BodyLogos Blog
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Redefining Strength
I want to change our perception of strength. Strength is the ability to meet resistance and influence an outcome without compromising ourselves. And we already have it.
Strength is not an attribute; it’s a state of being. Gladiators, bodybuilders, and football players demonstrate strength through brute force, sheer willpower, muscle mass, and relentless pursuit. But we’re also quick to identify dancers and martial artists as strong. Their medium taps into a sense of vulnerability, balance, alignment, controlled power, and grace—but no one can deny their strength. Strength may look different on each of us, but it is an inherent part of who we are.
You are not weak by nature; you are stronger than you think. Your strength is not something you need to kill yourself to gain—it is already within you, waiting to be excavated. The key is to stop chasing something you already have and tap into it, so you can manifest that strength in your everyday life.
Because we don’t think we’re strong, we approach resistance with the idea that we’re not enough. We throw everything we have at it and push past our physical, mental, and emotional limitations. We see strength as domination, but it’s not.
When you learn to listen to your body’s divine wisdom, you cultivate a sense of where your body is developing tension instead of standing in its strength. You end the vicious cycle of unrealistic expectations, injury, and self-criticism and learn how to consciously embrace responsible growth. You stop compartmentalizing your strength into emotional, physical, and mental pieces and operate from the strength of your being at all times.
You learn how to align yourself with gravity—instead of working against it—so you can channel your strength to meet life’s resistance. As you meet resistance with equal parts power and alignment, you transform tension into strength
As in the sword dance above, the power lies in bringing just the right amount of force—not too little and not too much. By meeting the sword’s weight, I meet gravity. I am tapped into a larger source of energy, free of tension, and discover a strength that is wholly and uniquely mine.
About Tammy Wise
Strengthen Your Will To Align
by Tammy WiseLao Tzu
People suffer in jobs they hate? Relationships fail because they don’t work through discontent? Poor posture develops into chronic musculoskeletal disorders? It’s easy for people to believe they don’t have the time or the right or the permission to act as they would if they could? These are a few examples of misalignment—deviating from your true nature—and it interferes with your ability to stand in your strength.
The result of misalignment is physical tension, emotional disinterest, and mental exhaustion. And when unchanged, perpetuates fear based beliefs and causes reactive behavior. It cripples your instinct to live in your strength! Misalignment is a mind, body, Spirit breakdown; just as, strength is a mind, body, Spirit aligning.
The act of aligning is the act of loving. Loving yourself enough to align within your physical body; loving yourself and another enough to align with the shared emotional needs of intimate relationships; or, loving your purpose enough to align with the mental demands of a workforce, ask for sensitivity and strength between mind and body, and self and other. The penalty of misalignment is the deterioration of one’s will.
In other words, the Will to Align is the devotion to invest your self to uphold the integrity of someone or something. The Will to Align is the courage to make love a verb.
Being devoted to a sound mind and body is exercising the confidence to make choices and craft a life simply because it contributes to its very nature—your nature–and not because it adheres to any external pressure to be or do anything else. Giving yourself permission to care for yourself connects you to your life purpose. Devoting yourself to personal integrity positions you to be in service to that purpose.
To develop self-devotion, recognize the importance of posture. How you stand on your feet, where your shoulder blades rest, how your spine adapts to sitting—physical subtleties, when aligned mindfully, are deliberately crafting the details of your life. This is ultimately how you place yourself in a life you want. Because how you do the smallest things are how you do the biggest things. Insist on integrity. Change your posture—change your life!
Enduring misalignment, no matter how small, in mind or body, becomes a way of surviving. And if you’re not careful, the accrued tension embodied from these compromises become preferable to the strength found in alignment. The unaddressed tension in the body keeps you in familiar patterns of poor posture that undermine the will’s devotion. Integrity is lost. The essence of you becomes buried under layers of disassociating.
Lao Tzu guides us by saying, “Give attention to the smallest things to simplify the complicated.” Let tension be your guide to recognize and reconcile the small misalignments and you will take ownership of your life and its condition. Any physical discomfort, mental confusion, or emotional anxiety, are signals that something is misaligned. Trust your senses, your thoughts can convince you it’s nothing!
Misaligning holding patterns are invisible to us until they cause some kind of rigid reaction, but they are not rock solid—the mind and body do let go when your response to tension is one of curiosity rather than dismissiveness. Curiosity meaning: to witness conditions and explore changes that unravel tension. Don’t wait till the elephant is the room is so big the condition is un-reconcilable.