Learning to Love My Aging Body

Aging.. what a loaded and loathed word.

Conjures up images of frail hands and scrunched up backs, saggy skin and shaky voices.

That’s aged though.

Aging, is a whole other concept and at the ripe old age of 40, I’m beginning to learn that this journey is yours to define, and to love or hate.

I focus this article on the body because my aging mind is poppin’ right about now. I’m sharper, smarter, wiser than I ever was. Youth truly is wasted on the young.

My body on the other hand. Sigh. Well, let’s just say that payback is a b*tch.

I wouldn’t quite say that I abused my body, not intentionally anyway. I was simply carefree. I ate what I wanted, drank when I wanted, and moved how I wanted. And believe it or not, it’s the last one that caused the most damage.

When you’re a kid, particularly a girl, you’re praised for your flexibility and grace. In dance classes we would compete to arch our backs to touch our noses with our feet (“the exhibitionist cobra”, as I like to call it) and in yoga, I aimed to achieve more pretzel than human.

No one told me that hyper-mobility was a thing, and a problematic thing at that. Not once. And that all that motion that brought me so much joy and praise would actually be harmful to my body in the long run. Don’t misunderstand — this is not about dance and yoga being bad, quite the contrary, to me they’re the best things in the world. It’s about the complete absence of focus on strength and core training in my early years.

Turns out also, that as you get older, the body accumulates and stores trauma. “Your biography becomes your biology” said Caroline Myss in her world-famous book The Anatomy of the Spirit. Your emotions get encoded into your cells and yep, you guessed it, negative emotions like fear, anger, jealousy cause decay and illness while positive emotions foster greater cell health.

Now I’ve ridden the wave of my share of good and bad moments, but the understanding that your emotional state literally impacts your body? That was news to me. At least news I was only ready to receive when I hit my 40’s.

All this leading up to say that my present day body is a little bit worn out. Two torn cartilages in my hips (common in dancers mostly due to the repetitive stress movement and also in my case exacerbated by a particularly bony hip bone — whodathunk it?), the artist — formerly known as the hyper-mobile- lower back — put into place by three sets of platelet injections so that it is now the kinda-stiff-lower-back, and all sorts of associated compensation and referred pain up and down my right side from my neck to my toes. Joyous.

I have the usual suspects too — crow’s feet, greying hair and “old lady stomach” as I call it, a stubborn lower pouch with the texture of cottage cheese. These ones I would say are par for the course. Arthritis (which is just a scary word for swelling and tenderness in the joints and can occur at any age) at 40 was not something I was prepared for. I wanted all the pain to go away and I wanted to jump, gyrate and gesticulate like I had always done. And I wanted it stat.

Body positive activists would say I’m body-shaming myself. I’m actually body-accepting myself by acknowledging it for what it is, and undertaking a commitment to loving it anyway. Like a cat that won’t let you pet it but shows up at your doorstep every day expecting a meal.

The first step in my acceptance process was to quell the resistance.

My therapist told me that we dislike pain because we get attached to the feeling of not having pain. Interesting concept — detaching from the feeling of pain? Like watching a movie. It’s there, and I’m here on the couch, eating popcorn and snuggling under a warm blanket, a safe distance away.

Well, turns out, pain will always hurt. But you can keep it from taking over, from your entire identity. For three solid years, my story was “I’m the girl with the broken hips”. How insufferably dull.

I saw an impressive (irrational?) variety of doctors, physiotherapists, chiropractors around the world. I did all the exercises, I took MRIs and X-rays, I had injections inserted into my hips and back. I stopped driving. I stopped yoga. I stopped dancing. I stopped me-ing in totality.

Changing the story led me to a deeper understanding of how involved my mind was in this whole debacle. Learning about chakra imbalances and energetic blocks led me to seek healing in Eastern traditions — reiki, acupuncture, meditation.

Is the pain gone today? No. But the resistance has.

I’ve accepted these splintered cartilages as evidence of life lived, perhaps even overdone slightly. The name of the game is not pushing to maximum capacity but rather striving for optimal grace. And the means to that end is a deep honoring of where I am now, at this point in time. Not yearning for the snake charmer moves of the past or fearing a hip replacement in ten years. Right here, right now is a vehicle that has much more to give, with a much more conscious rider in the front seat. And I’d take a driver with experience any day.

A change in attitude has resulted in some actual physical life changes. Here are some of them:

• My workouts are less about routine and pushing hard and more about listening and pulling back when necessary. I maintain a mix of cardio, strength and yoga and really check in with myself — what do I need today? If it’s meant to be a cardio day but I’m feeling like a bit more flow, yoga is where I’ll go.
• I’m weary of allopathic solutions that treat symptoms and not causes. If I have pain (and I do most days), I listen deeply for where it’s coming from and guide the doctor accordingly if I make it that far. After all, you may have 15 years of experience in the medical field but who knows my body better than I? I’ve never had a good doctor reject my input. I also don’t take everything they say as gospel. I weigh it with all I know that’s going on with me and seek a second opinion, if necessary. It’s a form of self-advocacy that I didn’t understand before.
• Energetic maintenance is in. I do acupuncture regularly to make sure to keep the energy flowing and moving. Move massages from the bucket of “luxury activity to be done with girlfriends or on special occasions” to the necessity bucket in which they should be — for tissue regeneration, endorphin release and energetic manipulation.
• Diet is important. I’ve seen so many friends before me make profound changes in what they eat when they hit their 40’s and 50’s. It’s not about deprivation but again about listening to what your body needs. They call it “intuitive eating”. I call it eating. Eating food that nourishes, that doesn’t deplete, that brings joy. What a novel concept!
• Lastly, and I think, the most important change has been thinking of myself as an entire system, not individual parts. You can’t treat your body well and ignore your emotional wellbeing, or your spiritual essence, or your achy-break heart. There are studies of smokers who lived forever because they had other elements that mattered — a good diet, active lifestyles and solid relationships. It’s all connected. We’re all connected. And the sooner we act like it, the better.

LEARN MORE

• Fitness Basics You May Have Missed
• 10 Online Workouts for Body and Mind
• Why Your Self-Care Isn’t Working
• What I’ve Learned from Battling Chronic Pain
• The Social Dilemma on Netflix

If you’d like to read books on the subject, message me and I can give you some recommendations.