Get back in shape.
Get your body back.
Get back to your routine.
Get back on track.
Get back to your old energy.
Get back to your practice.
Get back to normal.
The assumption underneath all of those phrases is easy to miss because they’re so common: somewhere behind you is a version of yourself that represents the correct destination.
You were there once.
Something happened.
Now your job is to return.
Sometimes that makes perfect sense.
If I sprain my ankle, I probably want to regain function I had before the injury. If an illness temporarily knocks out my stamina, I may want to rebuild it. Rehabilitation can absolutely involve restoring abilities we’ve lost.
But human beings aren’t reset buttons.
Sometimes something happens and we don’t go back.
We go forward differently.
And I think a wellness culture obsessed with restoration can make that reality much harder to live inside.
Back to Which Body, Exactly?
Whenever somebody talks about “getting their body back,” I want to ask:
Which one?
The body you had at twenty?
Thirty?
Before pregnancy?
Before surgery?
Before disability?
Before menopause?
Before the injury?
Before the medication?
Before the grief?
Before the job that changed your schedule?
Before the five years of life that happened between then and now?
Bodies don’t disappear and get replaced while we’re distracted.
The body you’re living in now is the body that lived through everything between then and now.
It didn’t go anywhere.
It changed.
That’s what living bodies do.
And yet wellness marketing is incredibly good at taking an earlier version of a body and turning it into both a product and a promise.
Remember when you looked like this?
Remember when you had this much energy?
Remember when these clothes fit?
Remember when you could do this?
Buy the program.
Take the class.
Follow the plan.
Commit to the challenge.
Do the work.
We’ll help you get back.
Back becomes a sales pitch.
And nostalgia is extremely marketable.
“Normal” Is Often Just a Date on the Calendar
We do something similar with normal.
I want to feel normal again.
I want my normal life back.
I want my body back to normal.
That’s understandable, especially after something disruptive.
There are times when I desperately miss an earlier baseline.
But normal can become slippery.
Sometimes what we call normal really means:
the last version of my life I understood.
It was familiar.
I knew the rules.
I knew what my body could do.
I knew how much energy I had.
I knew what a day looked like.
Then something changed, and suddenly all the measurements were wrong.
That’s disorienting.
Of course we want familiarity back.
But familiarity and health aren’t always the same thing.
Familiarity and sustainability aren’t always the same thing.
Familiarity and safety aren’t always the same thing.
Sometimes our old normal included things we had become very good at enduring.
Sometimes it included a pace we could technically maintain but shouldn’t have needed to.
Sometimes we don’t realize that until the old normal becomes unavailable.
Yoga Can Become Another Way to Chase the Past
This can happen very quietly on the mat.
You remember what your practice used to look like.
So you begin treating that practice as the destination.
Maybe you once practiced five days a week.
Now you’re trying to get back to five.
Maybe you once practiced vigorous flows.
Now you’re trying to build yourself back up to them.
Maybe you once had a particular range of motion.
Now every practice becomes a measurement of how close you are to recovering it.
Maybe you used to move through class without much