Announcements
Wow, the my Body can podcast was the runner up in the Best Health & Fitness Podcast category for the Discover Pods awards. Thank you so much for your support in this. I’m truly touched. https://discoverpods.com/2025-podcast-awards-winners-announcement/
If this reflection resonates, I’d appreciate you sharing it with someone who might need to hear it. Quiet posts travel best by hand.
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For a long time, I released stress by moving for a long time.
Long walks.
Long hikes.
Long bike rides.
Not fast. Not intense. Just long enough for my nervous system to settle into a rhythm and let whatever needed to move, move. I never thought of it as regulation back then. It was just what felt good. What worked.
And then, not so slowly I couldn’t do that.
Foot problems. Back problems. Endometriosis. Surgery. Recovery. Vertigo. Unpredictability.
It wasn’t one thing. It was a pileup. And somewhere along the way, the main way I knew how to get energy out of my body didn’t work.
I didn’t just lose exercise. I lost a pressure valve.
When energy has nowhere to go
Stress doesn’t politely stay in the brain.
It shows up in the body whether we invite it or not. And when I couldn’t move the way I used to, the stress didn’t disappear. It just stayed. It pooled. It poked. It pressed.
I didn’t always notice it right away. Sometimes it showed up as irritability. Sometimes exhaustion. Sometimes sadness that didn’t seem to belong. Sometimes it was just a sense of being weighed down by something I couldn’t name.
The hardest part was not knowing when my body would cooperate.
A year and a half of on and off vertigo taught me that lesson brutally. When the world can spin without warning, I stopped trusting movement. I stopped biking altogether. I stopped even considering it. Safety became smaller. Possibility narrowed.
I lived in Copenhagen, Denmark and didn’t bike once, even though it was been a few years since the last vertigo incident. (Also, biking in CPH was a pretty aggressive experience, which you never see in the Instagram posts). Participating in that kind of angry movement wouldn’t give me what the long, quiet rides once did. So I didn’t try.
Instead I adapted by doing less. And less. And less.
Not because I wanted to, but because I had to.
The chances of spinning while moving were too high.
The strange grief of losing familiar movement
I don’t think we talk enough about how specific grief can be when it comes to bodies.
This wasn’t about becoming sedentary. It was about losing access to a language my body spoke fluently. Long movement was how I processed things. How I thought. How I unwound years, not minutes.
When that went away, I didn’t immediately replace it. I sat in the absence for a long time.
Part of that was fear. Part of it was habit. Part of it was not knowing what was safe anymore.
It took years before I was willing to experiment again, not with the goal of getting back to what I used to do, but with the quieter question of what might be possible now.
Finding something else, not a replacement
I didn’t stumble into resistance bands and weights with enthusiasm.
I resisted them. Hard.
They felt boring. Restrictive. Too contained. Too unlike the open-ended movement I loved. And honestly, I had injured myself before trying to force my body into things it wasn’t ready for. I didn’t want to repeat that.
But something shifted when I stopped asking my body to perform and started asking it to participate.
The barriers that used to stop me began to fall away, not because my body magically healed, but because my expectations softened.
Using resistance bands and light weights didn’t give me the same experience as long hikes. It gave me something different.
It gave me a way to let energy leave my body again.
Weight, in every sense of the word
I’m currently taking a course focused on nervous system regulation, and one idea keeps coming up again and again. Stress has to come out.
If it doesn’t, it doesn’t just disappear. It settles. It accumulates. It shows up sideways.
The physical work I’ve been doing over the past seven months, especially with weights, suddenly makes sense in a deeper way. It isn’t just about strength. It’s about load, capacity.
Not the load of today, but the load of years.
I’ve started to think of it like this. Physical exercise helps me release the weight of the day, so it doesn’t become the weight of the year. The somatic work helps me release the weight that never got processed at all.
No wonder I’ve been exhausted. This is real work.
And yet, underneath the fatigue, there’s something else.
Lightness.
That feeling surprised me when it showed up. I didn’t trust it. I thought something was wrong. I’m so used to tension that its absence felt suspicious.
When lightness feels unfamiliar
There was a moment recently where I realized I wasn’t carrying what I usually carry. Not physically. Emotionally. Mentally.
The weight wasn’t gone forever. I know that. Life doesn’t work like that. But it wasn’t all piled on at once, pressing down on me. And sometimes pressing out. Wanting a release.
For the first time in a long time, I was experiencing the day as the day. Not as an accumulation of everything that came before it.
That felt profound.
And fragile.
Because I also know this won’t stay the same forever. What works now will need to change again. my Body will change again. My needs will shift again.
But that doesn’t mean this moment isn’t real.
Staying flexible instead of faithful to one method
I used to think I’d find the thing that worked and I’d stick with it.
Now I think adaptability matters more than loyalty, with exercise and maybe some other aspects of life.
There probably isn’t one practice, one movement, one system that carries us through an entire lifetime. Especially not when chronic pain, trauma, and aging are part of the picture.
What I’m doing now is working now.
That feels like enough.
I trust that when it stops working, I’ll adjust. Not because it’s easy, but because I’ve already learned how to do that part.
Where I am right now
my Body can process more than I once thought it could.
Not by pushing. Not by forcing. But by experimenting. By paying attention. By letting go of what I think movement is supposed to look like.
If you’re reading this and you’re experimenting too, whether something is working or not, I’d genuinely love to hear about it. You can leave a comment or send me a message. Sometimes naming what doesn’t work is just as important as naming what does.
For now, I’m letting this lightness be what it is.
And trusting my Body to tell me what comes next.
Until next week mBc friends,
Steph
