I Like to Move it Move it!

beautywalk Sandra Butel gym physical pain coaching aging Montreal — *Reflections on Building a Body* Photo by Sandra Butel

I am Sandra Butel and this is my beautywalk.

beautywalk is an internal and external voyage complete with roadblocks and gravel paths and time lying down on our backs under the beauty of a tree.
beautywalk for me, is a place of refuge and authenticity and learning as I make my way through the trials, tribulations and awesome wonder and joy of life in my all too human form.

Aches and Pains

As I crest into my 56th year of life on the planet I find that there are more pains in my body to wrestle with. Whether it is the tooth pain I had before, during and after my recent check up and long overdue dental cleaning, or the pain in my hips or the dull ache I get in the middle of my lower back as I go about my volunteering duties at my latest yoga studio, pain has become something that is ever present in my life.

This visceral sense of age not just being a number coincides with the first time in my life where I no longer have medical benefits. Any support I require comes with the added ache of a higher than normal price tag. I find myself measuring the severity of the discomfort and deciding, for the most part, only to search out the treatments that I deem essential to my overall well being and to me showing up in my life in the most positive and loving way possible. Sometimes permission comes in the form of the phrase “Bessie’s treat”, a nod to the money that has come to me from the estate of my recently departed Mom. I have put quite a bit of time and money into figuring out what to do about the new level of discomfort I started to feel in my right hip and thigh and knee back in April when we arrived in Montreal and started walking on pavement instead of on dirt roads or in the lush green fields of the Asian or Mexican countryside.

The Rise and Fall of Hope

As I limped my way through gatherings with my in-laws, I started to get the attention and concern of my sister-in-law, who greatly espoused the virtues of the well loved Osteopath, Benoit, that the Montreal branch of my partner’s family tree looked to for guidance and relief. I heard many stories of how he had magic hands and of how his combination of physiotherapy and osteopathy was the ideal balm to the various aches and pains that family members had been through. This lyrical love song of his magical gifts, as “the best osteopath in Montreal'' was accompanied by the firm line that, “of course, he is not taking any new patients.” The hope that had blossomed for those moments of waxingly poetic story time was replaced by the harsh reality that he was so good that it would be nigh on impossible for me to be lucky enough to get in to see him.

I shrugged my shoulders and figured that I would just have to find someone else who could help me with my pain. A few texts and emails later and I had found an alternate osteopath and managed to get some relief after a few sessions on her table. She “liberated” my feet. I didn’t even know they were trapped and my steps taken since then have felt so much more fluid. It is, as she predicted, “Like walking on new feet.” I took this for my fate and continued to get what relief I could from the 2nd best osteopath in Montreal. She worked on me a few times and urged me to visit a podiatrist to get an assessment done on the relative length of my leg bones and the placement of my hips so that we could determine what the cause of the discomfort might be.

Hope Rises Again

To my surprise and delight a few weeks later my sister in law told me that she was going to reach out to Benoit to see if he could add me on as a one time patient. She had been watching me limp around at repeated family gatherings and was moved to reach out to see what influence her status of loyal long-time client might bring. I felt such a sense of good luck smiling down at me and this feeling of having won the caregiver lottery increased 100 fold once I got to experience Benoit’s heart and hands, live and in person a few weeks later. He had generously offered to sneak me in before his vacation and see what he could do to help me.

The hype was 100% true and Benoit really was the best solution for all of my pain related needs. My first visit was a revelation as he used his knowledge and insight and “Benoit'' methods to release the stiffness and pain in my right leg and hip. He confirmed that the podiatry visit and the upcoming scans were the best possible next steps to address my concerns. I walked out of there with a skip in my step and the sense that I had left 6 months of stiffness behind me as I closed the door to his Outremont office.

Short Leg Syndrome

I went through with my appointments with the podiatrist and visited a lab to have scans made of my legs and hips. I found out that indeed my legs were uneven, my right leg measuring a full 2 cm more than my left leg, a difference that increased to 2.8 cm when I was standing. All my life my body had learned to live with my “short leg syndrome” and it wasn’t until I got into my 50s that I began to find that the difference resulted in bouts of intense pain. With some relief that there was actually something that was wrong that could be corrected I got custom orthotics made and began the journey to getting used to these new shapes that have been inserted inside of my shoes.

