Personalizing Movement + Effort, by Debbie Rosas.

There was a time when I believed effort was everything. Push harder. Reach farther. Prove myself through how much I could do and endure. I worked out like that. I worked like that. I lived like that. That’s until I began to study Aikido and work with energy and found that working hard no longer worked. Not only did it not work, but it was also not the body’s way.

Along the way of embodying this wisdom there were many moments of trial and error, each giving me the time I needed to personally trust ease over effort. I remember one pivotal moment, barefoot on the studio floor when I was overextending. Pushing past my body’s whisper. Not trusting ease, not sensing, but using more effort than what was needed.

My muscles clenched. My breath was ragged. My spine, instead of lengthening, was bracing. And for what? In that moment I heard the voice within me louder than ever say, “Over effort isn’t the way—why don’t you trust the body’s way?”  The eerie quiet surrounding this message seemed to make me listen and hear this message differently. I remember feeling embarrassed.

I became committed to changing and beginning a different kind of practice: the art of less—something deeper. I started studying effort not as force, but as felt sense of “Dynamic Ease.” Not as performance, but as something I witnessed in my Aikido teacher; embodied presence. Soon I began to fully develop what I teach; The Body’s Way and Your Body’s Way are not at war.

They are in an energetic, cooperative relationship, shared through sensation, by deep listening, guiding us toward what I called, Dynamic Ease, which can be sensed as having the perfect alignment of body and flow motion with energy. This flow-motion is not just a technique. It is the truth of how we are designed to move and function on and off movement space.

Not floppy. Not weak. Strong, but supple. Stable, and free with effort and ease. The first time I truly sensed this flow motion fluidity, not in metaphor, but in bone and breath, I remember spiraling my arms through air, my base steady, my core leading, and there it was: Dynamic Ease. Not floppy. Not weak. Strong, but supple. Stable, free with effort and ease, like water.

The sacred structure of the human body’s over 200 bones and 700 muscles thrive when this relationship flows, and the motion is systemic, not isolated. When body shapes unfold in space through horizontal ranges of motion and levels of high-middle-low vertical planes; our movement adapts. It is varied and our energy blends with what is inside of us and around us.

With Dynamic Ease, effort no longer meant exhaustion. It meant attention. It meant choice and measuring effort not with clocks or calories, but with my heart, breath, fascia and Aikido in The Nia Technique practice, while observing movement details and asking, “Was I gripping? Was I gasping? Was I blending? Was I listening? Was I working with my body and energy?”

As I taught myself to move vertically up and down or horizontally in and out with Dynamic Ease, I gained the skill in real time to move and measure ranges of motion by sensing ease and effort as communication, not condemnation. I found myself personalizing movement not just for preference, but for presence. I was honoring The Body’s Way and My Body’s Way.

It feels good to no longer move and push, but to move, sense and feel the power of right effort. And from that feeling, this is how I can be assured I will continue to learn, grow, transform and heal. This is the wisdom I teach and share with others. The more we learn to sense systemic flow, the more our body can teach us not just about movement, but about life.

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