Garden Without the Groan
If you are a gardener, I would hedge a bet that your garden is in full, glorious chaos right now!🌻
July is when all that spring hopefulness comes bursting into bloom… and with it, this may also be a time when your body is feeling every hour spent bending, kneeling hauling and reaching among garden growth or flowerbeds.
If you've ever stood up with an involuntary groan after a happy afternoon of weeding, then this blog's for you!
The good news is that a few small shifts in how we move can make all the difference between a garden that nourishes us and a garden that leaves us aching.
So much of the strain we feel in the garden comes not from the work itself, but from the way we brace through it…
bending from the back instead of the hips,
holding our breath as we lift,
locking everything up as we change levels.
Here's a gentle reframe… let your breath lead the movement.
Practice these techniques instead:
Start with standing at your flower bed or garden patch and take a deep breath in.
As you exhale lower and bend toward the area you are about to weed, allowing your hips, knees, and back share the work together rather than asking your low back to do it all alone.
Take another deep inhale.
Exhale as you rise from weeding, allowing the exhale to lift you.
Best rule of thumb… when shifting from kneeling to standing, pause for one conscious breath before you move and move on the exhale rather than springing up out of habit.
Remembering to practice these small shifts will allow you to trade bracing for breathing… and your body will thank you for it.
This, sweet friend, is the very heart of Functional Healing. There's no separate workout to schedule, no routine to squeeze into your busy summer. It's simply a more conscious way of doing the things you already love to do.
The garden becomes your practice. Every bend, every lift, every level-change is an invitation to align breath with movement and let your breath work with your body instead of against it.
If you'd love to go deeper on the how ~ how to bend, lift, kneel, and change levels in a way that protects and supports you ~ then Functional Healing is the course for you! These are the exact learnings we cover in our Functional Healing online course.
Additionally, we have created a Functional Healing Workbook which can be used a stand-alone resource or as a paperback companion to the online course. The workbook details modules 1-4 of our online course.
For more information on either of these offerings, check the links below:
Functional Healing Online Course
That said, you can begin this very afternoon, right there among your tomatoes and petunias. Breathe, observe, apply, love… and garden on, one sweet breath at a time🌱
Love,
