BodyLogos Blog

Unseen Things that Collapse Your Chest

Common Loon Opens the Silver Lining of its Heart

The heart expresses its emotions through the characteristics of your chest muscles. Like a looking glass, everything from your joy to sorrow is visible through this physical transparency.

When you cry sad tears your chest muscles collapse inward into the protection of your back. But when you cry tears of joy your chest muscles bounce outward into the world with each gasp.

While the expression of any real raw emotion is essential to experience your life fully; resilience, toward balance, is also essential to your well-being.

Sadness, by the way, is not the only thing that crushes your heart. Doubt, uncertainty and shame also shut down, what I call, your Smile of Truth. This smile across your chest embody’s more than joy, it expresses your self-worth, assurance and confidence.

To smile at the world through an open curiosity of your chest, even when it seems that the world has let you down, is to remember the silver lining. The gift left in the wake of discouragement.

Believing that the Universe is on your side is the opening that reveals your silver linings.

Welcome to the BodyLogos blog. Here’s where you’ll get your dose of alignment and balance with grace. (Sign up here to join 1,000 other blog subscribers.)

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

Tammy Wise is a widely respected mind-body fitness expert based out of New York City, owner of BodyLogos, Inc. author of The Art of Strength: Sculpt the Body ~ Train the Mind. A former Broadway dancer turned Tao minister, Tammy was voted the Best of Fitness by Time Out New York and has appeared in Martha Stewart’s Whole Living magazine, New York Magazine, Natural Health, Shape, and Thrive Global. She’s a Transformational Authors Contest Winner and regular contributor to Honeysuckle magazine and Medium. Visit her at bodylogos.com.