National Green Juice Day

Emily Hagenburger January 25, 2019 No Comments

January 26 is National Green Juice Day! Get the most from the day with this advice from Galina & Roland Denzel, authors of Eat Well, Move Well, Live Well.

We see more and more of our readers and students opt for a green drink in the morning. The reason? Convenience for most! It’s much easier to tip back a delicious liquid while putting one shoe on and sending a child out the door to school than sitting with a crunchy spinach and kale salad, isn’t it? While there is nothing inherently “bad” in a green drink, here is how to ensure you make the most of your green habit:

  1. A green drink is not a complete meal. While electrolytes and water abound in green drinks, sodium and potassium will only get your body going so far. A complete meal for an average size female may contain 500-700 calories with a combination of protein, healthy fats, and carbohydrates, including fiber. A green drink, even when large, will provide mostly carbohydrate in the form of simple sugars, no fiber and none of the other macronutrients. Consider having your juice and still adding protein, healthy fats, and fiber to create a complete meal.
  2. Remember to chew. Juice is extracted from an actual plant, and before juicers came around, we relied on our teeth to get the liquid from inside the plant cells. This allowed time to mix the food with saliva, and since carbohydrate digestion starts in the mouth, the process of carbohydrate breakdown could begin properly. When we drink juice, there isn’t enough time for saliva and carbohydrate to mix, so it’s key to remember to “chew” your juice. Hold and swish it in your mouth for a while before swallowing.
  3. Chew other food. Chewing is key for keeping your teeth and jaw healthy, mineralizing bone and exercising your facial muscles. If you drink all your vegetables, you are missing on the natural movement of chewing –often wanting to catch up with crunchy foods like chips and pretzels – which make the loud noises you are missing, too! Believe it or not, making noise is a part of the food experience and we do miss it! If you don’t want to have one of those days that starts off with a green drink and ends with a bag of chips, remember to have enough raw and cooked veggies at your other meals and keep juice as a special occasion a few times a week or when you are really in a hurry.
  4. Make your own juice if you can. It takes effort and time to select, wash and juice your own veggies: I like to mix kale, spinach, green apple, celery, cucumber, lemon, ginger, turmeric, and a bit of pineapple. There are several benefits of doing this. First, you have complete control of the quality of the veggies, how they are grown and washed. This keeps your juice clean and free from contaminants, as well as parasites and viruses that can hop on food when it’s not properly handled. Washing, chopping and juicing gets you to
    touch and get in contact with your food – leading to better digestion, connection with the food, and satiety. The process of mindful eating starts well before we’ve taken the first drink. Last but not least, the physical work that it takes to wash and cut the veggies and fruit is movement our bodies need and can use – so many of us feel the effects of a sedentary lifestyle, and outsourcing juicing to someone else means missing out on a great movement opportunity.
  5. Discard of your pulp in a smart way. I have friends who work it back into meatloaf or creamy soup in order to increase their fiber content or even make dog treats. We use juice pulp to feed our worms in the worm compost outside. They say they love it!

Take a walk on the range

Guest post by Dawn Again author Doniga Markegard

Just outside my front door there is a field of stinging nettles the size of half a city block. It is the healthiest plot of nettles I have yet to see.

It was not always that way. There was an old barn on the hill above, that once was a milking barn and then held moonshine during prohibition. The activities in the barn helped pay the mortgage on the ranch and supported the growing family of settlers. When my husband arrived on the ranch the barn was falling down, due to lack of maintenance. The new owners made money elsewhere and simply used the ranch as an escape from the modern day stresses and routine.

The barn was bulldozed into the ground. Remnants of the roaring Twenties and a family of farmers making a go at life in California would soon turn to dirt. That dirt would then be fresh breeding ground for seeds that were carried along the coastal winds, dropped by birds as they migrated or a fox as he marked a territory. The seeds that lay in the freshly disturbed earth were not those that dominated the surrounding grasslands. They were seeds that some call the name forbidden to utter in some circles, the dirty word that many groups dedicate themselves to seek out and conquer: Invasive Species.

Poison hemlock, ripgut brome and medusahead all are icing on the cake of the conqueror. As these species drift around the world, looking for an opportunity to propagate, we have a choice to view them as a problem or an opportunity. So when the dirt became home to Italian thistle and poison hemlock, we put in the pigs. In nature, waste equals food, so if we are to mimic nature, everything eats and is eaten. When we want to sculpt our lives and our landscapes, that basic principle can help us avoid dissonance. The pigs did what they do: eat everything. They ate the roots of the plants because we let them stay long enough to feast on the starchy taproots of the thistle. Then we moved them off and let the ground rest and recover from the disturbance.

