Everyone’s telling you to start a new hobby, to start a course during the COVID 19 pandemic lock down.
You’re being told to slow down—’this is a great opportunity to journal’.
Yes, but ...
Maybe you’re feeling stressed that you don’t know how to slow down right now: must stay positive, must keep busy.
Are you scrambling for control?
Completely normal. When things are taken away from us, without our say, it’s completely normal. Maybe for you, going to the gym is the one thing you can depend on to be constant, that is in your control.
But now it’s not there.
There’s a spectrum:
On one hand you’re being told to relinquish control, to surrender to what it is, to use this time to do the inner work.
On the other hand, you feel like you need to maintain some control in your life and exercise is one thing you can make sense of.
Both can be true for you.
You can use movement to both practice relinquishing control AND create structure to this new rhythm.
It can still be that dependable thing, the thing that is constant. But let it look different for now.
How can you expand to invite curiosity in? How can you expand to instead of using movement to control things, use it to soften?
Be uncomfortable with not having your gym environment.
Be uncomfortable with digging into the hows and whys for motivation rather than external schedules.
Be uncomfortable with the potential of things not feeling the same when you do return to the gym.
Be uncomfortable with using this as a way to address the rold exercise in your life—what do you really use it to control?
The more you can soften to these things WITH movement, the more you can relinquish in a way that makes sense for you if movement is a dependable aspect in your life.
This IS your opportunity to get curious about what they mean when they say ‘listen to your body’.
My brilliant friend said to me: make the only goal to be okay with falling down again and again and getting back up again.
This new rhythm with your exercise is not going to feel good. It will feel clunky and unfamiliar. But let it. And then the next day, let it again. Just like when you first started exercise, or when you did that first CrossFit class, it will get easier. It will.
If having structure will help you create space to make sense of things, shift into a new rhythm for your training. Let go of expectations and trust in the fact that you will figure this out with what you have available to you.
The Bold Collective: out of gym edition is open. Head to the link here if you're ready to have that infrastructure.