I have put on my Captain Obvious hat this morning: we move with our whole bodies.
Maybe it’s my Captain Should-Be-Obvious hat. We tend to think about our bodies in segments, limbs, sometimes even systems. We do curls and think: I am exercising the muscles in my arm. In truth, we are using our whole bodies, integrating all those different kinds of tissues to lift that weight.
What that means, practically, is that stuff that happens in one area of the body affects everything else. Imagine, for example, that I have a blister on my left heel. The problem is just right there. Except now I’m walking differently because my heel hurts. This changes the way my knees and hips work and the way my spine aligns itself, how my shoulders orient themselves and how my arms swing, even the angle of my head on my neck. That one blister can give me a headache or aggravate lower back pain.
Of course, there are times when it is useful to use our gift for analysis to break down our body into parts, but sometimes we need to remember the whole. We’re a lot more useful as entire human beings than as just a collection of arms and legs.
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