Embracing active movement to find the stillness within you

“There is more movement than they’d expect if they are doing it right, that movement can feel scary. You want to feel stable, but most riders are used to feeling stable a certain way. Eventually you will feel stable because of the movement, not without it.” - @mrtankcook on Instagram. (Photo credits: @Sindt417 on Instagram)

I follow lots of horse riding accounts on Instagram. There is something special to me about horses—their groundedness and ease, their muscles bunching up through graceful movements, every trot belies an understated kindness for life. I fell in love with horse riding as a child and this love has kept me company through some of the toughest times in my life. People might look at it and think it’s just a sport, but to me, horse riding was as grounding as it was inspiring—it taught me how to embrace active movement through life while finding stillness within.

It may seem far-fetched that a simple activity as horse riding can teach one such deep lessons but the best teachers are always the ones most unnoticed. It is confusing why the most natural and organic thing, movement, is seen upon by people with so much apprehension. Forget about riding a horse, but something as instinctive as running with our two legs is often met with reluctance. Take a look at the five closest people around you and count how many run regularly? More often than not, the majority are not regular joggers. Perhaps they don’t even walk regularly.

The rhythm of movement

Movement is one of the most fundamental expressions of life itself. We use the words “moving forwards” to signify growth in life. It is manifested in multiple forms—physical activity, emotional expression and curiosity of thoughts—with even more nuances in between each of them. The most visibly obvious forms are of course the physical motion of walking, running, dancing, jumping and doing sports. During these activities, our body tenses and releases with each action, every muscle fibre engages and loosens as it supplies the energy needed to execute each movement. There is a flow of energy from one state to another—tense and relax, tense and relax, tense and relax. This forms a rhythm, a beat and a pulse, somewhat like music. It is not hard to see how a dancer’s body vibes to the beat of a tune, jumping on a staccato, languid on a legato and moving through the entire song. When we jog or walk, we are also moving through the rhythm of life. 

Movement in our emotions and thoughts

Yet movement is not only reserved for physical activity though. It is also in our emotional expression. When we experience emotional states of joy, love, excitement, anger, sorrow or even calmness, we are moving through them. Imagine a scene when someone is laughing happily with friends and suddenly receives the sad news of someone’s death. That emotion from happiness to sadness is a form of movement. The same goes for our thoughts as it jumps from one topic to another, getting curious about something it has never seen, wondering about the whys or the meaning of life. Our thoughts are going through a motion. 

While everything described above should be a natural daily occurrence, more often than not, through the trials of life, many people remain stuck mid-movement. Some unexpected trauma happens, perhaps more than they were prepared to handle, overloading them. Then they stop running, they stop feeling and they stop questioning. Their body, heart and the mind ends up being stuck in a fixed spot; fixed in time and space. Maybe an ankle was sprained due to high activity but once recovered, the person doesn’t jump anymore. Or someone’s heart was broken and after a period of grieving, he or she decides not to risk loving again. Or they could have been a curious child who was constantly told not to question the adults and so lapsed into a fixed mindset. Sad but true, these things happen everyday. We get conditioned as children by our very parents who should be teaching us to embrace life. At this point, we are in limbo, and our lives, in all its different aspects, are frozen in time, neither moving forwards nor backwards. 

Let’s dance through life

While it may seem like a very complicated and difficult situation for someone who is stuck, there is a straightforward and simple solution—start moving. It could be a daily stroll for someone who has been physically injured. It could be looking at memes and allowing oneself to laugh again. Or one could simply get curious again about a daily task, for example, how much sugar does the waiter put into one’s cup of coffee? The key is to shift oneself from a place of rigidness to a place of newness. It doesn’t have to be a big thing because it is about the act of moving and not necessarily the destination. For someone who sits all day at the office desk, making a point to incorporate an evening stroll can make a huge difference in breaking the monotony of daily life. Or for someone who is afraid of opening their heart, a smile to a stranger can be a big leap of faith. Of course there are many more ways to loosen and soften one’s body, heart and mind but if all else is too difficult, the simplest thing to do is to walk. 

Life is not a bed of roses and more often than not, it can be full of thorns. But trauma notwithstanding, we can practise active movement through life; from the day we are born to the day we die, knowing that for as long as we are being active, we are living and growing. We cannot control what life throws at us, nor can we prevent the thorns from forming, but we can walk, we can run and we can dance through life.

And that itself makes all the difference between dying and living. 

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Food for thought: When you feel a strong emotion like anger or sorrow, are you able to also feel the physical feelings connected to it, like an increased heart rate or a constriction of the heart?