3 July 2025
I’ve made an observation over the past few months. Traditional news sources and social media have been broadcasting impending threats and bad to worse news (here in the U.S.) In response to all the doom and gloom, I might expect a parade of overwhelmed and hopeless clients moving listlessly through my clinic door. While I am in the business of providing support for weary bodies or battered spirits, I’m noticing something a little different. What I see emerging is the ability to meet current day challenges with flexibility of spirit and a reconnection to body wisdom. Instead of utter collapse, a dynamic response – a pivot has become available to some of us.
This coincides with my own trajectory this spring of making plans, and watching them wash away with the tide. I plan a weekend away, and an unavoidable conflict arises to make me reschedule. The trip weekend arrives and the rain is so unrelenting that the plans must be changed once again. I watched 12 consecutive rainy Saturdays pass from March to mid-June. Surely by July we would be blessed with a solid dry weekend for the start of my camping and backpacking season. But alas, no. And this is where pivots came to mind as a practical strategy, but also a component of healing.
Pivot was something I learned first in dance classes and later while playing sports. It is a very physical therapy-ish type of word. It implies agility, coordination and even power. However, the pivot I’m speaking of has its claws (think kitty cat meow claws, not wild predator rawr claws) in other layers of our somatic selves. The pivot moves from “this is how it was supposed to be,” to “what is actually happening in front of me right now?” The crux of an effective pivot seems to be two-fold. First, acknowledging the feelings surrounding the change, doing any assessment of how big of an obstacle this will be. I was going to run straight through the middle of this trail, but now I see a gigantic mud puddle in my path, versus I was going to run this whole trail this morning but it is closed one mile in for forest restoration…
Second, we are tuning into other options, and staying open to new experiences that arise – aka when one door closes, another one usually opens. I’m going to jump the puddle, run around it or I guess I need to go on another adventure today to find a new trail altogether. (One note about the fine line between this process, and denial or bypassing – acknowledging the reality and the discomfort don’t have to be glossed over in order to effectively pivot. We have time for both.)
For me, this looks like bailing on a day and night of hiking and camping when we expect 12 hours of rain. Maybe I will take a long drive and deep dive into a good podcast instead. It’s a bummer to miss out, or cancel fun things and it’s okay to feel the disappointment. Sometimes the ability to change it up, and go with what is right there in front of us in the moment can yield new and magical experiences.
So how does this relate to bodywork? For most of my career I’ve been invited to support people who face disappointment – structurally and physiologically. Sometimes it is due to acute injury, a fall, an accident, or unexpected surgery. Other times it is more profound, a cancer diagnosis, degenerative disease process, or chronic pain.
Different approaches are applied during a course of physical rehabilitation. One path is “fixing the issue.” I formerly used the wording taught to me in PT school which is to say, we’ll bring you back to your prior level of function. When we treat a whole person, I no longer understand what that phrasing means (outside a parameter for health insurance to control one’s reimbursement.) We don’t return to the prior versions of ourselves. But we can target the best case scenario – a newer, post-event, version of ourselves. The other path is one that is inclusive of the new obstacle (in terms of a degenerative process like aging, or Parkinson’s Disease) where your baseline or “prior level” is a moving target and we work together to accommodate this condition while still aiming for the highest possible quality of living.
We hold the potential of health and healing when we encompass the phases of a good pivot. This applies within the confines of one session, or along the course of a longer plan for recovery. We can stay present with discomfort (with some hand-holding as needed) and name the sensations, the mislanded expectations (how it was supposed to be) and let that move through us. And we can stay in a place of possibility given the reality of our structural bones and blood, letting new experiences and ability emerge in real time.
And if it is helpful to remember, we are born and develop under gravitation forces and mechanical stresses – learning always from moment to moment to adapt. Connecting to our bodies, feeling supported and adaptable is an underrated way to promote enormous storehouses of health.
So I’ve been quietly asking myself, how well are you able to pivot around this situation? And sometimes that answer is – not at all, I just need to take a pause. More on that to come… In the meantime I’m here for sessions – to work on just that one thing, or to plan with you a longer arc of wellness or healing, for whatever surprises might be landing on your path.
