Movement Heals.

Movement heals.

In the world of physical therapy, a lack of physical movement leads to nothing good. If you injure your back and you protect and guard that injury and never move, you’re not actually doing anything to heal your back - you’re just hurting it more. By guarding that injury, you might think you’re doing your body a service, but in reality, you’re actually allowing inflammation to stay in that area, not allowing healthy blood flow in to heal, encouraging immobility of joints that really just want to move in a healthy way. I understand the idea of “if it hurts, don’t move it”, but it doesn’t really work like that. Ultimately, guarding that back injury can lead to permanent mobility deficits, compensatory patterns, and either continued pain in the area or pain in new joints that are trying to pick up the slack. I’m not saying to completely ignore the pain and jump right back into life at full speed, but healthy appropriate movements to facilitate healing is the only way that that back pain will resolve. A more appropriate idea regarding healing after an injury should be more like “if it hurts, I should not move in the way that I injured myself, and instead, find a new, healthy way to move and resolve the real issue”.

If you don’t know already, you will soon learn that I like to find the deeper meaning and relate things together. So what if we apply that concept of a lack of movement to other arenas:

Emotional movement. Spiritual movement. Mental movement. Social movement. Energy movement.

A lack of movement in any of the arenas listed above will lead to exactly the same things that result from physical immobility and guarding - permanent mobility deficits, compensatory patterns, and pain in the area or other areas.

If we hold onto a negative emotion, and never let it go, that lack of emotional movement will cause pain. We will either relive the same pain over and over again, or we’ll project that pain onto something or someone else. Think of that person you refer to as an “angry person”. I can assure you that that person was not born angry. That person has clung to his or her emotional pain and projects it onto others as anger. If we hold onto our spiritual and/or mental beliefs and never let them flow and move, our spiritual/mental beliefs will never grow and we won’t be able to ascend to our next best self. If we hold on to our social views and don’t allow for social movement, we’ll be living in the past - the way that the generations before us lived - which can certainly cause a form of pain.

Where all of this gets really fun is when we realize that stagnancy in one arena can lead to pain in another arena. Holding onto emotions can lead to physical pain. While this is hard to conceptualize, I assure you it happens - think about when you’re stressed at work and you hold onto that stress… for a lot of people, that can result in neck pain; for others, it’s stomach distress. Holding onto outdated spiritual/mental beliefs or outdated social ideas can lead to judgment of others, which causes pain in both the individuals being judged and in society as a whole.

So again: “if it hurts, I should not move in the way that I injured myself, and instead, find a new, healthy way to move and resolve the real issue”.

Moral of the story: All. Movement. Heals.