Winter set in, and soon a diversity of plants began to establish in the pig fertilized and disturbed earth. We did not spread any seeds, just waited and watched as the drifters found a settling place amongst the diversity and chaos. The result is a field of stinging nettle that is so healthy that the top leaves are the size of my hand—despite the drought—rivaling those of the Pacific Northwest, where everything is greener and bigger. So when life brings us stinging nettles, what more are we to do than to eat, a basic behavior we share with all life on earth. The act of gathering, preparing food and then the celebration of eating helps us to tap into that familiar comfort of not only surviving, but thriving.

Each species has a role and once we begin viewing this diversity as something to celebrate rather than select, isolate and destroy, the better off our lives and landscapes will become. The ranches on which our livestock graze support 66 species of birds and 157 species of plants. In all this diversity there is food being grown. How we tend to that food source is up to each and every individual. For our family, in spring, an abundance of stinging nettle means it’s time to make stinging nettle chips!

Recipe: Stinging Nettle Chips

Ingredients:

Top 3 or 4 sets of leaves of the stinging nettle plant before they flower in the early spring

Olive Oil

Apple Cider Vinegar

Nutritional Yeast

Sea Salt

Instructions:

Harvest the nettle, be creative, collect as many as you can. See page 211 of Dawn Again to learn how to harvest without gloves. I also recently worked with my daughter Quince and I held a bag under the plant while she carefully cut the leaves with scissors. Enjoy the adventure of interacting with the plant.

Find a bowl large enough to fit all the nettles. Pour in the olive oil and vinegar about 3 parts oil to one part vinegar. Stir in the nutritional yeast until you have a slurry. Add in a couple pinches of salt to taste. Set all the trimmed leaves of the stinging nettle as well as the top group of leaves that form a bud. With a wooden spoon gently massage the oil mixture into the nettles until they are thoroughly coated. Pour in more oil as needed to coat the nettle. Take your time with this, part of the process is to massage out the stingers. Don’t tear the leaves, just work the oil into the surface. You know when it is ready when you pick up a raw nettle leaf, eat it and it does not sting your tongue. When you taste it, go through a sense meditation before you place the leave on your tongue. Then use your intuition to add more salt, fat or acid to the mix. See page 60 of Dawn Again for sense meditation. Preheat the oven to 300 degrees and place the nettles flat on a cookie sheet. Cook for about 20 mins, turning half way through until the leaves are crisp but not burnt.

#practicewhatyoupublish and other tips for holiday season happiness from our authors

For the last several months, I’ve been participating in a challenge to walk a hundred kilometres in a month, alongside two of my siblings, and a bunch of our childhood friends. This month, the online group in which we report our progress and egg each other on, is called “100 km in Crazy December…We Got This!!”—a nod to the way December seems to zip by in a cloud of twinkle lights and shortbread cookies, with one’s best intentions scattered like so much shredded wrapping paper after a gift-exchange frenzy. Without that kind of external motivation and accountability, I know it’s easy for me to forget I live in a body at all. My month is shaping up to include lots of time at my desk (book rewrites are coming my way this week, plus there’s the work I do here at Propriometrics Press and on Katy Says, the bi-weekly podcast from our author Katy Bowman), lots of time at my sewing machine (making Christmas presents for family and friends, and yes, for myself!), and lots of time in the car (my husband and I drive eighteen hours to see my family at Christmas).

All of this, plus the usual hustle and bustle of the season, could set me up for a stressed out, sedentary month. But I’ve been thinking about the hashtag we use on social media: #practicewhatyoupublish, and I’ve asked some of our authors to share with me—and with you—their best tips. We hope you’ll find some inspiration for your own life here!

 

Galina Denzel, the co-author of Eat Well, Move Well, Live Well, writes about meditation in that book’s chapter “Meditate on This.” But, she notes, “sitting meditation comes easier in those times when I have relative peace, life is in flow and I am not facing huge challenges. But with the holidays, there is more stress, more expenses, more travel, more preparations in our home. On top of it, we have a special holiday program, and our students need our attention, so technically, we put a lot on our plates.” So here’s how Galina embodies #practicewhatyoupublish:

While our life is rich with many amazing holiday experiences, it becomes harder to wake up and pull my cushion, sit and just drop into what’s in my body. And herein lies the paradox: the times when I most need to attend to my inner world is the time when I am least wanting to do it, because…there is stuff to do. Around this time of year I choose to do walking meditations instead of sitting meditations. It’s a way for me to combine two of my favorite ways to stay connected with myself at a time when walking comes easier than sitting. This way my walk to the store can become an opportunity to drop in and be with myself and attend to emotions, thoughts, sensations, connections that are tugging at my heart. I can do it on my way to or from work. I can do it while walking with my partner.

