This started as a blog post, but somehow turned into a love letter.
…
Hello, Dear Reader!
For those of you who aren’t the avid readers of Us magazine that I am, let me remind you of where the phrase “conscious uncoupling” comes from.
A few years ago, Gwenyth Paltrow and her pop star husband Chris Martin got a divorce. But they didn’t call it a divorce. They called it “conscious uncoupling”.
At the time I was a yoga teacher, and I started using the phrase to describe what we’re doing with body parts in a yoga practice, as in–
“Can you move your ARM without moving your SHOULDER BLADE?”
“Can you move your PELVIS without moving your ribcage?”
“Can you move your big toe but not any of your other toes?”
But the kind of conscious uncoupling I’m gonna talk about in this blog has nothing to do with uncoupling people or body parts.
Today I’m writing about uncoupling ideas.
See, our culture tends to couple certain ideas together in a way that does not serve you.
And I’m all about breaking those types of mental bonds so that you can live a freer, happier, more authentic life.
The sneaky thing about these “couplings” is that we don’t even know we have them.
We imbibe these ideas like water during our entire lives. Our brains are literally wired by the cultures we grow up in!
So these unconsciously coupled ideas are deeply held, mostly-unquestioned assumptions.
So I made a big list of things that many of us have unconsciously coupled, so that we can begin to consciously UNCOUPLE them.
Let’s start with a bit of a softball–I used to talk about this all the time when I was a yoga teacher.
MOVEMENT AND EXERCISE
If you ever took my yoga class back in the day, you may have heard me talk about the Venn Diagram of movement and exercise.
Human movement is a HUGE, HUGE category–a HUGE circle. It encompasses all the stuff you normally think of as movement, like swinging your arms, running, bending over, dancing, etc.
But human movement also includes things like–
- climbing a tree
- having a bowel movement
- whatever movement it is that your spleen makes when it does its spleeny stuff
- birthing a baby
- beating your heart
- crawling
- moving food through your digestive tract
- laughing
- fidgeting
- the movement of teeny muscles at the base of your follicles that make your hair stand up when you’re cold
- chewing
- moving your eyes to read this article!
Movement, something we have in common with the earliest lifeforms on planet Earth from 3 billion years ago,
is A HUGE CIRCLE in our Venn diagram.
And EXERCISE, invented by human minds very recently, is a teeeeenytinylittledot in that circle!
Yeah, exercising is good and we should all do more of it. And, even more than that, we all need to move more.
For many of my coaching clients, this conflation of exercise and movement creates problems.
When you have movement confused with exercise, you tend to think that movement is something that only happens when you’re at the gym.
When really, moving more can also mean stuff like:
- sitting on the floor more often
- laughing more
- hugging more
- eating whole, raw, firm vegetables that take some effort to chew (like a carrot)
- allowing yourself to experience temperature changes
- strolling out to the mailbox more often
- reaching up to the top shelf of the closet to pull down your purse
- lolling on the floor instead of the couch to watch Netflix
- having more sex (alone or with someone else)
- tickle war
- living room dance party
- climbing a fence
- gardening
On to the next thing that we tend to unconsciously couple. This one has disastrous, lethal results to many people:
WEIGHT AND HEALTH
Did you know there’s an “ob*sity epidemic”? Of course you know. Because every cultural institution in our lives is constantly berating us about it!
“YOU NEED TO LOSE WEIGHT OR YOU WILL DIE” might as well be an enormous neon sign constantly flashing on and off, on and off, in your brain.
Guess what? Despite what you may have heard from legions of internet trolls, your own brain, your mother, and our entire fatphobic, sexist, racist, ableist culture…
“Obesity” is a made up category. And being fat won’t kill you.
(You may be wondering why I’ve put fatphobia in the same category as sexism, racism, ableism, etc. It’s because, spoiler alert, ALL THOSE OPPRESSIVE SYSTEMS ARE INTERLOCKED.)
I’ll have more to say about this in future posts, but for now, please just know that weight is a TERRIBLE proxy for evaluating anybody’s health, including your own.
This has been demonstrated by an enormous body of research, stretching back decades. To quote science journalist Michael Hobbes,
“Dozens of indicators, from vegetable consumption to regular exercise to grip strength, provide a better snapshot of someone’s health than looking at her from across a room.”
In other words, weight doesn’t tell you shit about an individual’s health, and thinking it does literally destroys lives.
EXERCISE AND WEIGHT LOSS
Here’s something you need to understand:
Exercise doesn’t particularly help you lose weight.
If that sounds BANANAS to you, go hit up the Google! Vox did an article about it recently, it was in the NY Times–but again, this is something scientists have known for decades.
Moving more can help almost every system in your body function better. But it doesn’t really do much in the weight loss department.
In fact, if you’re weight training to get stronger, you’ll probably gain weight! Because muscle weighs more than fat.
So here’s how this soul-sucking dance goes:
// We think we need to lose weight to be healthy.
// We know that “exercise helps with weight loss.”
// We torture ourselves with punitive exercise.
// We get injured, bored, and/or demoralized by this joyless, endless chore.
// We stop exercising.
// And because we have exercise confused with movement, that means we stop moving.
// And because movement is key to unlocking some of the most delicious endorphin experiences available to human beings, we lose joy.
FUCK THAT. Uncouple movement from exercise, weight from health, and exercise from weight loss!
Instead of that, cultivate joy by wiggling, laughing, swimming in the lake, hot baths, snowball fights, screwing, snuggling, walking the dog, howling at the moon, gazing at sunsets, eating a bunch of different delicious things with different textures, lying on the floor to do the crossword, lifting up a heavy rock to help a toddler inspect an earthworm, etc etc etc please add your own!
One of my favorite questions that I ask my coaching clients…
…and I usually have to get to know them pretty well first.
This is not a question that yields useful results if you apply it too quickly or shallowly…
Is this:
// What do you want to remember on your deathbed? //
My loves.
Please know that the diet, your weight, the dress that didn’t fit…none of that shit is going to matter.
Move, in whatever way you can, for the love of it.
Because you’re alive, and SPECIFICALLY evolved for joy and pleasure.
Because you’re mortal,
and for all we know,
we only get this one life.
Love,
Emma
PS: I’m a Life Coach, and my literal job is to help you stop overthinking about bullshit and start living your magic. Let’s work together!