I long ago gave up setting resolutions for a new year, but I do like to start it with some conscious intention. To help me do that I usually reflect on the year that has been but with this being the year of years (!) I wanted to keep it simple. So I went with five lists of 5 things! They are:

5 things that I am grateful for in 2020
5 things that probably wouldn’t have happened this year without the pandemic
5 things that I was sad about in 2020
5 things that gave me joy in 2020
5 words (my intentions) for 2021

If you like to reflect back too then they might help as a guide.

Here are my lists

5 things that I am grateful for in 2020
1. Best friends: For keeping each other jovial, holding each other’s tears, kicking up the proverbial every so often and knowing just what to say when.
2. Technology: I can be guilty of slamming technology, but where on earth would we have been this year without it!
3. Nature: For having fields and trees and countryside on my doorstep and for teaching me the cyclical nature of everything
4. Books: I eventually picked up on the unread books on the shelves and then some. I can’t imagine a evening without reading now
5. Sleep: When lockdown came, I started to sleep through the night for the first time in years. I think I finally gave up trying to control everything that I couldn’t!

5 things that probably wouldn’t have happened without the pandemic
1. Writing: I had a strong sense in March that I needed to write weekly to my email list to send out positive vibes. The writing evolved, I started a daily writing habit, I joined a writing group. I now call myself a writer and am working on ‘stuff’
2. Homeworking: I’ve been wanting to work form home for 2-3 years now and while I dipped my toe in the water, I hadn’t really fully committed to it. Well now I am!
3. Online Classes: Both teaching and participating! I’d never have thought of teaching online, but it now makes so much sense and is now part of my long term business model. Online classes have also allowed me to ‘go’ to classes and trainings from other teachers all over the world.
4. Walks with my husband: a need to just get it of the house has left us with a regular walk habit where we catch up with each other and take in the joys of the countryside around us. I cherish these walks
5. Appreciation of what’s actually important: Honestly, I reckon without this year I probably wouldn’t have appreciated what and who keeps the country going, how important community is, how little words make a big difference and how the busy-ness of life can get in the way of seeing the real stuff of life

5 things that I was sad about in 2020:
1. My brother and sister-in-law split up after 30 years together. I didn’t see it coming and I cried for days.
2. One of my best friends experienced an acute and serious deterioration in her mental health. She’s still not well but she is now getting support she needs
3. Clashes in values around how we all interpreted limitations and some of the divisiveness that came from that
4. Foodbanks, poverty, businesses going under, businesses hanging on for dear life
5. Not being able to hug

5 things that gave me joy in 2020:
1. Dancing - in the kitchen, in the supermarket, anywhere really!
2. Box sets in the evening - in particular ‘Schitts Creek’.
3. Being outdoors - every single damn day
4. Walks with friends
5. Growing my hair long again and faffing about with updos, plaits and accessories

5 words that I’m taking into 2021:
1. Hope
2. Gratitude
3. Service
4. Laughter
5. Self-care

The issue of 'form' has come up several times this last week or so when working with clients. And it’s been mulling about as a concept for me as I’ve been doing my own practice.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard the phrase ‘I want to know I’m doing it right’ over the years. And certainly way back in the beginning of my time as a movement practitioner I also wanted to make sure my clients were doing it right. I looked at their shape, their position, their symmetry and what I believed to be the best form in the movements we were practicing. My head hurt. I was analysing, thinking and focused on what wasn’t right, so I could help them to ‘get it right’. And I was constantly disillusioned with my own lack of ‘good form’ no matter how hard I tried.

I'm not exactly sure when it was, other than a good few years ago now, but I realised I wasn’t seeing the bigger picture. I wasn’t seeing all the GOOD movement that was going on. And I wasn’t building the support that I was giving clients around that - as I could have been! I threw the rule book out, and instead kept concepts, connections, guidelines about what ‘good’ movement is.

I’m not going to lie - that wasn’t an easy direction take. I questioned so much of my training. I drifted massively from my association of being a pilates practitioner (and I’m not sure I’ve ever integrated it back in). But the more I studied psychotherapeutic and other somatic practices the less I could believe in there ever being a ‘correct’ form.

