Building Bridges with My Body
The long overdue part 3 of the Broken Body Series
NOTE: This is the third installment of the Broken Body Series. If you missed My Broken Body & How Western Medicine Failed Me Completely, you can check it out here and if you missed I Was in a Patriarchal Relationship with My Body (So No Wonder it Fucking Hates Me), you can read it here! You might want to start with those for context.
Disclaimer: Also, see a doctor and all that if you have severe pain. I know what’s up with me, I’ve been to doctors. They just weren’t helpful in fixing it.
Extra Note 2026: Holy crap, I wrote most of this after the first two parts and then forgot about the draft for the better part of a year. Oops, sorry about that.
All right, so now that you’ve learned about my physical history, as well as my stark realizations about how I treat myself, you might be wondering what I’ve been doing to make things better. The upside of having forgotten about this article for so long is that I get to add some 2026 updates into it, so… weee!
Westerners Have No Relationship With Our Bodies
I’ve come to realize how very sadly out of tune with our bodies we Westerners are. We often choose to ignore and numb ourselves when something is wrong, as opposed to engaging, being curious, learning what’s wrong, and healing it.1
A lot of the time, we expect to go to a doctor and they will make it go away, soon or soonish. We don’t take the time to understand or do it right. That’s likely why so many issues come back.2
As such, it perhaps shouldn’t be a surprise that I struggle to understand what my body is telling me a lot of the time. I have no idea what her voice sounds like most of the time, unless she’s screaming in pain.
Think about it, a little — especially women, but of course everyone has valid experiences here… How often do we treat our selves — our bodies — as though it’s a person we dislike? While my modus operandi in life, generally, is in favor of kindness and understanding, why can’t I treat myself with that?
Put it this way: if we’re in pain, we take a painkiller, or just ignore it. We don’t hear the body’s plea for help, even though we’re aware of it. I’d sit for hours in a twisted position as my body begged me to stop and I ignored her, asshole that I am.
It literally wasn’t until… either my NUCCA doctor or my osteopath mentioned in passing that our bodies aren’t supposed to hurt. That sounds idiotic, but if you think about it, it makes sense. I thought my body was supposed to hurt, because I broke it. But Western medicine told me there was not much I could do about it.
Western medicine was wrong.
My Modalities (The Fitness I’m Familiar With)
I’ve always enjoyed trying out new things, because I believe that variety is the spice of life. Besides, the more things I try, the more aspects of the body and movement I will learn and be able to take forward, which just so happens to be what I did when I started applying breath to explore my aches and pains.
Yoga
The first “sport” I ever tried that I really genuinely loved was Ashtanga yoga, particularly the primary series, largely because it’s so challenging. A lot of different Flow or Vinyasa yogas are very soft and gentle, but as you maybe clocked in part 2, I’m a rather gung-ho when I take something on. I have a penchant for diving in the deep end and Ashtanga was perfect for me in that sense. I was told that it was often used to regulate the energy and emotions of teenaged boys, which makes sense because it’s not easy or gentle.
Now, I picked up Ashtanga on a recommendation from my sister-in-law when I was in college, so I was at the ripe young age of about 19 when I did it first. I then picked it up again the year before I moved to Finland. This, of course, predates my neck injury by a few years.
I loved it. It taught me how to breathe (“pranayama”) in a way that energizes me, even if it took me 3 months to figure out how to to the breathwork properly. After my first 10 classes, I discovered that I could go to the mountains and snowboard from dawn until dusk without any aches or pains afterward. It was brilliant!
To this day, I fully believe that if you were to only ever learn one thing about fitness to practice, it would be sun salutations. They stretch and strengthen your whole body. They’re deceptively simple yet surprisingly complex. You can spend your entire life learning them.
CrossFit
As I mentioned in parts 1 and 2, I was also really into CrossFit for a couple years. I liked the way it taught me the basics of how to keep my body safe during heavy weightlifting and I learned a bajillion new movements and techniques, the majority of which I can implement anywhere without needing the gym rig. I used to be afraid of free weight training. Not anymore!
The CrossFit bracing sequence is dedicated to protecting your body from the high-impact of weight training, which means:
Feet in the correct position (hip or shoulder-width apart, movement dependent), knees externally rotated
Core engaged! This means activating the deep core muscles that protect the lower back, not just the surface abdominals
Shoulders rotated back and down
Diligently applying this to every movement kept me from causing any greater damage to myself while lifting heavy weights.
Now, unfortunately, CrossFit’s high intensity was really not what my body needed, especially with my bones so out of alignment, so eventually I was forced to quit when I noticed that my chronic pain was starting to get worse and not better.