As Luck Would Have It

I had been lucky enough to be offered a second appointment with Benoit for after my orthotic creation. The second session was just as full of physical relief as the first one but this time we were able to go even further. His ability to see into the physical causes of the pain was matched with his ability to see the additional mental layer of pain that I had been creating in my mind. As he worked on me we talked about the causes of pain and the additional weight of the meanings we add onto this pain. With my background in coaching, and his many years of treating clients, we were able to get into an in depth discussion of how as humans we all just want the pain to go away. We resist just feeling it and refuse to see it as a possible message or as a tool to growth and transformation.

I got this aha moment when I was lying on my back and he was using all of his body weight to loosen up the stiffness in my right leg. How blind I had been that my own interaction with pain was much like that of my clients with their mental or emotional pain.

Pain Pain Go Away

My desire had been to find a solution, whether in the form of a treatment, or a pill or a new habit, to make the pain go away. I didn’t want to be with it, I didn’t like how it made me feel and I certainly didn’t like the thoughts I was having about how this was going to be my lot in life now as my body continued on its path of aging. I had been seeing my pain as bad and wrong and I had been looking for someone or something to blame.

I had done the necessary work to find the mechanical support I needed and the existence of my leg balancing orthotics went a long way to relieving my discomfort. I saw now that the real cause of the majority of my discomfort were the thoughts I was having about the existence of the pain itself. I had been concocting all sorts of stories of how I had failed myself and there were many “if only I had done x,y,z” or “if only I had not done a,b and c” thoughts floating around. I had gotten into the place of deciding that since it hurt that meant I should stop doing what I was doing and just accept that now that I was older there were just going to be more limitations for me to accept. I resisted and felt the full weight of my biology, cursing my luck in having inherited my Mom’s and not my Dad’s bodily abilities.

Get a Move On

When Benoit said in his singsongy, easily understandable French that “research shows that the single best solution to any discomfort we are feeling in our bodies is to get moving and to keep moving”. He went on to say that, “there is no better way to get the stiffness and soreness out than to increase the amount of time we are stretching and walking and dancing”. He did admit when pressed that there were certain physical activities that he would not recommend for me at my age and that these included “skydiving, bungy jumping and mogul skiing”. According to Benoit, the rest of the diversity of ways we are able to move our bodies were all a-okay for me.

Blind Spot No More
I had a chuckle at myself for the blind spot that Benoit’s insight had just revealed to me. I had gotten caught up in the story that pain was not only bad, but that its existence required a radical change that would allow me to get as far away from it as possible. I had been hoping to return to a time in the past when I had taken my bodily movements for granted. I was putting so much energy into judging the current circumstances in which I found myself, with the new aches and pains in my body, that I was missing the gift that was being offered to me. I had forgotten that pain, whether physical, emotional or mental, was not permanent and no matter what I did I could not ensure that it would not return to visit when I least expected it. I had lost sight of the truth that the presence of discomfort does not have to result in a diminished capacity to fully appreciate the beauty of life. While I was clear on this concept when it came to my thoughts and feelings, when it came to bodily sensations I had lost sight of the fact that I always have a choice between resisting, judging and pushing away what I don’t like and fully embracing and accepting the reality of what is, just the way it is. This situation was calling for my insatiable curiosity and a detailed investigation into how I could use this pain to learn and grow and be inspired to make some change in my day to day life that would have a positive impact on my future .

This was not a case of “I’ll be happy when my pain goes away” but rather a case of “yes, there is pain, so what?, now what?”

So What? Now What?

This has been a theme that has come up many times in my coaching practice. Clients come to me with pain about some “too bad to be true” event in their lives. They find themselves unable to process and accept what happened and their deepest wish is to find a way to make it not have happened at all. I can empathize with this feeling of wanting the ugly times to have been but a dream and I also know first hand that no amount of magical thinking can make our pasts turn out differently.

