Most people do not get to be as old as I am without having some injury history. Life is just like that. We break a leg, or sprain an ankle a few times, or hurt a shoulder. Injuries heal, but our bodies are not entirely the same afterwards. In fact, one of the best predictors of injury is… previous injury.
Even if we don’t re-injure a body part, we can struggle with how that part behaves. We may consciously or unconsciously compensate for that wrist we want to baby a bit or that knee that makes that weird sound. These compensations ripple through the body and suddenly some other part is working too hard and starts to complain.
So what do we do? First, we try to have some compassion for ourselves and our hard-working body parts. Our bodies do amazing things every single day. Yes, even the ones that don’t conform to societal standards of beauty, even the ones that creak a little more than last year, even the ones that are too whatever for our personal tastes. Some of us might think it’s too weird to thank our bodies, out loud, for all that work they do for us, but maybe it’s not.
Then we tune in to what the body says back. Maybe the body needs to move a little slower. Maybe it would be happier moving more often during the day. Maybe a bath? We only get one, so it’s a good idea to treat it nicely.
We can also do some mindbody work. Pilates is great for this. We discover that our left side is both more stable and more inflexible than the right side. Who knew? We can encourage the right side to work a bit more and the left side to chill out a bit. It can be disconcerting, doing a bunch of exercises that expose all the little cheats we use to get through the day, but once we find them, we can teach our bodies to do better, with less pain and suffering.
We can do this.
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