Water Jogging
Water jogging is one of the most useful things I’ve come across and the only reason I struggle with it is because it requires me to go to the pool and I prefer to do things that I can do at home without paying, because I’m a po’ person.
However, water jogging is one of the best calorie burners in the cardio spectrum, while simultaneously being one of the lowest impact on the body, so it’s really perfect for me.
It’s also one of the most boring things you can possibly do on your own, since pools don’t play music. This can be a good thing for me in the right mindset, but in the wrong mindset, being alone in a pool for an hour can mean that I spend an hour torturing myself with unproductive thoughts. So I prefer to go with friends when I can, which means I don’t go as often as I should.
Whirling & Belly Dance
I also really enjoy trying new things. In 2024, I met a really fascinating Iranian woman, Safa Solati, whose Whirling Lifedance workshop I participated in during August 2024. This was a cool AF experience, as I learned how to spin in a circle for an extended period of time without getting dizzy or ill (something I surely need to practice if I want to improve, haha). I also learned about its meditative and purging qualities, as it seems to get your energy moving through your chakras and can unlock things inside you that have been jammed up. It’s a beautiful practice and I wish the classes had aligned more with my schedule in 2025.
I also did a 10-class workshop in Oriental Dance/Belly Dance last fall, which taught me how to isolate different parts of my spine and add movement to them. This was a hugely useful thing to learn and I really enjoyed it (and learned a lot about my ingrained perceptions of femininity, wow), but I learned that the movements are, even when done gently, a bit hard on my body. My spine needs very soft, gentle exploration and I need a bit of control and strength before I could explore these movements more fully. But! I am extremely glad to have learned them for future use!
Photos by Auvo Takkinen (@atp_kuvat)
Zazen
I have never actually taken a lesson or class in zazen, which a form of Zen Buddhist seated meditation. There are many different modalities but ultimately, it involves sitting, often in Lotus position, for an extended period of time. There are two cushions you can use to make it more comfortable, a large one to protect your butt from the hard floor, and a small round one to adjust the angle of your hips, per how tight they are. The idea is to, with time, figure out how to sit for extended periods of time without experiencing pain. When I’m out of alignment, this is counterproductive, but once I’m balanced, it’s really helpful.
The Simple Movements I Used to Hear My Body
So now that you know a bit of my background in fitness and motion, here is what I did when I was doing breath meditation to try to listen to my body.
First, I went to hang from a clothes line in the yard. I wanted to give my spine a bit of relief from gravity, because it’s something that I keep feeling like I need… though specifically, I feel like I need to hang upside-down. I still haven’t done by 2026 and I still crave it.
With my hands shoulder-width apart on my makeshift pullup bar, I did three movements:
Dead hang: just hanging from the bar with no shoulder support, for as many breaths as I could handle (it wasn’t many, maybe 3x deep breaths)
Then I engaged and disengaged my shoulders five times, with my feet on the ground to see where my shoulder alignment was at (tons of popping throughout my upper right quadrant).
Finally, I finished with three controlled kips, to practice shoulder stability while encouraging movement in my central spine (pushing to the limit but not straining or forcing beyond).
This all felt really good, so I decided to keep going and came inside to do a Jefferson curl.
Jefferson curls were something I loved to use in CrossFit warmups. It’s the kind of stretch that gets better the slower you do it, and I’ve had some weird moments doing it in the past.3
The idea is to curl forward, vertebra by vertebra, all the way down your spine, as slowly as possible. I like to add an inhale and slight straightening/lengthening of the spine, then exhale on the forward fold to get deeper into the stretch — an Ashtanga trick!
The curl felt really good, so I finished with a couple sun salutations…
Inhale, reach upward, lengthen the spine.
Exhale, fold forward, touch the toes.
Inhale, straighten the spine, plant the hands.
Exhale, hop into plank and descend to the ground.
Inhale, upward dog.
Exhale, downward dog.
Breathe deeply in and out, five times.
Then do it all in reverse. It’s magical. The yoga movement flow feels really good when you start to understand and get into it.
After all of this, my body felt weird and jittery. My spine threw a spasm at me, feebly, and went calm. It didn’t spasm for a long, long time after that.
Changing the Way I Talk to Myself
So, I mentioned in Part 1 that I had this weird-ass hippy physiotherapist who wasted a lot of both of our time telling me to be nice to myself when I was in need of strengthening and stretching techniques. However, I hate admitting that she was also right about me, it just wasn’t what I expected at first.