I usually choose one of three anchors for my walks. On some walks, I choose to attend to my breath, as I walk and become aware of certain thoughts, events, sensations, emotions or connections, I keep my awareness on my breath. This way I have a line connecting my attention to my breath and my whole experience organizes around it. A second anchor may be the ground. As I walk, I feel my contact with the ground—right, left, right, left—aware of the textures under my feet. A third anchor may be the colors around me—as my attention drifts I always come back to the colors and notice here is red, here is yellow. You can choose your own way to organize your walking meditations, and make this idea your own.

Practicing walking meditation is all about setting the right intention and can really transform how you feel through the holidays. To make it easier, I am sharing one of the walking meditations from our holiday program. Have a listen. (http://eatmovelive52.com/walking-meditation/)

Joan Virginia Allen is a co-author of Dynamic Aging:

During the holiday season, I am in the car a lot. Great opportunity to practice head ramping as explained in Dynamic Aging: Simple Exercises for Whole-Body Mobility. For more information on head ramping, check out our blog entry “As Long as You Breathe, Change is Possible” at www.dynamicaging4life.com.

 

 

Doniga Markegard is the author of Dawn Again:

Winter brings time to breathe. Winter brings people together to sit around the fire and talk about the season, talk about our dreams, reflect, and imagine the future. I have been thinking a lot about the future. When you have kids it is hard not to. The changing climate, political system, and the rapid pace of tech growth are all subjects to talk about around the fire. There is something about sitting around the fire with other people that brings about a depth of honest conversation that is difficult to achieve in everyday passing.

I recently had the chance to sit around the fire at Wilderness Awareness School while I was on my book tour in Washington. This was the same fire I wrote about in Dawn Again. That was 20 years ago. It has been burning nearly daily since that time. Each year a new group of youth comes to gather around that fire and talk, cry, dance, dream, and imagine the future.

Pictured here, Doniga Markegard and her son Larry teaching Holistic Context-Setting to the Wilderness Awareness School apprentices

Katy Bowman, author of eight books, including Movement Matters:

My books are always about movement—specifically natural movement, transitioning your body to handle more natural movement, and where movement can fit back into your life. When it comes to movement, the holidays can be stressful because with the addition of so many extra “things to do,” the bout of daily exercise is the first to go. For many, it’s the least connected thing to other elements of life and so is the easiest thing to set aside when all the other plans come in.

Katy’s Hiking Advent invitation from 2016

The way I #PracticeWhatYouPublish is to, obviously, keep moving. I choose less convenient methods (read lots of things by hand!) of processing raw or foraged ingredients. I also like to celebrate with movement—to infuse the holiday with movement—so that we can move together (yay Vitamin Community!). I create exercise advents for my social media followers, giving them one exercise each day. I send out a “Week Before Christmas Hiking Countdown” letting our friends know where we’ll be hiking and at what time, and that they (or even just their kids) are invited. We hold a holiday-eve brunch for all our friends, often eating outside and then heading out for long walk down a local trail. In short, I’ve worked to make the holidays ABOUT moving. Movement is not only a great way through which to celebrate, movement should be celebrated. Movement is the gift!

Shelah Wilgus is a co-author of Dynamic Aging:

During the holiday season and any other time, I make sure to calf stretch several times a day. I leave a half foam roller in front of my sink in the bathroom. That way I can do a double calf stretch while brushing my teeth or just washing up. Detailed instruction for doing the calf stretch can be found in Dynamic Aging: Simple Exercises for Whole-Body Mobility.

Alison Bernhoft is the author of Entropy Academy: How to Succeed at Homeschooling Even if You Don’t Homeschool:

I have a couple of Entropy-Busting Ideas which helped me keep the chaos at bay, at least as regards Christmas stockings:  early in the year, I hung up plastic grocery bags, one per child, on a rail in my closet kept exclusively for that purpose. (It’s a short rail, and we have six kids, in case you were wondering.)  As the months passed, the bags filled with odd items that I found on sale, with mementos of some of the trips we had made, maybe a CD from a concert we had particularly enjoyed. Then it was a simple matter to add the traditional English piece of silver money, apple and satsuma in the toe, then fill it up chocolates, brain puzzles, and a giant plastic candy cane filled with M&Ms.

Warning! Once wrapped, small presents become impossible to tell apart! THE ONLY WAY TO FILL STOCKINGS AND STAY SANE is to use different paper for each  child, (but the same paper for all that child’s presents.)

And Alison’s daughter Lorna adds:
The distinctive thing we did that comes to mind is extending the season and acknowledging the Magi by exchanging books on January 6, the Epiphany. Strong emphasis on extending the season!

As for me, I’m excited to apply some of these tips to my December, and I hope you are, too! In my family, we called January 6 Little Christmas, and there was always a special meal, and a small gift for everyone around the table. I loved the way it brought forward the warmth of the season into the new year. From everyone here at Propriometrics Press, may that warmth be your companion long after the last gift is unwrapped and the twinkle lights are packed away.