We are all as unique in our anatomy and movement patterns, as snowflakes are from each other. We are each formed by our DNA, our early physical and emotional development, our experiences, our beliefs, our personality, our environment, our interactions.

How can there EVER be ONE right posture, version of a pose or movement??

And yet, somewhere and at sometime ‘they’ decided there was. (I have no idea who ‘they’ are either!!)
So we learn to lack trust in our own ability to FEEL form. We get caught in the visual of what it might look like & seek confirmation we got it right - even if it means overcompensation, lack of easy breath, increased tension and it feels painful!

Yet, we ultimately know better than anyone when form feels right - in the same way that we know when a jacket doesn’t fit (or maybe it does but we know it’s ‘just not me’).

I get that if you’ve never known how to feel the best form for you then how can you know? And I guess that’s where I come in... i’m not here to contort you into a version of yourself that you can’t do life as! I’m here to help you do YOU! To feel how YOU stand, sit, bend, walk, run, jump, do cartwheels (if you wish).

And we both know it when it’s ‘right’ for you! I see it, yes, but not as a text book symmetrical posture or movement. I see it as an ease in how you breath, or hold yourself. I see it in the brightness of your skin and the lightness in your energy. I also in my own way FEEL when your form is right for you. I’ve learnt to trust that as being gut feel and intuition.

Someone this week called it ‘magic’, someone else called it ‘weird shit - good weird shit’. To me it’s the thing that happens when we stop trying to conform and fit into shapes that suppress who we are. And instead explore who we are and our own unique form.

As I write this, I can feel a sense of anticipation and nervousness going around about what changes might be ahead and a dog-tired feeling of how long all this might last. I’m feeling it too. I’m down in Dumfries & Galloway this weekend on the mountain biking trails and found myself smiling to myself as I realised the metaphor they presented to me as I rode them!

The routes we’ve been on have been particularly rocky, gnarly ones and it struck me as I navigated my way through them, just how much it felt like navigating through the ongoing uncertainty and rockiness of the pandemic!
Mountain biking asks you to keep going, even when you don’t know what’s ahead, even if you’re not sure how you’ll tackle the tough bits and even when you get tired.
You can’t look just at what’s right in front of you or you’d never go anywhere. You’d avoid the obstacles, detour them around and convince yourself it’s too difficult. You’d see all the divets & tufts as individual obstacles & the route would feel impossible.
Trails need to be tackled by looking a bit further forward at what’s ahead, finding the line through it that smooths out the rough and then committing to that line. The more you do this the more you trust your judgement - or you learn from it. You learn to have faith in your ability to ride what’s ahead, even if you’ve never ridden the path before. You learn to gauge your pace, knowing that too fast & bullish means less control and too slow & cautious means too much control. You learn to roll with the rockiness and to bounce back & adjust when the rocks try to throw you in a different direction. You keep looking forward to where you’re going, and deal with the bumps & shoogles on the way, knowing they’ll come, but not letting them stop you from going on.

The trails you’ve never ridden before naturally hold more uncertainty. You’re nervous, but you give yourself the grace of having a go and doing your best. You adjust - maybe a little different in pace for now, maybe the easiest line you can find this time, maybe today you do walk down that particularly gnarly section that you can’t find any other line in. But you get on your bike, you ride regardless of not knowing what’s ahead.

Some times you DO take a thump, you might have a fall, or you might indeed get the collywobbles. But you get back on, you carry on, & you feel a certain pride in yourself for not letting it beat you. And at the end of each ride you revel in your sense of achievement, your new found resilience and the little bit more courage and faith in your ability that you’ve nurtured.

I know this weekend many of us are wondering what changes are ahead, and how long this ride will last. You might not be a mountain biker, but you can see what I’m saying, eh? And you now we’ve got this too, don’t you? We get back on it, we work our way through it. We ride together.

3 years ago, a great teacher* of mine taught me a phrase that I really love, and now often use in my own classes. She said:

“We know what the weather outside is. But how is the weather inside for you?”

