When the Body Holds Still

Movement, Stillness and the Intelligence of Repair

In nature, movement is rarely constant. Rivers slow and widen. Water pools in low ground. Paths become compacted where feet pass too often, and wild again where they are forgotten. Fields grow, are harvested and then lie fallow.

These changes are not failures of the landscape. They are responses to pressure, time and circumstance.

I think about the body in much the same way.

We tend to notice our health when something stops moving as we expect it to. Energy falls. Digestion slows. An injury doesn't recover as quickly as it once did. We lose a capacity we previously had and immediately want to know how to get it back.

But sometimes the more interesting question isn't how do I make this move?

It is why did it change?

When Something Changes

We live in a culture that likes forward motion. More energy, more exercise, better productivity, faster recovery. If something feels stuck, there is an enormous temptation to do something about it.

I see this in clinic all the time. People arrive having tried diets, supplements, exercise programmes and any number of interventions because they are determined to get themselves moving again.

Sometimes an intervention helps. Sometimes the body appears to say no.

That interests me.

If someone could previously exercise four times a week and now needs two days to recover from a walk, something has changed. If a digestive system that once worked almost unnoticed has become slow and unpredictable, something has changed. If someone who once coped easily with a demanding life now finds relatively ordinary days exhausting, something has changed.

The important thing is not simply that the body has slowed. It is when it slowed, and what happened around it.

A body rarely exists only in the present moment. There was a before.

Perhaps there was an infection, an operation, a pregnancy, a bereavement, menopause, an injury or a period of extraordinary work or responsibility. Perhaps sleep had been deteriorating for years before the energy disappeared. Perhaps digestion had changed long before the person began to feel unwell.

None of those things automatically explains what followed. But they give us a chronology. And that chronology can help us distinguish between something that has always been part of someone's constitution and something that represents a genuine change from their baseline.

This is why I am wary of looking at a slow or “stuck” body and immediately deciding that it needs stimulating.

Before asking it to do more, I want to understand why it began doing less.

The Temptation to Push Through

Most of us have been taught to push through. We do it with tiredness particularly well. We drink another coffee, work later, exercise because we think we should, promise ourselves an early night and begin again the following morning.

For a while, we may get away with it.

Then occasionally we don't.

This is where people can become frustrated with their bodies. The things that used to work no longer work. Exercise leaves them depleted rather than energised. A restrictive diet makes them feel worse. The supplement that everybody recommends does nothing. Rest helps, but not enough.

The instinct is often to try harder.

I think this is precisely the point at which we need to become more observant.

A change in capacity is information.

There is also an important distinction between noticing something and explaining it. If your energy has fallen dramatically, that is an observation. If your digestion changed six months before your energy fell, that is another. If both began after an infection, we have another piece of the chronology.

Saying why all of those things happened is a different matter.

Sometimes there will be a medical explanation and appropriate investigation is important. Sometimes the picture is less clear. We don't have to rush to fill that gap.

We can begin with what we know. We can look at what changed, what came before it, what followed and whether the pattern itself is changing.

That is not doing nothing.

It is learning what we are actually looking at before deciding what to do about it.

The Landscape Doesn't Need to Be Forced

This is where the landscape metaphor remains useful to me.

If I find a patch of waterlogged ground, I could simply dig a channel and move the water. But I still wouldn't know why the water was there. Perhaps the soil has become compacted. Perhaps something has altered upstream. Perhaps the water table has risen. Or perhaps that particular piece of ground has always been wet in winter.

I have to understand the landscape before I decide what needs changing.

I think good Herbal Medicine requires the same restraint.

Herbs can do many things in the body, but choosing something simply because we have decided that a process is “stuck” is very different from understanding the person whose body has changed.

The herb comes later. The looking comes first.

Repair Doesn't Always Look Like Progress

One of the hardest things about recovery is that it rarely follows a straight line.

There can be better weeks and worse ones. A symptom that seemed to have disappeared can return. Energy improves and then dips again. Sometimes someone realises only after several months that something which once happened every day now happens once a week.

A snapshot can make that difficult to see.

Chronology allows us to see something else: direction.

We begin to notice whether recovery is becoming quicker, whether difficult periods are becoming shorter, whether something is happening less frequently, or whether the body can now do something that it couldn't do three months ago.

These changes may be quiet, but they matter.

When the Body Holds Still

So I no longer automatically see stillness as something that needs to be broken.

Sometimes it is simply the point at which we need to look more closely.

What was this body capable of before? When did that change? What was happening around that time? What has happened since?

There may be a clear medical explanation. There may be several contributing factors. Sometimes we may never know precisely why the change began.

But understanding the chronology gives us something valuable.

It gives us somewhere to begin.

The body doesn't always need us to push it forwards.

Sometimes, first, we need to notice where it stopped.