Movement is what I do, as an osteopath, and I will come back to the culture of movement.
But first, what is culture? Let’s skip the thesis and talk about something simple, such as food, which forms a big part of most modern Australian “culture.”
A good friend put this to me, when we were discussing the idea that people don’t know what and how to eat. My friend is of Italian heritage and thinks that this concept is ludicrous! “What do you mean you don’t know what to eat? Ask your grandmother!”
That is culture. It is knowledge that is crafted, grown and passed down through the generations. It evolves as it passes through each generation. It’s not just food though, its everything. It’s what keeps us grounded. It allows us to keep our feet firmly planted while we continue to grow and explore new experiences. It’s what we always come back to after our forays into the unknown and it keeps our mind, body and soul connected.
Maintaining culture is like planting a seed that grows into a tree. It happens slowly, and requires work. You must cultivate the ground, water the tree, feed it, give it love.
Without culture to keep us grounded, we become separated, isolated, unloved, depressed, anxious, angry and pained. Like the seed that is left unloved and is not cared for, we wither and become choked by weeds.
But we live in a world that wants a tree that grows like Jacks beanstalk. We want to plant the seed today and pick the fruit tomorrow. In fact, we want someone else to plant the seed and pick the fruit for us. In short, as Australians we have no culture anymore, because we haven’t cared for it and now we are suffering. You can’t “ask your grandmother” because you, and I (maybe not all, but many of us!), put them in a nursing home and as they lost their sense of purpose and connection to family, they withered away and a thousand generations of knowledge was lost with them.
Our grandparents should have been living in a granny flat (yes – GRANNY flat!) at the back of our house, showing us as children how to love, grow and nurture. Showing us how to care for ourselves, for a vege garden or fruit tree, or the world around us. Showing us how to move!
Good health and good movement are the same as the seed that grows. The same can be said for conscious awareness and humanity but let me save that rant for another time. You can’t plant the seed and walk away. You have to nurture it. You can’t do exercises in the morning and then forget about it for the rest of the day. You have to live every moment with the movement changes you create.
We have forgotten how to move. We forgot at the same time as we threw away our culture, when we left our grandparents in the nursing homes.
We shouldn’t need to “learn how to lift”, its innate! It’s a blue print that’s passed on from one generation to the next. And if good movement is embedded in our culture then we stay grounded in it. Good movement is expressed, not learnt. And it’s practiced in purposeful and cultural tasks that enhance our awareness and keep us grounded. Like squatting in the garden to plant the seed alongside your grandparents. The same seed that will grow to become a mighty tree. But you must love and care for the seed, which means kneeling and squatting in the earth daily, it means moving constantly.
But we threw our movement culture away too, and we would rather laze on a beanbag staring at a screen of some sort than kneeling in the garden, or turning over mulch and compost that helps growth. Growth is hard and it’s not comfortable. But being comfortable all the time means we never grow.
So now we have to learn to re-express normal movement. We have to work double time to re-establish our culture.
I am a teacher, or perhaps a better word is facilitator, of better movement. But there are not enough movement exercises under the sun to fix movement problems and pain without addressing the bigger picture. Culture. I’ve seen it, I’ve experienced it a thousand times over professionally and I’ve felt the failure for myself.
Movement and posture are not something that you practise for half an hour or even two hours each day. They are part of who you are, part of your personality. And who we are stems from our culture. If you want to fix your movement you must start to transform yourself. Reconnect with the world around you and start living in conscious awareness, practicing with each breath you take to be the best version of yourself. Then you will start to move better and the aches and pains will recede.
The beauty of the human experiment that we call life, is that each day, and every moment within each day, we have another chance to better ourselves. To reconnect, to share and care, to put the tech away and kneel or squat in the dirt and grow something, to love more, spend more time with our children and grandchildren, to re-grow our culture from the ground up so that it becomes the tree that fruits for generations to come. And of course, each day is another chance to move more and to move better until it becomes part of who you are.