Get Your Move On!

Your nervous system needs proof of freedom, not just the concept.

Think about this for a moment.

Notice your shoulders right now. Are they dropped or are they up near your ears? Notice your jaw — clenched or loose? Your breath — are you actually breathing, or are you managing it?

Most people reading this just realized their shoulders were up.

That is data. That is your body trying to tell you something it has been trying to tell you for a long time.

This is what I want to talk about today.

The Freedom That Never Lands

There is a kind of freedom we talk about in spiritual communities that stays entirely in the head. We can name it. We can preach it. We can feel the emotional resonance of it when the music is right and the room is right and the moment is charged.

And then we walk out of the room and the shoulders are right back up.

Because the freedom never landed in the body.

This is the piece that gets skipped in so much spiritual work. Not the theology. Not the ideas. Not even the emotional release on a Sunday morning. But the embodied, felt-in-the-tissue truth of what it actually means to live free.

Here is what I have come to believe: Your body is not where freedom goes to die. It is where freedom learns to live.

What the Body Carries

I have watched sincere, intelligent people do the work — pray through it, talk through it, think through it — and still walk out of the room carrying exactly what they walked in with. Smart people. People who meant every word. The mind said it was done. The body was still holding on.

The grief that never completed. The fear that got wired in before you had understood it. The shame that lives in the posture — the shoulders that fold inward, the voice that gets smaller, the way you stop taking up your full space when you walk into a room.

None of that is stored in the thinking mind. It is stored in the tissue. In the breath pattern. In the muscle memory of years of bracing against something.

You can have the insight — and the insight is real, and it matters — and still walk back into the same life because your body has not received permission to let it go.

This is not a spiritual failure. This is how the human being was built. The nervous system stores what the mind could not finish processing. It holds it there. Waiting.

And here is the thing about waiting: the body is patient in a way the mind is not. It will wait years. Decades. It will carry what you gave it and hold it intact until something finally gives it permission to release.

Movement is one of the primary ways that permission gets granted.

The Matrix Is Physical Too

In Breaking Your Matrix, I write about the agreements that run us from below the surface. The things coded in so early and held so long that they feel like facts rather than beliefs. The network of default response and inherited reaction that keeps you cycling through the same patterns even when you know better.

That matrix does not just live in the mind.

It lives in the body.

It lives in how you move through a conflict. Whether your chest opens or closes. Whether you freeze or push forward. Whether you expand when you walk into a room or immediately start making yourself smaller.

The agreements that hold the matrix together are physical agreements. They are stored in the body as surely as they are stored in thought. Which means breaking them has to include the body — not just new ideas, but new signals, new permission, new proof that something has actually changed.

What Letting Go Actually Looks Like

I wrote something in Free From Religion that keeps coming back to me when I think about this:

“Leaves in autumn, released into the wind, carried into places you may never see.”

I wrote that about surrender. About the kind of letting go that does not require a destination.

But I also read it now as a picture of what the body does when you finally stop gripping.

A leaf does not release by deciding to release. It releases when the grip loosens. When the season shifts in the root of the thing.

Your nervous system needs proof of freedom, not just the concept of it. You can tell yourself “I am releasing this” while sitting in the same posture, with the same held breath, bracing in the same way you have always braced — and the body has no evidence for that claim. Nothing has changed in the body. It is still doing what it learned to do.

But move? Walk without a destination. Shake until something loosens. Let your body respond to music without a monitor in your head grading the response. Breathe deeper than you normally allow yourself?

That is a new signal. That is the nervous system receiving something different.

That is the body being given permission to finish what the mind has already agreed to.

What Religion Got Wrong About the Body

Here is just one thing I believe the religion that I pastored in got wrong about the body. I say this with grief, not accusation, because I lived inside this teaching for a long time. Many of you reading this did too.

The message — not always spoken directly, but always present — was that the body is suspect. The body wants things. The body feels things. The body is at war with the spirit and has to be kept in line.

And so we learned to live from the neck up.

We learned to distrust the gut. To override the physical signal in favor of the doctrinal conclusion. Feeling something strongly in the body was probably just the flesh acting up — weakness, appetite, emotion getting in the way of clear thinking and right living.

I wrote in Free From Religion:

“Religion did not begin as a cage. It became one.”

One of the bars of that cage was this: the body is the lesser thing. The spiritual person disciplines the body, restrains the body, rises above the body. Worship with your mind. Pray with your theology intact. Keep the physical impulse in its place.

And then we wondered why the freedom we kept reading about did not land anywhere real. Why the peace we preached about was not something we could actually feel. Why so many people in those rooms were exhausted and brittle and quietly desperate even while saying the right words.

You cannot live from the neck up and be whole. That is not a design flaw. That is a rejection of the design.

This Is Not About Fitness

I want to be clear that I am not talking about fitness.

The culture has already turned the body into another performance metric. Another thing you are not doing well enough. Another project to optimize on the way to becoming a better version of yourself.

That is not this.

This is about giving the body permission to be part of your healing — not as a machine to be upgraded, but as the living ground of your actual experience.

Some of what you are carrying has been carried so long you have forgotten it is not yours. It settled into the muscles when you were twelve. It tightened in the chest the first time someone important told you something false about who you were. It went into the jaw, the hips, the shoulders.

The mind can name it. The mind can even forgive it.

The body has to release it.

That release does not happen through more effort. It happens through something more like permission. You give the body permission to move, to shake loose what has been gripping, to complete what the nervous system started and never got to finish.

The Last Mile

The whole work of getting free — of breaking the agreements that keep you small, of living from the truth of who you are rather than the performance of it — that work is not finished until it gets into the body.

This is the last mile. This is where the abstractions have to become something lived.

Freedom that stays in the head is a beautiful idea waiting to become a life.

Rising — the real kind, the kind that holds up on a Thursday when there is no music and no room full of people and no momentum — rises from the body too.

Start Here This Week

You do not need a program. You do not need a plan.

You need to give your body permission to move today.

Walk somewhere without a destination. Put on music and let your body respond without grading the response. Stand outside and breathe deeper than you usually allow yourself to breathe. Shake out your hands. Press your feet into the ground.

Up until about 2 years ago I would constantly say, “I don’t dance.” Well, I stopped saying that, and now I love to dance, and I don’t care what I look like. I just love to move! I didn’t start dancing until I stopped saying those words. I encourage you to set yourself free to move, in whatever way you prefer!

You are not doing this to get fit. You are doing this to let something move that has been stopped.

The energy that is stuck in you right now — the low-level tension, the grief that has nowhere to go, the tiredness that sleep keeps not fixing — it is waiting for a door… So move!

Movement is one of the doors.

Rise includes the body.

Freedom lives here too.

~Gil

Rise without End. Live without Limits.