The first time I heard it, I was able to tune in instantly, curiously and with no sense of judgement as to how I was feeling at that point in time. It is that latter point that was a completely new revelation for me. Tuning into my body had become second nature to me by then, and I'd become so much better at being able to identify how I was feeling on an emotional level as well as physical. Yet I struggled to not feel a need to do something in response to identifying my emotional state. I would judge how I was feeling to be positive or negative, and would either begin a process of trying to hold onto that feeling, or running away from it. Rather than acknowledging 'how' I was, I'd make a judgement about 'who' I was based on that emotion and change my behaviour accordingly. 

Let me say this clearly: No emotion is a bad emotion.

We need to be able to tap into different emotions to give us our whole range of being human and to give perspective to each individual emotion. We need sadness, joy, guilt, anger, grief, embarrassment and the whole gamut of emotions. They are a fundamental part of what makes us human, and they teach us how to relate to and connect with others. Way back, before we had language, these emotions WERE the language we used in our social cultures and tribes. They were also our internal signals as to what we contributed to, needed from, and how well we were functioning in our tribe.  
 
Now, I think I logically knew this a few years back. I'd probably seen the Disney animation 'Inside Out' by then (watch it and get your kids to watch it - it perfectly encapsulates our internal emotional system). So I kind of got it. But I certainly didn't really believe it within myself. It took an analogy for me to see my emotions more objectively and as a result to, ironically, feel them more clearly.
 
Considering my emotions and moods as internal weather allowed me to accept their presence and that they would pass. I saw the 'feel goods' like sunny days and rainy days (I absolute love the rain!!!) filled with energy, creativity and joy. I saw the 'feel mehs' as foggy or dull days where energy was lower or flatter yet things still happened just in a different way or at a different pace. And sometimes it was just a storm that would be messy, but it would pass. I realised that I accept all atmospherical weathers unquestionably and accommodate them accordingly, yet I hadn't been doing this with my own weather. I became kinder to myself as a result of accepting my emotions, and my emotions become more regulated and less extreme (at some point I'll wrote a blog about emotional regulation - a fascinating subject - but it's not for today!). 

By accepting how I am, and FINALLY with no judgement, I now make better choices for myself with regards to how to best meet my needs. Sometimes the changes are subtle. A bit like knowing I'd best take a warmer jacket when it's cold, I might choose not to go to places that will make me feel worse or potentially dull my sparkle. Sometimes the changes I need to make are more substantial. I might need to have a difficult conversation or, yup, give myself a kick up the backside. Usually the big changes come when I realise certain emotions aren't passing as naturally as they might otherwise, and I realise I'm stuck. 

As Brits we’re socially conditioned to talk about the weather pretty much most days. But I wonder how often, in general as a nation, we take time to observe our own internal weather. I suspect not enough. Maybe our starting point is to clock when we mention the weather of the day, and to have a wee internal check inside to our own feelings too.

As Billy Connolly once said "There's no such thing as bad weather - only the wrong clothes". Indeed there’s no such thing as bad clothes, just inappropriate or misinformed self care.

​* thank  you to Clare Gates-Sjoblom, known affectionately by us teachers as 'yin yoda', for this phrase and for your teachings. That simple turn of phrase hit me deep and changed much. <3 <3 

Over these last few months, we’ve found ways to stay in touch and socially interact because our need to connect with others is a fundamental instinctual drive within us. This powerful need is hard wired into our system and we seek connection to experience feelings of safety, love, care and of being seen, valued and accepted. 
Trying To Change Ourselves To Feel Connected
A lack of self-acceptance can lead to us trying to change how we are in order to feel connected and seen. We seek validation from others that we are accepted, to feel that we belong, and we may do that by trying to emulate what we believe others admire or value in a person. For those with a negative body image, this can manifest in trying to look a certain way, or cover up what they don’t like about how they look. I wrote previously about what makes up our personal sense of body image, which you can read here.
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Throughout history, cultures have revered different body shapes and sizes; from the Egyptians to the Rennaisance period, to the 1920s and through to the current day. In the last century in particular, this has changed rapidly, each decade bringing it’s own apparently ‘ideal shape’ around which fashion is formed. The increased speed of these shifts coincides with rapidly expanding marketing, consumerism and selling. Advertising feeds on our insecurities and the promise that if we could somehow look like a certain way, then we would feel better about ourselves.

