My Delicate Constitution
As I began incorporating Ayurveda into my life, I had a profound realization about my health: I’m frail.
To those who know me and this blog, it might sound strange that I hadn’t realized this before. For two-and-a-half years, I’d been grappling with ulcerative colitis, a serious gut disease. And by the time I learned about Ayurveda, I was recovering from a months-long crisis that had landed me in the hospital and endangered my life.
But I had always seen myself as robust, tough, and strong. This was part of my identity, and applying the word frail to myself was a revelation.
It came when I read the following passage in Claudia Welch’s Balance Your Hormones, Balance Your Life:
If a woman has a lot of stress or multitasking in her daily life, or a very slender or delicate constitution or tends to fear and anxiety, she likely needs to protect her yin. Therefore, a gentler form of exercise would be most beneficial. …Gentler forms of exercise include… Brisk walks, gentle hikes, bike rides, tai chi, or qi gong for 30 minutes daily, exchanging 5 to 10 minutes of any of those exercises with a gentle form of yoga 3 to 7 times a week, to maintain flexibility.
Reading those words, I was amazed at how the first sentence described me to a tee. I was a very slender woman who tended to anxiety and had a lot of stress and multitasking in my life.
But I had never before thought of myself as having a “delicate constitution.” And I was also struck by the way I hadn’t followed any of Welch’s precepts about exercise. True to my persona as an ambitious young American woman, I’d never tailored my efforts at fitness to my individual body. I had always just tried to do the sports and exercises my athletic peers were doing.
I had often jogged—until my knee pain became so bad that I stopped. I had played ultimate frisbee, which involved a lot of sprinting, till my knees made me quit that, too. I had lugged heavy equipment around for field-based, outdoor environmental science jobs, figuring I could handle the strain if others could.
I’d assumed I could keep up with my peers and had never seen my slender frame as a liability. Whatever I lacked in muscle I figured I could make up in grit. It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog, right?
But reading Welch’s words, it dawned on me that I might have been approaching exercise wrong all my life. In pushing myself so often, and thinking in one-size-fits-all terms, I had ignored my own body. A new, surprising thought now arose: I have a frail constitution.
It was such a revelation that I whispered it aloud to myself.
“Ohhh,” I breathed. “I’m frail.”
I had never considered myself frail before. But the thought was now washing over me in a wave of recognition, and I reeled with its impact. This was the explanation for so much.
Yes, I had often felt vibrant and healthy, but the fact was, I was much thinner than most others around me, and my body had certain sensitivities that other, more robust bodies didn’t. I had ulcerative colitis as well as various other autoimmune conditions. My body had been fraying at the seams for years under all the strain I was putting it through. I just hadn’t been paying attention till recently.
Looking back, I wondered what harm I had done by refusing to even consider that I might be delicate. I had always thought of myself as steely and spunky. Frail was the opposite of how I wanted to see myself or to be seen.
If what matters is “the size of the fight in the dog,” then the unfortunate corollary is that if a “dog” can’t overcome an obstacle, it just lacks grit. A weak person lacks character. Her weakness is her fault.
But what if I just accepted that I’d been born into a body that wasn’t the strongest and toughest, and that I couldn’t always do as much as someone who was stouter?
To my surprise, the thought was not only a relief—it was bizarrely empowering.
Allowing the possibility that I, Katie, might be frail, my worldview subtly shifted. I had always tried to be a protector of those weaker than myself—but if I was frail, then perhaps I could build a life where I protected myself.
By placing myself into this category, I could do away with internal debates about how much to push myself. The answer was generally that I needed to be conservative—to err on the side of caution. I wouldn’t want someone else to damage her delicate body by trying to keep up. I shouldn’t ask that of myself, either.
I’d been thinking of tai chi and my daily walks as a stop-gap after my big health crisis. I had figured I’d do these gentle exercises till I built back up to more intensity, like zumba or the high-intensity interval workouts my husband Ron often did.
