[books, movement] A Physical Education, Casey Johnston

[kaberett]

Back at the beginning of January beadsbuttonslace wrote up some reflections on this book, which interested me enough that I put in a hold on my library's only digital copy, which was an audiobook, and then I managed to listen to it in under a week, and now I am subscribed to Johnston's newsletter (and reading its archives) and also trying to work out whether I want to buy a physical copy or a digital copy for my own library.

Which is to say: I liked it. A lot.

To start with, I currently have a semi-professional interest in memoir (as a medium for imparting information) on the topic of embodiment. There's a lot here for me to mull over in terms of structure and storytelling; it's a genuine pleasure to watch someone carefully work through how to best communicate a complicated and counter-intuitive message to a hostile-but-hopeful audience, by which I mean an audience who are coming in primed to distrust but have at least a tiny part of themselves that would, very tentatively, really like to think that maybe just possibly there might be some truth in here. For bonus points, a significant chunk of what she's communicating (notably "start easy, no, easier than that" and "Rest is the Work, and The Work is Rest") is identical to things I need to communicate.

Next, and of broader relevance: it is fundamentally a very enjoyable book. You get an up-close look at somebody encountering the life-changing joy of learning how to inhabit and work with and listen to and exist happily in their body -- to delight in it, over and over again. She is just absolutely in love with moving her body this way and nerding about moving her body this way and providing The Scientific Explanations in An Accessible Fashion (from the perspective of someone with an engineering degree! I'm so amused by how much our experiences overlap).

I should be clear, having said that it's fundamentally very enjoyable, that part of what makes it enjoyable for me is that she is very, extremely, I cannot emphasise this enough, explicit and frank about her experiences with disordered eating (including numbers), subtitular diet culture, and also abuse (parental and intimate partner), harassment, alcoholism, and parental death. All of it is to a purpose; all of it ties in to the ways in which The Body Keeps The Score, both in terms of learning how to identify and understand the messages your body is sending as integral to the ability to actually experience life, and in terms of (the science of) the range of long-term effects on bodies resulting from various approaches to feeding and taking care of them.

For me, this frank and grounded discussion is incredibly soothing. Part of the reason I'm loving her work so much is that I can read it safely, and that means that I'm abruptly discovering that things I've long known my body does are things that most bodies do, actually, and that they have names, and that there's actually a pretty solid scientific framework for understanding them. And part of the reason it's safe is that she is absolutely completely unequivocally consistent that if you want to get stronger you need to eat food; that you don't want to lose weight; that you need to rest. She walks you through how much she struggled with all of these ideas, and how she wound up convinced by both the science and how her body responded when she decided to try doing something different.

She comes back, over and over, to the ways in which deliberate movement can produce a sense of agency and of mastery -- and about the wind-ranging psychological effects this has, as well as "just" getting better at Pick Thing Up, Put It Down Again. I recognise so much of what she says about this -- about curiosity about what one's body can do, and pleasure in finding out, and the effects that can have on everything else about how you think about yourself -- from my own explorations of movement. We're (mostly) rehabilitating from different things, but: she gets it.

While, and this is hilarious to me, presenting a view of Pilates -- one of the things that harmed her, before she found lifting -- that has very little at all in common with my experience of same! This is useful both for calibration of what my (eventual) audience is likely to know/"know" about Pilates, and for the illustration that there are many different routes to getting the same benefits -- because I recognise, viscerally, many of the things she gets from lifting as things I am getting/have got from Pilates.

I desperately want to sit her down and make her infodump at me about Her Thoughts On Pilates in more detail than appears to currently be available in her archives, but alas this is unlikely to happen. I want to know what she's read! I want to know how much we actually disagree! I want to poke her brain and her thinkings!

In the meantime, despite going I MUST NOT BUY EQUIPMENT UNTIL I HAVE ESTABLISHED THAT THIS PROGRAMME WILL NOT ACTUALLY BE BAD FOR ME, I have bought some adjustable dumbbells. If all goes to plan, they will be coming into my actual possession on Thursday, and I will then not do anything with them (okay, fine, other than a very small play) for at least another three weeks. Because, well, I have been wanting to improve my upper body strength, and I have been stalling on how to (and regretting not having been strong enough to safely get free weights instruction during my ten-physio-sessions-for-the-newly-diagnosed-hypermobile a decade ago), and LIFTOFF was right there...

And some final notes:

• it was only earlier today that I realised that an article that did the rounds a little while ago, The new MacBook keyboard is ruining my life... is BY THIS SAME PERSON
• at least two of you will be delighted to know that in the Epilogue, she discovers bouldering!

Comments

[batdina]

I read that book in one sitting. Like you, I'm dealing with EDS so I'm being careful. But also like you, I'm now in possession of small weights to see how this feels in my body.

I did not know she had a newsletter. I must go investigate now.

[kaberett]

She has a newsletter! If you sign up for the paid version you get access to a Discord that is full of lots of other bendy people and is all around a lovely environment! Do recommend.

[cesy]

Interesting, thank you.

[kaberett]

<3

[bluapapilio]

Excited to read this!

[kaberett]

I hope you enjoy!

Gratuitous and contradictory Icon Post

[jesse_the_k]

Intriguing! Thanks (and also for sensuum, which is highly relevant to me)