“Perfectionism is a self destructive and addictive belief system that fuels this primary thought: If I look perfect, and do everything perfectly, I can avoid or minimize the painful feelings of shame, judgment, and blame.” 
Brene Brown

In this age of social media, multi-channel television, 24-hour news and incessant advertising we are now constantly exposed to these messages. Even with healthy levels of self-esteem, it can feel overwhelming, impossible even, to know how to navigate through these continual messages about how we are apparently supposed to look.

Why You Might Be Feeling Worse About Your Body Image

Life during the pandemic has brought new challenges to this conundrum.
Our increased lack of real contact has made us even more vulnerable to the messages around us. We may have used social media and television more to keep us feeling connected with others. Yet, it can also create increased anxiety and stress about how we might have been spending our time during the lockdown. Feeds and news stories have been filled with conversations around daily exercise, who’s eating what to keep healthy, and how we could be using ‘this opportunity to improve ourselves’.

It can lead to pressure to keep up with what we think everyone else is doing and a belief that just coping with getting through a pandemic is somehow not enough.  Those who already had negative feelings about their body may find that these feelings are accentuated, and many who aren’t used to feeling insecure about how they look may be finding fault with their body or scrutinising their changing shape.

If any of this resonates with you then you may find these tips helpful:

1. Accept that this is a unique time and that it will not last forever. History won’t look back on this time and care about how people looked or what they ate.
2. Practice being kind to yourself. It’s ok for your body to change, and it is in no way representative of who you are as a person, nor how successfully you have coped with the pandemic.
3. You are not alone in how you are feeling. Even though it may seem like everyone is creating their fittest form ever, the reality is that most are not.
4. Follow feeds and stories that impact on you positively. If posts from influencers, or even your friends, leave you feeling bad about yourself then unfollow or at least mute them.
5. Be aware that we only ever see a snapshot of someone’s life. We can never know the real story behind the posts and the pictures, and we have no actual idea how that person feels about them self. They may very well be trying to hide truths about themself from others.  
6. Talk about how you are feeling. It can feel incredibly vulnerable to do this and allow others to know how we feel or to let ourselves be seen as we truly are. Yet, it can be one of the most empowering things that we can do. And it can allow others to see and accept us as ourselves, cultivating a true sense of connection and belonging within us.

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” 
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

Lockdown living for some has brought a liberating change of choosing comfort clothes over formal wear, relaxing hair and makeup routines or experimenting with different looks, colours and styles as going to the hairdresser was put on hold.
For others, it has raised concern about their weight or body shape and how it might have been affected by changes in their usual patterns and behaviours of exercise & eating.  And as we now transition our way into more social interactions again, many are worried about how others might judge them because of how their body looks.  
If you are feeling this way, then please know that you are not alone. It is important to understand that these feelings are not actually about how you look. Rather they relate to your perception, thoughts and feelings about how you look – your body image. 

4 Aspects of Body Image

There are 4 aspects to body image. Knowing these can help us understand our own sense of body image:

1. Perceptual Body image is the way you see yourself. This is not always a correct representation of what we actually look like. We can perceive ourselves to be bigger, or smaller than we actually are or to have a different shape than we actually do.
2. How you feel about the way you look is called your affective body image. That includes the things that you may like or dislike about your appearance, body shape or specific body parts.
3. Cognitive body image describes the thoughts and beliefs you have about your body. Examples of negative cognitive body image would be, ‘my body is disgusting’, ‘I would feel better about myself if I was a different shape’. 
4. When someone feels unhappy with how they look, then they may carry out certain behaviours that they believe will change their appearance or hide what they believe are their flaws (eg excessive exercise, disordered eating, missing social events, not being seen without full makeup). This is behavioural body image.

What lockdown has highlighted, or exacerbated, is a cycle of trying to change the outside in order to change the negative feelings and thoughts on the inside. This cycle can further deepen a sense of being ‘not good enough’ unless you look a certain way, further fuelling a belief that you will not be accepted by others unless you look a certain way. 