 

 

Happy birthday, Movement Matters!

It’s not often we mark the anniversary of the publication dates of our books, but Movement Matters stands out for me. It feels like more than a book. It’s trite, I guess, to say it’s not just a book, it’s a way of life…but then, it kind of is a way of life, isn’t it?

From the launch party last fall (entirely unlike any book launch party I’ve ever been to—and as a writer/editor/journalist/publishing person, I’ve been to lots) at which humans and cows hung out together on a beautiful, holistically managed ranch, pitching it to help prepare locally grown and foraged foods and sharing a meal around long tables in a field as the sun set over the Pacific Ocean, to the feedback we’ve heard from readers about the changes they’ve made to render their lives a little less convenient and a little more movement-rich, Movement Matters is the kind of book that easily invites you to take what’s between its covers out for a spin in the world. And that spin has a way of changing the world. Again, it feels like we are creeping dangerously close to the kind of breezy inspirational talk you might find on a motivational poster featuring a couple of unlikely animals cuddled up together, say, a fox and a duck. But really, in order for the world to change, all that has to change is one person. Or the way one person approaches one aspect of their life. Like using a hand-grinder to grind coffee beans. Or doing the back to school shopping at a second hand store. Or walking to the post office instead of driving. Game changers, all three. And absolutely achievable by just about anyone—if not those specific acts, then others just like them.

So, yeah, here I am wishing a book Happy Birthday. If you haven’t had a chance to acquaint yourself with Movement Matters, there is no time like the present. It’s available in three formats—paperback, ebook, and audiobook. And Katy Bowman and I have had a number of chats about it on the Katy Says podcast series called Between the Lines, in which we discussed in detail all the books she’s written, so if you learn better by listening to a couple of nerds talk about books, you should check them out. You can get a look at the launch party here—it’s the next best thing to being there! And we’d love to hear what you think of the book—which, by the way, is a gold medal winner of Best Essays of the Year at the Foreword Indies, how could I have neglected to mention that till now! How have you changed the world in the last year? Drop us a line in the comments and let us know!

Golden days

I’ve written before about how we celebrate good news, here at Propriometrics Press. Well, the emoji strings were flying thick and fast Saturday night, as news broke that we had won not one but TWO gold medals at the Foreword Indies Book of the Year Awards.

Three of our books were nominated for Health Book of the Year: Diastasis Recti and Movement Matters, both by Katy Bowman, and Eat Well, Move Well, Live Well, by Galina Denzel and Roland Denzel. Movement Matters was also nominated in the Essays category. Much to our delight, Movement Matters won the gold medal for Essays, and Eat Well, Move Well, Live Well picked up gold for Health.

Here’s how that news was received in our virtual office on Saturday:

 

Once we’d cleaned up after the confetti cannon, frolicked for a while in nature, and consumed all the virtual champagne and tacos, I had a chance to ask our winning authors what it meant to them to win a Foreword Indie.

“Although I’ve written many books, I still think of myself as a sort of blogger-turned-author,” says Katy Bowman. “Most of what I write is on the internet—in short bursts on social media or in the occasional article. And even though I write about the importance of movement to our physiological, social, and ecological models, my books have always been relegated to FITNESS categories, making it challenging to spread the idea that movement is critical to our bodies, lives, and planet to anyone but exercisers. Movement Matters won Best Essays! In a contest open to essays on all topics, with judges who are into books, and who are not necessarily into movement or exercise or fitness or even health! I’m excited because it means Movement Matters is accessible—interesting, even—to those outside of fitness, which is the most critical step in bringing the idea that movement matters to the world.”

Roland Denzel echoes that sentiment. “We’re honored and thrilled to have been nominated,” he says, “but overjoyed to have won. It’s wonderful to be recognized for our hard work, and when it’s by people outside of the health and fitness industries, it’s even better. This is the audience we’ve always wanted to reach and help, so when they appreciate our work, we know we’ve succeeded.”

And finally, I asked our editor in chief, Penelope Jackson, what went through her mind when she heard the news two of our books had won gold—especially in light of how new this company is, and how small our list is. She resisted the urge to reply in emoji strings and celebratory gifs (for once), and instead told me: “What I thought of first was all of the hours Roland, Galina, and Katy put into writing their magnificent books; all the time I and our other editors spent working with the text; the time Zsofi spent designing and laying them out; all the time you, Steph, have spent managing distribution and sales and printing. So much of the work that goes into a book travelling from an author’s mind to a reader’s hands is invisible, and that’s why these awards are meaningful. They are a recognition of all that uncelebrated labour. We know how special and brilliant our authors are, and we know that every minute of our work has been more than worth it—I’m so glad other people see it too.”

