The Happy Mess Project

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Exercise in the life of a right-bodied 28-38 Projector

Picture by Conscious design on Unsplash

Someone just asked me privately about my exercise routine with my 28-38…

Regularly, I’ll catch someone mentioning Ra’s recommendation to exercise with some definition between the root and spleen.

I only have 2 channels, and one of them is my 28-38. I had a bad car accident in 2000 and broke my back. After a year re-learning how to walk, my doctors were adamant, I needed exercise in order to stay healthy and would always have to deal with back pain. The problem is… I could never find the right kind of exercise for me. Even gentle yoga was too much to maintain regularly. Even what was fun, even what I really loved, even in very small doses.

I was also getting worried, I always had quite loose joints, but it got really bad at the time, with regular ankle and knee twists, and I wasn’t very active at all, I was afraid it was seriously hurting my body, making me lose the little physical autonomy I had. But at the same time, I wanted to experiment with my mechanics since my life got so much better just following my strategy and authority superficially…

So… I had started to study so I looked into what Ra had to say about the mechanics of exercise. My open ego was definitely not helping with the maintaining part. But nothing was as impactful it seemed from my research as body orientation.

Right bodies and exercise

I was stunned when I read him talk about how much right bodies aren’t made to exercise at all. He actually jokes about it in the PLL DLR variable workshop (focusing only on the rightness of the body) saying “if someone comes to you and invites you to jog… shoot ‘em.” 😂 I was pretty annoyed and terrified to make my back hurt even more, and to get even more twisting of my ankles and knees at the slightest move, but also, part of me was relieved. Something felt like the relaxing possibility of maybe not having to try so hard to find “the right exercise routine”.

So I figured (how cute how my mind thought it had a choice) I was going to stop everything, just for a few months, and see what would happen. Like Koen mentioned to me at the time, if my body needed it, it was going to move anyway.

Fast forward 2 years and a half…

My body & exercise

I do not exercise, my body doesn’t allow it anymore. It doesn’t move in that way when my mind is thinking about it, nor when it isn’t. I have bursts of more physical moments, like, I just packed some of my stuff for a few hours this afternoon quite easily. I sometimes enjoy dancing, going to a concert, taking a little walk to go somewhere (right bodies need a reason to move… and doesn’t even know why), swimming leisurely for a while. But those are not for exercising, they’re just movement.

My back pain? It appears I have no pain at all when I stop exercising and moving around as if I had a left body or more motors…!

I went from 2 decades of back pain as part of my life to no pain at all! Similarly, I also stopped twisting my ankles and knees, except when occasionally my non-sacralness takes moving around too far, then I’ll have a “warning twist”. It’ll twist just a tiny bit, and I stop and rest, nothing else happens. Another thing I was told I’d have to live with and maybe even have to have surgery about, especially if I was not moving around more…

So it only started with learning that right bodies in general are not here to exercise and experimenting with stopping to try any voluntary “moving for the sake of moving” for a while, just to see if mechanics were truer for me than homogenized doctors advice. I never went back. And my body is much more relaxed and at ease that way.

My energy levels

And when I do need energy, I have exactly what I need, with very minimal pain when it’s a bit intense, but the more my experiment goes, the less I’m involved in any intense activity anyway. This week for example is the first time in my life even something like packing doesn’t have to be intense or draining. It’s just a few more active days in my movie for a while, with some rest in between. No need to abuse my body in a packing marathon at the last minute, numbing my pain and fatigue by stuffing my face with complex food (my determination is Appetite). The correctness of my PHS protects me.

PHS magic

Spending time and sleeping in a more correct environment and eat per my determination seems to have helped a lot too. Both to heal my body and to not feel the need to move around. Maybe you know it too, that delicious feeling of relaxation, that nothing is to do, that I can just relax, “be” and watch what’s happening in my world. I love so much how much honouring my right body feels healing, reconcile me with my body.

The question of weight

I was also scared I might put on a lot of weight by being so passive. And it turns out, I only put on weight when I eat complex food rather than the differentiated food my body loves more and more. PHS is fucking magical. 🤩

Ra and the mechanics of exercise

Oh, and for that “root to spleen” thing? Ra talks about it in a couple of places. It depends on the orientation of the body and type. Non energy beings, non sacral beings? Not really the exercising type, even with left bodies. Ra as a left bodied being was also saying “I’m a non sacral. I only have one motor, i use my energy very sparingly. I am pretty active, but it’s more things like being on my computer or sitting with you and teaching”.

When describing the need to be active in a left oriented environment, he would specify “there are so many types of activities, and depending on your type, or your definition, it can change a lot. For a left bodied Projector, only having active fingers in front of a computer can be active”. When it comes to rightness, activity that requires too much attention (like exercise mostly does) cuts us off from the awareness we’re here for. Since I heard all that from Ra, my heart always aches a little when I hear a right bodied person wanting to be active…

My Manifestor Love, right bodied, with 3 motors and definition between the root and spleen can absolutely jump around for a few hours at a concert or when he’s playing his music in scene. He will do the heavy lifting of our move to come. But when he exercises, suddenly he’s exhausted, hurts himself and starts to abuse his body and numbs it with complex food (another Appetite determined) within weeks. But when he doesn’t, like me, he has all the energy he needs when he needs it. He slowly stops being angry not having time or energy to play music (energy we release incorrectly is not available for what we need…). He even slowly stopped moaning in pain from picking up things off the floor since he stopped exercising. There may be a heavy price to forcing movement.

So it’s another thing that is quite differentiated. And that requires experimenting on long term to really know what our body would do naturally. When we don’t force it. So if exercising is hard, or hard to keep up, especially with a right body and even more as a non sacral person, I can only recommend anyone to play with not moving until the body moves by itself and maybe see it changing their relationship with their body slowly…