The Other 23 Hours of Your Day

About 15 years ago, my right shoulder froze up and would not move. Nerve pain shot up and down my arm.

I cried (and I am not a crier).

So I took action. I saw a physical therapist, who slowly and (with more crying) painfully moved my arm inch by inch into a wider range of motion.

I was so desperate that I also tried an alternative treatment in which the doctor injected a saline solution into my shoulder.

Not only did it not work -- I can still see that day so clearly -- the injections produced tiny red blood stains which ruined the most beautiful ivory silk blouse that I wore to challenging work meetings.

I am still angry that I had sacrificed that beautiful blouse to a failed attempt at healing my shoulder.

I just couldn’t understand how this could have happened to my shoulder. After all, I had been religiously taking Forrest Yoga classes 3 times a week for about 5 years at that point.

All this was on my mind, as I sat among 30 other students at Kripalu, a retreat center in western Massachusetts, at my Yoga Tune Up® teacher training seminar led by Jill Miller.

Jill was assisted by a group of assistants who helped guide us individually during the training.

One of those assistants, an amazing teacher in her own right, Amanda Tripp, talked to us about how she never healed her back pain through the 1 hour sessions with doctors or therapists of any kind.

Instead, it was only when she started to pay attention to how she lived the other 23 hours of her day that her back pain slowly receded.

This was true for me as well.

From the time I opened my eyes in the morning until I closed my eyes in the evening I was, in true exhausted achiever fashion, pushing through my day, checking things off my to-do list, moving from one required activity to another.

I didn’t have any idea that my hard-core, goal-oriented, energetic approach could be the problem. In fact, I patted myself on the back for being able to keep going even when I felt tired, had sniffles, or worse, had a frozen shoulder.

Here was the RX: Find an expert who could fix it; who could teach me some new exercises; who could stretch me out.

But the injuries and pain never quite resolved, or came back, or something new cropped up in a different part of the body.

Why? Why? Why?

Not because of inevitable aging. Rather, because of accumulated stress that we hold onto while we sit, work, push, and check off the necessary tasks of the day.

For us #FierceOver50 women, one new class, one round of physical therapy, one new movement prescription is not sufficient.

The pain keeps coming back because your body is still holding onto stress.

This is what it takes to be #fierceover50: taking on the slow and steady rebuilding of your relationship to your body through breathwork, self-massage, and movement.

I invite you to join me in the #FierceOver50 Gathering where we meet in virtual roundtables twice a month to learn how you can shift your approach to the other 23 hours of your day. And then, the practices that I recommend each week make sense in a new way.

These practices are not just stretching or repairing muscles. Instead, they allow you to nourish these muscles and fascia in a new way.

In our Gathering roundtables, I teach you how to create “breathing room” in the other 23 hours of your day. We talk about what we are learning, how our week has gone, how we can take better care of ourselves, and what we might do differently.

As a group of women supporting each other we begin to untangle our exhausted achiever selves and, instead, learn how to use breathwork, self-massage, and movement -- my Body Vitality Method -- to flex inner muscles that you have not used and are waiting to be woken up.

Join the Gathering here by clicking here.  Your monthly investment in yourself is $47.00 (Less than half the price of one massage, I’m just sayin’.) You can cancel at any time because it is a monthly charge (but you won’t want to, because this kind of support will, I’m hoping, become such an important part of your daily life.)

Get in touch if you have questions about whether the Gathering is right for you!