Emoji tacos and champagne for all!

Mother of all gardens

My mother has always been a gardener. Together, she and my father turned our suburban corner lot into a glorious green place, where we grew most of the vegetables our family of six ate in the summer, where we composted our organic kitchen waste (long, long before composting was trendy, or even understood by our friends and neighbors), and where we kids spent summer evenings picking stones out of the soil, and summer mornings harvesting endless rows of beans, cucumbers, and tomatoes so my parents could pickle, can, and otherwise preserve them.

Years passed, and our yard went through many phases, growing and changing as our family did. The huge garden gave way to a swimming pool and my parents continued to grow a few tomatoes and other favorites in raised beds my dad made. After he died, those went fallow, and then gave way to grass.

But this year, my almost-seventy-year-old mother decided she’s ready to grow some tomatoes again. There’s a decently sunny patch just off the deck in the backyard, but it was terribly unkempt, filled with raspberry canes and spring onions that had gone rogue from other parts of the garden, and a rhizome-spreading visitor from next door.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mom wanted three planting boxes, and a stone pathway she could use to get among them to do her work. So, on a recent visit in advance of Mother’s Day, my spouse knocked together three nice planters, and Mom and I got busy with shovels, rakes, and brute strength. We pulled out an old planter, dug out bags and bags of that invader from next door, harvested some spring onions and some nearby rhubarb, dug out and moved rocks that were in our way, and got the area ready to become a new garden.

This made for two day’s worth of bending, pulling, pushing, grasping, squatting, single leg squatting, reaching, and twisting, lots of barefoot-on-dirt time, and tons of fresh air. Not to mention the time spent hanging out with each other, working side by side, or resting on the deck, drinking water and congratulating ourselves on our hard work.

Mom wanted a path she could feel comfortable stepping down onto, and walking over, while she goes about her planting and weeding. Something that would provide both stability for her less-sure moments, and enough texture that she can continue to challenge her balance and give her bare feet some lumps and bumps to navigate.

My mom has just started reading Dynamic Aging, and while she doesn’t see herself climbing trees like Joan, Joyce, Shelah, and Lora, she is absolutely interested in aging well, maintaining the mobility she does have, and even gaining more if she can. She’s even getting back to her composting roots, albeit on a smaller scale than our garden’s earliest days.

I’ve been working to #stackmylife more consistently, and this project really lent itself to that philosophy: I moved more, and moved more of me, racked up some barefoot time, spent time with my mother, took care of a little patch of the Earth, enabled my mom to move more, and move more of her, and to divert some organic waste to her own backyard to feed the soil that will eventually feed her (and me, if I’m lucky!). Also, that’s Mother’s Day gift-giving done and dusted. A pretty efficient use of two mornings, I must say.

If you’re still looking for a gift for your mom, or for one you know, we’ve sorted some of our recent books into helpful piles for you! Find what you’re looking for at your favorite online or bricks and mortar book retailer, and Happy Mother’s Day to all who mark it!

 

So, that was something!

So, in case you missed it, one of our books was on The Today Show on Friday, no big deal (totally a very big deal). First of all, what a total thrill to see Katy Bowman and some of her Dynamic Aging co-authors on national television!  And of course, the idea that millions more people were able to gain access to the ideas and possibilities presented in Dynamic Aging is the real fuel for our collective fire around these parts.

So that part was awesome enough, and then around mid-day Eastern time, Dynamic Aging started charging up Amazon’s best sellers list, finally coming to rest in the number two position, where it stayed for just about twenty four hours. At this writing, it’s still firmly in the top 50 books. You guys, out of more than thirty million titles. Let me give you a bit of perspective on this. Propriometrics Press is a very small company, with one full-time employee and a ragged band of independent contractors. We’ve all been together in person exactly one time, and it was just a few months ago. Getting our book on The Today Show was a massive accomplishment. Watching it climb the charts and compete alongside books published by the Big Five was a pinch-me-I-must-be-dreaming experience. Seeing it still sitting comfortably in the top 100 books today—I don’t know how to explain the feeling. We do not do a lot of resting on our laurels, but we are pretty good at celebrating our success with long strings of celebratory emoji, like this:

The part of all this that remains the most awesome is hearing from readers. So, if you’ve had a chance to look at Dynamic Aging, we’d love to hear from you. Drop us a line in the comments if you like, and if the spirit moves you, maybe review the book on Amazon—reviews of all kinds help other readers decide whether a particular book is for them.

And now, it’s on to the next! (see under: laurels, not resting on). We are getting ready to release an expanded edition of Move Your DNA in just a few weeks. Tell you more about that soon!

Body of Wisdom

Over the past few weeks I’ve been starting my days in a new way: reading Katy Bowman’s Movement Matters. (And that’s not happening just because I’m managing social media for Propriometrics Press).

