The only movement that drains you without your permission

It starts before you even sit down.

Applications are open for Posture in Motion.

A small-group posture and somatic practice for people who want to feel more at home in their body, move with more ease, and begin shifting the patterns that keep them tense, braced, or in pain. Apply here: https://hedishah.com/posture-in-motion/

You sit down to write an email.

Within seconds: shoulders tense, jaw clenched, face serious, fingers gripping the mouse like it might run away.

Maybe you even hold your breath a little. For some of you, this started hours before this moment, just from thinking about it.

And yet you could write the exact same email without any of that. The words on the screen weigh nothing. So what is all that extra effort doing there?

That extra effort has a name. Moshe Feldenkrais called it parasitic movement: unnecessary, habitual muscular effort that tags along with an intended action and quietly drains you. Extra tension that does nothing for the task at hand.

Now raise the stakes a little. Maybe you’ve been procrastinating on this email for days, telling yourself you should have sent it already. Maybe it’s an email where you set a boundary or say no. Maybe you’re reaching out about an opportunity and you catch yourself rewriting every sentence, putting in all this extra effort just to make sure they like you. Notice that nothing about the task changed. Everything about how you’re carrying it did.

This applies to so many other scenarios in life.

As a society, we’ve been conditioned to believe that the more effort we put into something, the more valuable it is (and the more worthy we are). We learn this early: who do I need to become to be loved, seen, safe, valued, and, basically, to belong? You can read more on this ↓

My unconditioning work, personally and with clients, has been about unlearning the layers that answer that question for us. Layer by layer: the brace in the shoulders that says “take me seriously.” The softened voice that says “don’t take up too much space.” The over-efforting that says “see how hard I’m trying.” Each one made sense once. Each one kept us safe, liked, or included. This is what I like to call the domestication process, and it’s deeply connected to survival. You can learn more on this here ↓

With every extra parasitic movement, our capacity to do the same task from our sovereign self decreases because our inner resources get spent on things that don’t actually help. We can even end up staying busy doing things we don’t want, because the goal is no longer to get what we want. It’s to prove we’re trying hard enough.

Over time, it drains our potency and energy. And when we’re less connected to our Self, what happens? More anxiety. More uncertainty. Feeling incapable, like we’re not enough. I could go on.

We all have moments where we have an idea, act on it right away, and then boom, there’s deep satisfaction. There’s freedom in it. Sometimes we even see how it moves other people, too.

Go back to the email example: if you focused only on writing the email (without the extra, unnecessary effort, physically or emotionally), how would you do it?

People experience the answer to this question differently.

For me, I feel: I just am.

Others might feel relaxed, content, at ease. Pick yours.

In Posture in Motion, one of the things we go deep into is this topic: understanding our conditioning, noticing our parasitic movements (especially the ones we use to justify our belonging), and how they impact our posture.

Applications are open here: https://hedishah.com/posture-in-motion/

Thank you for joining me on the path of unconditioning,

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Hedi Shah
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👁️ Mindfulness Teacher & Bodyworker
🐉 Nervous system regulation, breathwork, and posture-focused strength training to target the cause of what keeps you stuck and in pain, not just symptoms.

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