C-PTSD caused from my childhood. What causes trauma? Well, the easiest explanation is when something happens too quickly for us to process. Many times trauma is a one-time event and, if we have a healthy nervous system, we can easily process it and move back easily into life. PTSD is when we haven’t been able to process event(s) from our present or past and they cause us to not be able to live life in a healthy functioning way. C-PTSD is well, complex... it’s when many events tie themselves back together.
I love to see someone who can easily share their emotions by pure expression of how they are feeling. With trauma, PTSD, and C-PTSD we often lose this ability until it can be refound with years of work and safety. What’s missing for us is movement.
Movement is also when we can cry (our emotions freely flowing), when I’m writing this blog, our blood moving, our heart beating, or our voice speaking.
Sure, maybe it’s because we couldn’t run from a situation, but there’s more to it than that. We lose the ability to keep our emotions and mental thoughts freely moving through. Our emotions and feelings (sensations) scare us so we try to stop them and we are stuck (even when are physically moving or meditating). Unfortunately, many teachings of our world support this (including some that call this enlightenment).
I honestly don’t think that any of us can escape trauma simply by coming into and being in this world. It’s really about our movement... can our nervous system support us with movement? To be supported and to move mentally and emotionally, we need safety.
I talk about myself and C-PTSD, but there’s another important piece to this too... the people who choose to love us and care for us. As time has moved on and I’ve continued to work on myself, I’ve started to step out of the narcissism (aka life revolves around me) of PTSD and I’m now able to see how this has affected my husband. It’s hard to see now that he now has PTSD from my effects of C-PTSD. Whew... now that’s a tough one... all because someone decided to safely love me. I see now how I have affected my husband’s ability to move.
I can stay stuck in the shame of it, but that isn’t movement.
Movement is beyond shame. Movement is beyond my saying I’m sorry to him. Movement is change in motion... even in silence. Movement is change in action.
Movement is beyond the physical. I could do acts of kindness or say I’m sorry to my husband a million times a day (and I do acts of kindness and I do apologize because he deserves it), but there’s more needed. I need to do more than the physical. I need to also mentally and emotionally move and truly clear the stuff. And so I explore beyond what I’ve tried before.
I look to movement of new ways.
- Lisa Pratt, February 2021
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