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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We had a full on few days of activities and for the first time in many years I ‘double-did’ on some days (i.e something sporty in the morning / something else sporty in the late afternoon). We did such a mixture: road biking, road running, mountain biking, fell running, hill climbing. We rolled out our mats and yoga-ed. 
🧘🏼‍♀️ 
And we both commented on how much we felt like we’d got ‘us’ back again. 

Since we first met, hub and I have been big movers. We thrive under high levels of activity, and the ruggedness of adventure. Our first decade together involved trips to mountainous regions all over the world to trek and climb peaks plus getting out on our bikes for hours to explore the Scottish landscapes. He climbed higher and harder, I cycled further and faster. 

​Our challenge has often been resting and staying still! 
🧘🏼‍♀️ 
We’ve been working on this and have been trying to find the balance these last few years. At times during this process, we have both felt like we have lost our adventurers within. In reality we’ve just not wanted the big challenges we thrived on in our younger days, and we’ve struggled with how to find the motivation without the ambitious goals. He no longer wanted to climb the world’s highest peaks. I no longer wanted to race all over the world. Our priorities changed. I turned to yoga, hubby turned to study and learning. We evolved, but an essence of ‘us’ lay dormant.

Somewhere, sometime, not so long ago, one of us realised that we needed outdoor adventure back. Life just didn't feel the same. Something was missing. So we put up the photos that most epitomised ‘us’ and we longed to feel the life in that essence again. 

It's no coincidence that movement is my modality. I find movement such a metaphor for life and often look to it to teach me what I need to see, or to gather the resources that I need to build within myself.

Of course, yoga and pilates are important practices for me to play out these metaphors: when I need to feel strength I am drawn to strong standing poses, when I need to go inwards and look within myself I am drawn to forward flexion or the stillness within yin poses. 

But I also feel these metaphors in sport: the challenge of long endurance sessions when I have to apply patience and conserve my energy, the process of moving forward when I want to stop and learning to dig deep and keep focused towards my goal when other things threaten to get in the way.  

It's triathlon that has taught me a big lesson recently. It highlighted to me how I have been transitioning through stages and phases of life.  In triathlon, 'transition' is the change time between each of the swim, bike, run elements of the race. It is the moments between getting out of the water in the swim and onto the bike, and then the moments from getting off the bike and out onto the run section of the race.
Transitions in triathlon are about being smooth, focused, efficient. They are about getting to, then settling into, the next phase of the race as quickly as possible.
    
During my prime competing days in triathlon I was an ace at transitions! I could get off my bike, get my helmet and bike racked, trainers on, gels picked up and then back out the transition area for the final run of the race in well under 30 seconds. Many of my medals were won on the basis of my transition times being quicker than my competitors. I was known for my fast transitions and would often hear coaches tell their athletes to watch and learn from how I did them! It was about being organised and focused and decisive. 

​So I find it hilarious, and ironic, that I can be fairly rubbish at dealing with transitions and change in the bigger context of my life! In my younger years, maybe not so much, but as I get older I've definitely found it more challenging to know which direction to go in, what to let go off, what to take with me, and I really care more about how others are handling the transition too. If I play out the metaphor, my transitions in life these days are the equivalent of me finishing the swim and then taking my wetsuit out on the bike leg with me while also having a full bag of snacks because I don't know what I might want for energy, and then trying to lug my bike with me while I run and during ALL of that I'm hell bent on making sure that my competitor has got out of the transaction area unscathed and onto her bike ok too. Jeepers! 

I AM going through a transition at the moment. I've changed my work pattern to suit my energy levels better and I'm in the process of building up some work nearer to my home to make commuting easier on myself. I think that I'm now in that decisive, focused stage of transition but I had a heck of a faff about getting to here.
We moved to the country 6 years ago to enjoy a different lifestyle, a quieter and less busy one. Yet, I insisted on keeping my city life going at the same volume and pace as it had been. My working days became way longer! 7am get ups needed to become 5:30am get ups in order to not sit static in traffic. Dinner time got later and time sitting in cafes increased as I wasn’t able to pop home between working both ends of the day. There was me metaphorically lugging the wetsuit and bike with me into the next stage of this event called life, but not sure what to put down where and when and what to take with me. 

The light bulb came when I realised that I actually love getting up at 5:30am. It really suits me. So the other end of the candle had to stop burning. It was time to stop spending my evenings coaching running groups, something I’d been doing for 18 years. It was a decision that I found difficult to make but knew that I had to. It was time to leave it lovingly in the transition area. Of course I was taking all the lessons and experience I’d gained from those 18 years forward with me, because they were threaded through me and integrated into how I work with people in others ways.
    
Once I had made that decision, things felt so much easier and it was clearer to focus on moving forward with a different energy. I am settling into the new pattern of working and I can feel that I'm beginning to flourish from it. My energy levels are significantly better and as a result my thoughts are much clearer and more positive. I'm doing less 'managing' my life, and instead I'm enjoying 'being' in my life. It does feel like a load has lightened and I'm actually doing more while also feeling incredibly rested. Deciding what to let go off has also helped me focus on what does fill my working week. I really enjoy my time in Edinburgh much more now and can think clearer when working with clients there. I've got other work much closer to home now too and it lets me have study and creating time which is so important to my development. When I wind down at the end of a working day I have an evening now to spend with friends, catching up with tv or just doing life stuff. It feels great. Really great. 

I can see in hindsight actually that the process of transition is simply a case of decide, focus, action, go. It really was like my triathlon transitions used to be. I would decided exactly what I needed, where I was laying it out, what order to do it and then it was just a case of focus, action, go. The decision was the hardest bit. And I guess sometimes it takes getting to a place of carrying too much and losing energy before you even realise that you need to make some kind of decision and what is serving your energy and what isn't.
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So, thank you triathlon for teaching me about life - again! I'm ever so thankful that you are a force, and a resource,  in my life.