The thing is, I love big ideas. And even more than that, I love big ideas that I can bring to bear on my life in tangible ways. I still find it astonishing that a book can deliver a person up to all that. But then again, I believe in the power that books have to open minds and seed meaningful change in our world.

I’m a pretty active person. I also work at jobs that have me staring at screens and tapping lightly on keyboards a lot of the day, so getting to use my body to experience the world became, and remains, vitally important.

The place I currently call home, Halifax, Nova Scotia, affords me some of the lifestyle that balances out my screen time. It also happens to be a port visited by numerous cruise ships, mostly during the gorgeous fall we often get. And it was on one of those autumn mornings that I took the long way to work, through one of our city’s most expansive public parks, which leads down to the North Atlantic Ocean.

I walked through some forest, down to the water and along the coastline for a bit, then past some shipping yards as I worked my way back to our mid-size city streets. En route, I passed a kind of ocean parking lot: where cruise ships from around the world anchor and where tourists disembark to see what they can see.

Chalk it up to the fact that I had been reading #MovementMatters, chalk it up to how everything was sparkling in some very beautiful morning light, but I was noticing things I hadn’t noticed before: like the road signs for pedestrians, the signs for cars, the parking lot full of cars, and the fact that I was the only pedestrian around at that time. And in the background? A cruise ship that had—what was that?—a giant plastic giraffe on its upper deck, wearing a bright pink life preserver. And looking down to the other end of the upper deck, a huge, and I do mean huge, screen. Think Jumbotron you can see from miles away. At sea.

It occurred to me that we may not have intended this in our dogged contemporary pursuit for more “leisure” time, but from my vantage point that day, it sure looked like we’ve reached a level of confusion about it all.

How did we get here? I blame the giraffe in the pink life preserver.

OK, blame might be too harsh. I love giraffes. But I’d argue that our cruise-ship friend, and even the cruise ship itself, is a fantastic symbol of where we all find ourselves. If I hadn’t read Katy’s book, I’m not sure I would have found the language for this, but I think I have some now: we’re getting it backwards. We’ve traded our natural tendency toward movement for epic bouts of sedentarism. And hey, I love relaxing as much as the next person. But I’ve noticed (you, too?) how relaxation doesn’t really do the trick after a long day of doing nothing, physically, already…

I always wondered if I was a bit odd (affirmative!): not really loving the gym, opting to walk to and from grocery stores carrying heavy bags, eagerly volunteering to help friends move or paint rooms in their houses. (Katy calls this “stacking your life.”) I’ve always loved using my body in the service of human living, and I realize I love the communal effort, too. And now, as I do even less sitting in chairs, add more movement throughout my day as often as I can, turn away from screens to look more at the sea and sky, and talk with our organic farmers who feed us so well, the more I don’t crave “leisure” as much as I crave connection with the world we all live in and with the people in it.

I used to dance tango a lot (and when I get back to it, I’ll be trying it without the high heels. Thanks, #WholeBodyBarefoot). It was my first profound lesson in the power of connecting with my own body, attending to the cues of another body, and witnessing the ability of the human machine to pick up on a great deal of non-verbal information—from music and rhythm to microscopic moves emanating from my dance partner’s lead to listening to my own intuition. While embroiled in a tango that sometimes would work really smoothly for a few seconds, a beautiful thing got created that was much, much bigger than the two of us.

So, I’m a believer in the sheer awesomeness of the human body and what that means as we move about planet Earth. I’ve got my own batch of gathered evidence. But it’s Katy’s #MovementMatters that has offered me not just a new vocabulary, but a new, dot-connected way of understanding the world.

What we do with our bodies matters. And that extends way, way beyond my immediate space. I feel the responsibility and the thrill of that. And I also feel tapped into a source of clarity about what being a human connected to the world means. Based on my own experience, it’s the moving of my body that delivers me back to that clarity when a lot of the signs and signals around me are saying something different. I’m happier, yes, but I’m also trying to be a better citizen. And it starts with a simple calf stretch in the morning. Amazing.

I love this line from Katy in #MovementMatters: “When striving for an evidence-based life, consider that your most relevant evidence is your body.”

To that I’ll add, without putting too fine a point on it: Vive la révolution!

(Giraffes welcome).

By: Tracy Picha

Beyond the book: Meet Ben Pobjoy

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If you’ve cracked into your copy of Movement Matters: Essays on Movement Science, Movement Ecology, and the Nature of Movement by Katy Bowman, you’ve had the pleasure of encountering Ben Pobjoy, who wrote the foreword for the book. Ben has only been on our radar for a little while, but we’ve become fast friends, forged through movement. You can learn more about Ben and his inspiring story here. Meanwhile, we had a chance to catch up with him recently. Here’s how that went…

 You’ve written before about how you encountered Katy Bowman’s work. What was it about her message that resonated with you?

