Dr. Jeffrey Gladden uses skiing as a metaphor for nervous system control: keep your upper body still and calm while your lower body handles obstacles. He calls this "meditation in motion," a state where you stay composed while adapting fluidly to whatever comes.
And so the analogy that I've started using is that of a skier. I'm a snowboarder myself, but I use the analogy of a skier. And if you see, and everybody's watched people ski, right? And so if you see somebody that's really good, a really good skier, and you see them going down a, like a mogully thing, or they're going through the trees or whatever, one thing you notice about them is that their upper body never moves, right? Their shoulders are pointed down the fall line and their face is heading down the fall line and their lower body is doing this, right? right? It's going back and forth and moving back and forth, you know, hitting this mogul and jumping to that and popping here. But the upper body is completely still. Yeah, that is what, for me, that is what good neurological function looks like, where you're actually able to navigate the vicissitudes of life, right? All the, all the changes of life, if you will, and you're able to navigate that, but you're, but you're calm and relaxed. You're in that, you're in that state of flow, and it's, it's almost meditation in motion, meditation in action now. And You're allowing what needs to happen to happen to deal with it, right? Like, I need to go here, I need to go there, I need to do that, I need to answer this, whatever it is. So the lower body's doing the work, but the nervous system is really calm and relaxed and in that flow state.
