The Joy of Movement with Kelly McGonigal: PYP 364

Kelly McGonigal is one of my favorite science/personal-development/psychology teachers and writers. And in a testament to her versatility and breadth of interests, her print books are in three different sections of my library: habits and behavioral science (The Willpower Instinct);  stress (The Upside of Stress); and exercise/movement (The Joy of Movement, her latest work.) Her audio course, The Science of Self-Compassion, is both a scientific tour de force and a big-hearted hug from a caring friend.

She manages a rare writerly and scholarly trick: to adhere to the evidence while letting her own humanity flow through every page.

Which is just to say, I had to deal with major Fanboy energy when I connected with her via Skype.

Her latest book, The Joy of Movement, is both a work of science and a love letter to the human body/spirit.

I admit, when I ordered it, I thought I knew what I was going to read: a well-researched, engaging tale of how exercise improves our mood and our brain functioning. I was delighted to be surprised by a treasure trove of ideas and philosophies that go far beyond the biochemistry of mood and movement.

One of my favorite chapters, “Collective Joy,”  is a great example of the Above and Beyond that McGonigal pursues in her exploration of the benefits of movement. Turns out that when we move as a collective (dance class, group yoga, New Zealand's pre-rugby Haka, bouncing up and down at a night club), we bond with the strangers with whom we're moving. A famous experiment, the Rubber Arm Illusion, highlights what's happening: our brains widen the part of the world that we define as “us” to include those other bodies.

The subtitle of The Joy of Movement is “How Exercise Helps Us Find Happiness, Hope, Connection, and Courage.”

Really, it's a book about becoming fully human.

A book about the unnaturalness of not moving; of sedentarism; of digital and virtual reality superseding the felt and lived experience of our flesh; of thinking that “exercise” is an unpleasant obligation or some weight loss gimmick.

McGonigal couldn't have been more open or generous during our conversation. We reminisced about one of our favorite yoga videos, Erich Schiffman's classic Ali McGraw: Yoga Mind and Body (Schiffman teaches; the actor follows). She may have given me a mandate to write a book about the Joy of Martial Arts, which I sorta complained was missing from her book