Katy unexpectedly landed on my radar when she appeared as a guest on a podcast. What’s peculiar about the resonance, is that it had as much to do with her message as it did the medium I first experienced her message through. Katy and her message are obviously brilliant, but it was the dialectical form of the podcast’s discussion that figuratively hammered her message into me. This podcast wasn’t just Katy opining about biomechanics into a microphone from a scripted speech, it was Katy participating in a well-rounded, long-form conversation where she was occasionally challenged by the host, and every time she was, she responded humanly and often humorously with even more evidence, insights or analogies that made her argument more compelling. In addition, she just had this fun and inspired timbre as well as what appeared to be a bright mind that was as imaginative and innovative as it was analytical and methodological. By the end of the podcast, I was just convinced. More so, I was awakened and inspired to move. I heard the podcast on January 14th 2015, began walking on January 18th, and have since logged over 10,000km in walks over the last 21 months. The short of it is, I caught the Bowman bug!

Why did it resonate at that time in particular, do you think?

I first heard Katy’s message on the tail-end of a decade of decline; where my ascending professional success had erroneously ushered in a seriously unhealthy degree of personal sedentarism. It wasn’t just that I was immobile and felt lazy, it was that my immobility was so bad that it was making me sick…and I was only in my early thirties! I knew I had a problem— one that was worsening— but I didn’t know how to solve it. I had tried to get fit with conventional forms of exercise but such either left me injured or the results were so slow to experience that I gave up. But, when I heard Katy speak about immobility as a disease of captivity, her articulation of ‘casts’, her ‘orca collapsed dorsal fin’ analogy as well as her scientific meets anthropological discussion of humans as primates / constantly moving hunter-gatherers, I was ENLIGHTENED! For me, it led to a profound paradigm shift where I saw the shortcomings of ‘exercise’ (especially within a larger lifestyle that’s sedentary) in stark contrast to the holistic value of a lifestyle rich in varied movement. It all just clicked, and the necessity of movement just clearly came into focus for me.

What kinds of thoughts did you begin having as you began to move more?

Initially, I felt a range of thoughts, and sometimes conflicting ones. Intellectually, I was convinced; I knew I had to move— Katy and her books thoroughly convinced me of such. However, I started walking in the dead of winter— up in Canada— and it was real tough out of the gates. I was severely out of shape, so it was physically demanding to trudge through the deep snow, deal with the subzero cold and endure brutal winds (that seemed to pass through any outerwear I wore). So, the first few months were hard. I’d heard Katy mention that 25% of our muscles exist below our ankles, and I understood this, but when I’d trudge the uneven snow or jerkily slip on ice, I didn’t realize every one of those muscles would ache at the end of the day, ha ha! However, I eventually improved my acclimatization and conditioning and moving became enjoyable. At first, it was stress busting; walking to and from work provided amazing ‘decompression time’ between my professional life and home life. Then, when spring and summer came around, moving outside just became awesome— especially as I developed the stamina to walk for a couple hours at a time. I just loved walking around outside, just being an observer to the weird and wonderful things the world has to offer.

At what point did you realize you needed or wanted to do some kind of social good along with your movement?

I work in advertising, and while it’s fast-paced and demanding, one upside is that I’m dispatched all over North America to make commercials. So, I do a lot of work travel, and beyond that, I’m fortunate to have the means to do a lot of personal travel around the world. Whether I was on work trips or personal ones, I’d walk, and I’d walk anywhere; from the nice parts of cities to the troubled parts. The more I travelled, the more I saw recurring patterns. While every city is different, every city is the same; poverty disproportionately affects women and children— and in Canada— our First Nations peoples. Witnessing this frequently, it just started to fuck with me on a deep level. There I was, this white successful dude— who’d been given every opportunity in life— that could now afford to voyeuristically drop into all these places. And, when I got there, I’d use my free time to work on my own self-improvement via walking. I just reached this point where I would look in the mirror from time to time and be like, “Man, if you don’t start moving beyond yourself and pitching in for the greater good, you’re a legit asshole of a human being!” Thereafter, I was out in Vancouver quite a bunch for work and I’d walk through East Hastings Street, which is this notorious street that’s riddled with homelessness and substance abuse. It’s a literal hell, one of the biggest failures of the Canadian state, and I just thought to myself, “This is completely unacceptable, and due to my apathy, I’m partially to blame.” So, I transitioned my physical movement into social movement thereafter and began distributing sandwiches to hungry people on the streets. It’s something I could do at home, it’s something I could do in hotel rooms, and I made it my mission throughout 2015. I recognize it’s a very small gesture that doesn’t change the system, but I’ve seen the small, temporary relief it provides to people so it has some worth on a micro level.