Changing Your Perspective

Things that may be helpful to improve your body image are;

• Focus on positive qualities, skills and talents that you have that are not related to how your body looks. ​​You are whole person, with many gifts to offer the world, not just a physical body.
• Practice finding things about your body that you like. This can be tricky to begin with but it gradually becoming easier. For example, you might recognise that you like your feet, and you are grateful for what they do for you, and where they take you. 
• Avoid comparing your body to others. All bodies are completely unique, as are you. We are different heights, bone structures, colours, postures and personalities. Accept your uniqueness and over time you can learn to embrace your body and appreciate that it is part of what makes you special.
• Make conscious decisions about what you read and look at. If something you read or watch leaves you feeling bad about your body, then turn over, mute or delete. Remember that a significant majority of images in the media are unrealistic, digitally altered and not true representations.

• Learn to trust that your body and you are on the same team. We can work WITH our body and gently shift postures that we adopt to deal with or hide uncomfortable feelings we have about our body. In doing so we can experience how it feels to be accepted by ourself first and foremost and to be seen as our whole true self. You may wish to use the short movement practice below as a starting point.

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For many of us, staying at home means we have more time available and more space in our day. Perhaps this offers an opportunity for us to do some of the things that we have been wanting, meaning, to do for some time. Perhaps instead this new found space and time offers up less of the distractions that we unconsciously create to shut out our inner critic, and we find we're unable to get away from the one person we don't want to be stuck with - ourself.

Too much time to think, too many changes to negotiate our way around and less interaction with others can be breeding grounds for our inner critic. We find ourselves self soothing in various forms - food, drink, binge watching - or creating new distractions to keep us away from ourself - cleaning what's already clean once more, visiting the supermarket 'just because', or online shopping for things we 'need'.

Now, this comes with no judgement from me - I get it! I seem to have cultivated a new passion for duvet covers and pillow cases that I didn't know I had! 

But I do also know what it feels like to be full of dislike for yourself and to sit with yourself when you'd rather run the other way. It takes courage. It IS challenging to self soothe in kind ways and to show ourself love and attention when we'd rather point out all our flaws and make a list of how and when to eradicate them. And it does take strength to notice who we ARE and accept all parts of Ourself. I also know that ultimately until we learn to do that then we will continue on the same old, same old cycle.

Now, let's be realistic, we don't make one big leap from disliking ourself to being filled with self love. That's a hell of a big ask I reckon. 

So, we start small! I've recorded and attached this short activity that you can try.  Just maybe it can help you can discover that actually some part of you is ok and worthy of some kindness. You may find that it feels nice to do this activity and you feel good for taking the time to look after you. Maybe it's the start of getting to know your body, building a relationship beyond the distractions and disconnection. Maybe you do it once and never again! But maybe it's the first step in making friends with yourself and being ok in your own skin.

You will need some hand cream, or lotion that you can rub into your skin. If you don't have anything like that at the moment then you could also use a couple of drops of olive oil or cooking oil.      

Life, as we know it at the moment, has limitations. The space that we each inhabit with our daily patterns and behaviours has decreased to a smaller range as we stay at home and reduce our interactions. We interact with screens and we spend most of our time in our living space. We cope with these limitations in our individual ways and we seek, and find, a new normality.

So too do we respond to these limitations by moving differently. As we go about our daily lives we express, respond and react with movement. We gesture, we habitually move from one place to the other, we move according to our emotions and to our interactions with others and the world around us. We move unconsciously in different ways and in different directions every single day of our life. So as we stay at home, living differently, our patterns of movement are changed, the variety of our movements are reduced, and, without being aware of it, we reduce the full expression of our self. Couple this with challenging feelings we may be experiencing as a result of lockdown, and we can find ourselves becoming stuck in uncomfortable patterns. How we feel affects how we move, and how we move affect how we feel.

What this means however, is that we can use movement to unstick our patterns and change how we feel. By consciously expanding our movement we can expand our expression again. By moving in different directions - bending / stretching, squatting/ reaching / rotating - we can bring back some of our 3D self again. We open into the space we are in, rather than locking into it. .
By moving through a few really simple movements we can shake off the physical feeling of lockdown that might be adding to already challenged emotions.
The attached video takes you through a short movement practice. It's 5 minutes long and opens and moves the body in 3 dimensions. You don't need any special clothes or kit, just you, your body, yourself.
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