Discovering Joy Through Embodied Exercise

The best path to uncover our true desires lies in the body. Our embodied experience of how goals and activities feel to pursue can highlight where there’s personal resonance.

The most sustainable and potent motivation is experiencing joy and curiosity within an activity. Cultivate joy for exercise and fascination with fitness to remove the need for constant external motivation.

Embodiment will help you become deeply rooted within yourself with confidence, and it will become the foundation for how you move through your days.

At the core of Intuitive Fitness is a nudge toward intrinsic motivation where we are driven by the satisfaction of doing an activity instead of a specific outcome.

If we can’t escape it, perhaps we can use memetic desire to our benefit. Maybe by modeling intuitive fitness, we can inspire each other to desire our own paths. At the least, we can create a little safe haven for people interested in embracing exercise from within.

Embodiment, as described by psychologist and bestselling author Peter Levine, PhD, in his seminal work In An Unspoken Voice, “is about gaining, through the vehicle of awareness, the capacity to feel the ambient physical sensations of unfettered energy and aliveness as they pulse through our bodies.

Gaining a deeper understanding of what we want is crucial to embracing exercise in an enjoyable and effective way. It’s hard to enjoy exercise if there’s something we truly want from it and we’re not progressing toward it. Making sustained progress is difficult if we haven’t clarified what we’re aiming for.