If you don’t enjoy moving your body, then you’ve lost the ability to be fully human. Repression of the flesh, your crooked lifestyle is suffocating the spectrum of your human experience.

Remember: you were made to move.

Somatic work is shadow work, and it’s impossible to fully heal the trauma of your past if you avoid the responsibility of curating an embodiment-focused lifestyle with movement-oriented daily routines.

You need to be your body: not be-in-your-body, but being-your-body as both anchor and expression of a genuinely self-loving adult consciousness.

Stagnation is physical, but it’s also emotional.

Think about your holding patterns.

Do your words get stuck in a tight throat?

Do you bite your nails or pick at your skin?

Do you grab at romantic opportunities?

Do you feel shameful when you swing your hips?

Do you cringe at your own reflection?

These are signs of emotional repression, and it’s the kind of pain that manifests in rigid postures and compulsive habits.  

Fitness and exercise isn’t categorised as therapeutic in a clinical sense, but its arguably the most important healing modality from a practical and common-sense perspective.

I’ve read hundreds of psychology books and worked intimately with dozens of individuals in multi-month mentorships, and the simple truth is that you cannot bypass the chronic disconnection of living inside a sick or unconditioned body.

Movement is healing, and its absence is crippling.

It’s about vitality, the expression of genuine feeling.

Do you know what it feels like to run towards something you need; to climb and pull yourself up to another level of awareness; to push something heavy above your head, and conquer your limitations; to dance with strength and grace and love; to throw a real punch or real kick with full feeling?

These are the natural expressions of the vitalised flesh, the fully embodied human.

This post isn’t about tight waistlines and six pack abs, I’m trying to encourage you to prioritise the instinctual-yet-intuitive expression of motion and emotion threaded seamlessly together.

In popular group workshops and trendy somatic circles, you’ll often see a fake it til’ you make it experience on display: participants are encouraged to pretend the feeling of being strong enough to defend themselves from an attacker or pretend the feeling of loving their reflection in the mirror.

But it’s often fake, performative.

You can’t trick the somatic unconscious.

How long will the artificially amped-up confidence linger if you’re not authentically rooted into a mindful and conscious body in your everyday life?

The 24/7 matters the most, not the performance.

Put in the work, and root into your flesh.

You can make yourself strong.

Physical assertion is a skill, so is surrender.

Get to the gym, the martial arts class, the yoga school.

I want you to look and feel healthy and beautiful rather than wasting more time juggling spiritual affirmations and mind-based narratives to trick yourself into feeling like somebody you want to be.

Physical exercise, when engaged mindfully, is both the foundation and the pinnacle of human self actualisation.

In terms of trauma healing, you’ll be in a much better position to work with repressed emotions, especially repressed anger, if you establish a baseline aliveness in your body.

It’s easier to feel when your flesh is awakened.

I want you to feel better, feel deeper.

Before you scroll away, I want to remind you about The Betrayal Of The Body by Alexander Lowen, which I recommended earlier this week. It’s a fantastic book, and I want you to read it as soon as possible.

Writing in the 1960’s, Lowen is a somatic therapy genius. His work is incredible, and there is no sense of exaggeration when I say that working with the somatic unconscious has changed my life.

My words in this post aren’t original, I’ve inherited my perspective from Alexander Lowen and his Bioenergetic teachings, and you can experience the beauty of your body in this way too.

There is an entire world of advanced, psycho-somatic literature waiting for you - and it’s right there, within your reach.

Check the newsletter sign up below,

Jordan