Since I realized that I am the patriarch in my relationship with myself, I started to pay more attention to things that I say about myself that I would never say to another person…
“My dumb brain…”
“My broken old body…”
“Stupid old me…”
I would never say that sort of thing about a friend or someone I care about. If my goal in life is to be warm and compassionate, why do I not express these things to myself? Why do I enable other people to judge me for society’s perceived imperfections by voicing, myself, that it’s okay?
I see this in a ton of my friends. We all care deeply about how we interact with one another, but when it comes to ourselves, my friends make all sorts of excuses…
“I’m hard on myself, but I also reward myself heavily…”
“It’s not about my looks, it’s about my confidence…”
“I just need to lose a few pounds/kilos to feel good about myself…”
All of these things are so superficial, so related to our external appearances, and rarely have anything to do with our internal health. Why can’t we be confident without being abusive to ourselves?
To answer these questions, I’ll save myself repeating what many other women have said and will just direct you to read Women Living Deliciously by Florence Given, because her book explains it beautifully and I can’t wait to get my hands on her first book too now that I’m almost done this one. I want to get everyone I know (any genders) a copy of this book and pin them down and force them to read it.
The short answer is just that we’re programmed this way, as women. Men too, but in a different way. Men have to perform patriarchal masculinity all the time, while women have to perform beauty all the time. Both are oppressive, brutal, unfair standards that no one should have do relate to. Both cripple us when it comes to finding comfort and happiness in life.
We do all of these things that aren’t inherently good for us, while neglecting to create any sort of integrated relationship with the only bodies we’ll ever have. That’s kinda messed up, don’t you think?
So What Needs to Change?
The difference now is that I listen to myself. I keep returning to my breath, making sure that my body is getting some oxygen, and then adjusting my posture or taking a break from what I'm doing to reset myself a bit. I'm trying to do more casual sun salutations.
Earlier, in the first week of January 2026, I settled in for my first hour-long workout in ages, and I swear my body was testing me.
“So, you say you’re going to listen to me now, eh?” she says dubiously.
“Yes, I promise,” I respond sincerely.
“Mmm, let’s see,” she says, retaining her skepticism.
From there on out, every single movement I tried from almost all of the above modalities threw me a curveball. I had to go easy on my spine extension doing oriental dance movements. I had to speed up the bottom half of my Jefferson curl because it got weak. I had to widen my grip on the stick doing shoulder passes because it was clicking and painful. I had to fully bail out of my final sun salutation because my shoulder strength went out completely.
In every single movement I tried, my body tested me to see if I would listen. Every single time, I had to admit my limits and not push too hard.
Every single day this year, I have done, at very least, one sun salutation. Even if I had to do it at 3 a.m. after having fallen asleep on the couch, I haven’t missed a day. I want to be reliable for my body. I want it to know that I’m going to help strengthen it and stretch it and realign it and heal it.
But it needs to be able to trust me, and I need to be trustworthy.
My body should be my best friend, and I’ve been an absolutely fucking terrible best friend to it. She’s a temple all right… abandoned, untended, unworshipped, as is the natural state of most temples in the modern world. And she deserves so much better.
I’m still not great at all this. I have to push for that one sun salutation every day, even after a month (fingers crossed — they say it takes 3 months to really form a habit). Sometimes, when I have energy and inspiration, I do other movements too, for about an hour. Sometimes I just do five sun salutations.
I don’t have high expectations here. If I was going to change overnight, I’d have done it over the past 7-8 years since I quit coaching CrossFit. Clearly, my change needs to be a bit slower.
It’s a relief, really. It takes me 2 hours to do a full primary series sequence, and frankly, in this 39-year-old body, I can’t handle that. So now, it’s all about exploring what I can handle, and working my way up from there, slow and steady.
So, I continue to be a work in progress, but this is how I started paying a bit more attention and using gentle movements to learn how to listen to my body and care more about what she has to say.
Stay balanced, my friends 💞🐻
Ngl it’s literally the same with our minds, tragically.
Did you know you can fix a torn ACL and other similar issues with massage? It just takes forever, and people want a quick fix, so they get surgery. But, surgery will never heal it properly, the way the slow, natural treatment will.
One time, I managed to crack about 7 vertebrae one after another, on the side. It was like someone pulled a rip cord, but it was my spine. Deeply unsettling to experience but felt really good after I got over the initial shock. Another time, I managed to completely realign my spine by fixating on relaxing individual muscles in the forward bend. Jefferson curls rule.
Sun salutations are my favorite! I didn’t do CrossFit but I did boot camp style hitt workouts and it worked really well. I have hyper mobility spectrum disorder and have been in pain most of my life so these things have been lifesavers!