But perhaps tai chi, yoga, and daily walks should remain at the core of my own exercise from here on, I thought. Maybe they were what my own body was geared for. My somewhat frailer body.
Learning to Move “From the Inside”
In my tai chi classes, the teacher sometimes talked about moving at only seventy percent of what was possible. When extending an arm, she said to stretch it to just seventy percent, not moving it as far out as it could possibly reach. Rolling our shoulders to warm up, too, we should only do seventy percent of what we could do.
I had to frequently check myself, because my instinct was always to try hard and be perfect, or better than perfect.
I liked to do everything—exercise, work—at one hundred percent or better. That instinct was returning now as my energy slowly rebuilt after my crisis.
But I discovered that if I only raised my shoulders seventy percent of the way to my ears, my bones didn’t crunch the way they normally did. And I got a gentler stretch, which in tai chi was actually considered superior to a bigger stretch, because it didn’t involve strain. The point was not to push to our very limits, but to move “from the inside,” using our muscles and our qi.
Thinking of myself as delicate or frail helped me apply this mentality to other movements as well.
On my daily walk, I had recently begun climbing the steepest hills in my neighborhood—hills I’d once done with ease. I’d had to build up to them, since I could barely walk to the bathroom when I’d first emerged from the hospital.
I noticed that my knees often started hurting as I began the steep climb. I was still weak, and was thus unable to push through pain like I once had. Instead of pushing through, I had to slow to a snail’s pace or stop altogether and turn around.
And the first couple times I did this, I realized this knee pain wasn’t unfamiliar. In the past, I’d had it countless times on these hills, but I’d ignored it and had just kept walking.
I was more present with the pain now. Ayurveda and mindfulness were teaching me to notice my body’s sensations. And now that it had occurred to me that I might be frail, I saw the pain as something to pay attention to even more. Knee pain was a signal not to push harder like I once had, but to check myself: Was it really best to do this hill today? Did my muscles need to rest? What if I moved slower?
I found that usually, if I slowed down, I could activate my leg muscles and move “from the inside,” like in tai chi—relying on muscles rather than joints. This took the weight off my knee joints so I could still make my way up, albeit much more slowly.
This new way of moving made me wonder whether the unexplained, chronic knee pain that had plagued me since my early twenties was really so unexplainable. Knee pain had made me quit sports, but no doctor or physical therapist had ever given me a good explanation for why it was happening.
When I had described my physical activities to doctors and physical therapists, they, like me, had seen nothing wrong with it. Jogging and ultimate frisbee were things people my age often did. Sometimes the pain was diagnosed as patella-femoral syndrome, a common problem with athletes, but even after rehab, it kept returning.
I now felt that my practitioners and I had overlooked the specifics of my particular body. I was unusually slender. Maybe my thinner muscles simply couldn’t do as much, for as long, as others’. Perhaps the mystery had really been staring us in the face: this was an overuse injury. My muscles had given out and had given my knee joints too much of a burden.
As I learned to move more mindfully, I often felt as though I’d been hollowed out by my crisis and was now rebuilding my whole body “from the inside.” It seemed like before my crisis, something about my physical being had been weak, like my body had been a wooden pillar full of hidden termite holes.
All my life, I had unconsciously learned to use my alignment and bone structure to get through strenuous activities, making up for the natural slimness of my muscles—but that had put too much pressure on my joints. Now, I was filling my core and limbs back in with substance. I was no longer allowing my body to do more than my muscles could do.
Going forward, I sensed that even as a person with a somewhat delicate body, I might eventually become physically stronger than I’d ever really been in my life. Now I was no longer “cheating” and wearing down my joints. I was instead strengthening my muscles.
When I admitted my frailty to myself, it wiped away any shame I might have felt about it before. If I was just naturally, physically frail, then that wasn’t my fault. It had nothing to do with weakness of character.
The strongest thing I could do, in fact, was to know my own limitations. That would protect me from injury and illness and help me be as strong as I could be.
