“Memories… What’s too painful to remember, we simply choose to forget.” *
I was thinking about muscle memory today. As I was contemplating the topic for my next webinar, I thought about the ways in which we move at different times of our lives. For me, the greatest gift of The Miracle Ball Method, is improving my muscle memory. My next webinar is Miracle Ball Method for an Ageless Body. What’s the difference when you are a child moving about, middle aged or older? You bend over, reach your arms, run, and jump. But as most of us know, movement changes as we become adults and continues to change throughout our lives. It doesn’t seem to get easier to move. We don’t do a lot of pondering as to why, it’s just a given. We may feel we never recovered from an injury, or from a stressful event in our life. Perhaps we have lived with a chronic low back ache or are getting tighter and more inflexible each year. We compensate and adapt. We find ourselves with a limited range of motion, gradually over time. Muscle memory can be of tremendous help and yet most of us don’t improve it, so we lose it.
My mind jumped to a line in the song, “The Way We Were”. “Memories…. What’s too painful to remember, we just choose to forget”. How interesting it is that muscle memory is similar if not identical to our emotional memory. The song was referring to emotional memories, but throughout our lives many people gradually lose much of their muscle memory. Whether it is from past physical pain, or the result of long-term stress, unknowingly we begin to train ourselves to age. You can’t move what you don’t feel. Try picking up a bottle of water, but you can’t feel the weight of it in your hands. You cant do it.
Even those who exercise regularly expect they will have to stop at a certain age or expect less results due to age or injury. When we see Tom Brady playing football at 44 we think he’s the exception to the rule. I don’t think so. I think he is following different rules.
Our muscle memory is dependent on regaining physical feeling. Just like emotional healing from trauma or psychological distress requires us to talk about our experiences to gradually relieve the overwhelming fear and pain, muscle memory is similar.
We must regain physical feeling to regain muscle memory. Loss of muscle memory activates a cycle of pain. We tend to move less, so we breathe less, the muscles further tighten as a result, and then our stress elevates.
How Miracle Ball Method Helps
The Miracle Ball Method improves feeling in the body. Our nervous system uses that feeling and we begin to regain the muscle memory. There are specific directions to do this, and they are much simpler than you might imagine. But they are somewhat counterintuitive.
Injuries, trauma, physical pain from stress or alignment issues, can be devastating. They can sideline us and linger throughout our lifetimes. Just as in emotional pain, our physical body will adjust, compensate, and forget in order to survive. But we don’t want to simply survive but thrive. Regain feeling in your body, and your muscle memory will begin to move you. Don’t choose to forget.
*The Way We Were
Barbra Streisand, Lionel Richie
Songwriters: Bergman Alan, Bergman Marilyn, Hamlisch Marvin
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