Our sphere of influence is limited to the present only and we need to put our undivided attention not on the pain and the limitations it brings with it, but rather on all of the wonderful ways that our body is able to express itself. Our job is to hone in on the actual experience of our feet lifting and lowering as we move our right leg forward and then our left or on the sensations we get when we stand on our tiptoes and hold our arms up high in a yoga pose, rejoicing in the momentary sense of instability we are feeling.

Yoga is a Gift

This insight was strengthened at my first ever Katonah Yoga class the other morning. Katonah Yoga is a relatively new style of yoga that, according to the studio where I practiced it is:

“Classical Hatha yoga combined with Taoist theory, sacred geometry, magic, mythology, metaphor and imagination in a practical framework designed to potentiate personal and communal well-being.”
Morpho-bleu.com

As various members of the mostly 50+ group whined and moaned about the difficulty of holding pigeon pose for as long as our teacher Sara instructed, her response fit right into what I have been discovering of late about pain. She said, “the painful parts of our lives, whether physical, mental or spiritual, are the places where we learn and grow.” “It is not at the times when we are fully at ease, or when we find a pose that our body can rest into as our minds drop into rest that we are going to be able to push past our resistance to discovery.”

The gist of her message is that it is indeed the times of struggle and discomfort that offer us the opportunity to expand our sense of self and move beyond our beliefs about our limitations. She went on to speak about how the supports, in this case folded blankets and blocks, were there to help us to push beyond what we believed was possible. To give our bodies a place to rest upon so that we might stretch ourselves further and further into a place of increased flexibility and openness.

I Like to Move It Move It!

As I head into the next moments of my life, I am eager to discover how my new sense of moving more will manifest in my everyday life. So far, I have added in a couple mobility focused sessions at the yoga studio as well as beginning to experiment with both barre and mat pilates. I have a renewed dedication to get 10000 steps in each day and have committed to getting myself outside and mobile each day. I was blessed with a dip in the pool the other day and revelled in the ease with which my body moved back and forth through the cooling water.

I am going to let this new stiffness inspire me ever forward into my future of limitless possibilities as I throw back my head and stick out my chest and sing along with King Julian of Madagascar fame, “I like to move it move it!”

This is Sandra Butel and this is my beautywalk. What’s yours?

Resources for Further Study and Personal Growth

If you are interested in trying out a bit of yoga to get your body moving and feeling good, I highly recommend Kate Rivard at Niche Yoga and Therapy in Regina. Her skills as a teacher and the lightness with which she holds space for her students make her one of my favourite yoga teachers of all time.
If you are more of an online type of practitioner or you don't happen to live in Regina, I cannot recommend enough the inimitable Fiji McAlpine, whose guidance and depth of practice has been such a big part of my beautywalk journey. Fiji is part of the fantastic team of the online based, Do Yoga With Me along with the wonderful David Procyshyn Fiji offers live sessions on Vancouver Island, as well as a wonderful series of retreats all around the world.
If you are living in, or passing through Montreal and want to try out Katonah Yoga with Morpho Bleu’s co-founder Sara Gallagher Bloom, do not hesitate to let yourself be swept up by this wonderful mix of magical metaphors and movements.
My offering as Coach Sandra is to listen and be open as we co-create a space where you are seen, heard and understood. If this sounds interesting to you please do not hesitate to reach out to chat about how we might best work together on making your life a little bit more the way you want it to be. Sign up for a free beautywalk session.
My new program From Worry to Worthy offers you an opportunity to investigate your own internal experience of the negative voices inside your head and help you to find ways to connect to the deeper truths of your own heart. Check out the full program details and book your first free session with me to get started. Friends and Family discount applied to all newsletter subscribers and your friends and family too!
If you are interested in signing up for TrustedHouseSitters you can get a 25% discount (as well as pass on 2 free months of membership to me in the process).

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I Like to Move it Move it!

Pedi-Cure

Pause for Reflection