What can you say about the response with which your sandwich-delivering efforts were met?

In the fall of 2015, when it began to get cold in Canada, I wrote a post on Facebook about what I was doing. It wasn’t to boast or be self-righteous, it was just a plea to my friends— many of whom are these turkeys (myself included) with expensive road bikes or designer running outfits— to consider pitching in (with food, water or warm clothes) on their physical activities outdoors because I knew they could afford it, and because people on the streets needed it especially as it was getting colder. We’re all these poser wannabe athletes and I was like, “Hey, let’s cut the shit, and be honest- we CAN and SHOULD be doing something.” Much to my surprise, the post went viral— like really viral, people shared it around the world. Many were jazzed on the concept of converting their physical movement into social movement. The response was a little overwhelming because I was flooded with inquiries and media coverage, I did a national health campaign with one of the biggest brands in Canada, I was asked to be on podcasts and to do talks in front of powerful people in my hometown. The whole time I was like, “Man, I’m just this regular dude doing this D.I.Y thing in my spare time…I don’t really know what else to say?” I didn’t aspire to be the face of anything, and I’ve kept things at bay by saying, “No” to a lot of requests to ensure I don’t become one. If anything, I just want people to know that small actions can have big reverberations. So, practice kindness and move beyond yourself.

What changed in you and in your life, because of that?

Nothing and everything! Sometimes I get recognized as ‘sandwich guy’ around Toronto, and the one material gain I received from it all, was a barista giving me a free banana once when I ordered a coffee one morning, ha ha. I could’ve cashed in on it- public speaker agencies were reaching out to me to sign me as a speaker— but I turned it all down, just not my vibe or intention. Even the health campaign I did for a big brand, I didn’t ask for a fee, instead, a donation of $25,000 was made to an organization that promotes physical literacy to young people in Canada…which is rad! Throughout it all, it just taught me how powerful one’s small actions can be. I’ve had about 65 million other realizations about privilege and purpose and becoming a better ally to marginalized groups on my walks that— if I were to share them— they’d be so longwinded I’d crash the internet! But, if I’m being completely honest though, the most life changing outcome of all the walking and sandwiches— beyond the move to better health— is that I met the woman of my dreams on a walk of sorts. It’s literally the most insane and romantic story ever!

You’ve begun taking on longer and longer walks, and aiming for larger and larger social impacts. What happens to you while you are walking? During your recent walk from Toronto to Buffalo, for instance, what happened inside you?

Yes, I got into endurance walks while simultaneously trying to think of new ways to retrofit my physical movement in ways that will deliver the most value to people who need help. In September 2016, I decided to do a continuous 125km walk from Toronto to Buffalo for Sprott House, the first transitional housing program of its kind for LGBTQ2SA youth in Canada. It’s based in my hometown, and was a no-brainer because I’m trying to become a better ally to marginalized groups. The walk was both easier and harder than I imagined it would be. We estimated it would take 25 continuous hours and I did in just under 20 hours…averaging 08:54 a kilometre. In these types of walks, what happens inside of me, is that I just get into a flow state for hours at a time, and I can blaze a quick pace. I align my breathing with my heartbeat as well as my stride, and I just become this movement machine. It’s like I tune out, I’m not even thinking, I’m just moving and flowing. It’s an incredible thing. However, during the walk, my body did start to break down. I reached a point where I couldn’t retain all the water I was drinking. I had to keep peeing…and I feel bad because I peed all over this last town I walked through! Sorry small town whose name I won’t type! But, luckily this happened right near the very end of my walk. Originally, I set out to raise $2,500 for Sprott House and I ended up raising over $27,000…so when the going got tough, I thought about all the donors who pitched in, and that gave me the strength to finish the walk.

What would you say to someone who’s not sure their movement really does matter?

You matter, your movement matters, and how you move matters; not just for you, but for others as well. Unrestrained movement— to me conceptually— is the definition of freedom. So, in a way, how we choose OR refuse to move, is an expression of either freedom or captivity / oppression. And, I do not mean this in a way that pertains to ablism / disablism, I mean this in terms of the cause-and-affect of movement, intention and action. In capitalistic societies, if you’re outsourcing your movement (from growing one’s own food to transportation itself), the slack is forcibly picked up by people likely being paid unfit wages in questionable conditions or by machines that burn fossil fuels and pollute. And, if the aforementioned isn’t compelling, I’ll end with a personal examples of why movement matters; it helped me lose 100lbs and reconnect with my body, movement was meditative and enabled me to put myself in check, movement helped me feed people in my community as well as around the world, converting my movement into a platform for fundraising helped me raise over $50,000 for two important causes in 2016, and movement brought me into the orbit of an amazing partner I hope to spend the rest of my life with!