Where Memory Meets Momentum
May 2026 • Strength
Since I was two years old, my body has been in motion.
Not as exercise. Not as discipline. As joy.
My mother saw me dancing around the house - the way some children run, the way some children climb - and understood something before I had language for it. She put me in dance classes. And from that moment, the body became my first home, my first language, my first form of intelligence.
Ballet gave me posture before I knew what posture meant. It gave me breath before I studied breathwork. It gave me muscle memory, spatial awareness, the ability to tell my body what to do and have it listen - all before I was old enough to understand what any of that would one day mean for my life as a leader, a healer, a practitioner.
Young Kwayera in Hawaii
But here is what I want to say clearly:
I never thought about fitness once. Not for decades. I simply loved to move - and strength was what happened as a result.
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We are taught to manage the body. To discipline it. To punish it when it does not meet a standard or reward it when it does. We are taught that fitness is something you go somewhere to achieve - a gym, a program, a before-and-after photo.
The ancients did not have this problem. Their bodies were their tools, their temples, their instruments of survival and ceremony. They moved because life required it. They lifted, carried, climbed, danced, drummed. They planted and harvested. They walked for miles in ways that modern research is only now confirming built cognitive resilience, bone density, and neurological health that we struggle to replicate on machines.
The body was never separate from the mind. It was never separate from the spirit. It was the whole thing - ancient technology, designed for a life of purposeful movement.
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We did not lose our fitness. We lost our relationship with movement as a way of being. |
I will be honest about my own journey here, because I think it matters.
For most of my adult life - through professional dance, through raising children, through founding and building Ifetayo Cultural Arts Academy, through decades of leading organizations and communities - my body stayed relatively fit because my life demanded movement. Dance classes, rehearsals, carrying, building, doing. Fitness was still an output of living fully, not a goal in itself.
I resisted the gym for years. Not lazily - philosophically. I could not understand why we would go into a room and lift things repetitively when we could dance, or do yoga, or play a sport, or do something that fed the soul while it worked the body. I wanted community. I wanted creativity. I wanted to sweat as a byproduct of doing something I loved.
Community classes became my answer - spin, yoga, CrossFit, anything alive with other people moving toward something together. That was enough for a long time.
And then my body began to change. The way all bodies do, across time - not suddenly, but gradually, in ways that a person who has always known their body cannot miss. I noticed a woman online - a vegan sister, well into her seventies, strong and radiant in a way that stopped me every time I saw her. I would tell people: that is going to be me. In my seventies. In my eighties.
I kept saying it. Until one day, I understood that saying it and becoming it required something more specific from me right now.
Then COVID came.
The stillness. The grief. The cooking of everything - the beautiful, abundant, nourishing cooking that became its own kind of coping. I gained fifty pounds. And while many people loved how I looked - and I understand that, culturally, that fullness carries its own beauty - I could feel what it was costing me.
Climbing stairs and feeling my breath leave before I reached the top. Standing at a podium to speak and feeling my belly press against my dress. Not shame - awareness. My body talking to me in a language I had always known how to hear.
I was not well in the way I know wellness to feel. And I have spent too many years teaching others what wellness actually is to pretend otherwise.
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The body speaks. We have simply been trained to override what it is saying. |
My coach introduced me to the figure fitness competition category.
My first response was resistance. These women look too small, I told her. That is not my body type. That is not my culture's relationship with strength.
She was patient. She said: this is exactly your body type.
I did not believe her for months.
The diet felt, at first, like a loss of freedom. The measuring, the protein counts, the prescribed meals that seemed to leave no room for the ancestral relationship with food I had cultivated over decades - the turmeric and ginger, the garlic, the flax and chia, the deep water, the things my grandmothers knew without a label. I had to learn, slowly, that these two things were not opposites. That ancestral food wisdom and athletic nutritional science could sit at the same table.
What felt like restriction eventually became liberation. The cage turned out to be a key.
And the free weights - the floor I had avoided for years, always staying with the machines, always staying comfortable - became the place where the real conversation with my body resumed.
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A pull-up. Then another. A push-up. Then ten. Not missing a day. The promise kept - not to a program, but to myself. |
Here is what the science is now confirming - what the body has always known:
We are living inside a chemical environment our ancestors never faced. Microplastics - the fragments of synthetic materials now present in our water, our food, our air, our garments - have been found by researchers to penetrate the blood-brain barrier, the brain's most protective defense. Once inside, they trigger inflammation, disrupt neural communication, and have been linked to cognitive decline, anxiety, and memory disruption.
One neuroscientist studying these effects said she was genuinely surprised: the blood-brain barrier is supposed to be nearly impenetrable. A protection against viruses and bacteria. And yet these particles were found deep in brain tissue.
Our brains are under siege from the inside.
And resistance training - the very thing I resisted for years - is one of the most powerful counterforces available to us. Research published in 2025 shows that resistance training significantly enhances cognitive control, working memory, and executive function in older adults. Neuroimaging studies confirm it actually increases cortical thickness in the hippocampus - the brain's memory center. It stimulates the production of brain-derived neurotrophic factor, the protein that builds and sustains neurons. It reduces the inflammatory markers that microplastics and modern living are generating in our bodies.
The ancients moved because life required it. We now know that movement is also what protects the mind. The body and the brain were never separate systems. They were always one.
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To learn something new - to challenge the body in ways it has not been challenged - is how the brain stays alive. This is not metaphor. This is neuroscience confirming what indigenous wisdom has always practiced. |
May is my birth month.
Every year in May I ask myself: have you gotten better? And I do not mean smaller. I do not mean quieter. I do not mean more palatable to a world that has never quite known what to do with a woman like me.
I mean: are you stronger? Is your collagen better? Is your patience deeper? Are you more truthful with yourself than you were twelve months ago? Do you have more freedom in your body, your mind, your choices?
My skin feels like it is being watered from the inside. My hair. My joints. Something in my body that I can only describe as fertile ground being tended again - the way soil comes alive when it receives what it needs.
The body has been waiting for this conversation. It was always ready.
The body is ancient technology.
Treat it accordingly.
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The Ancient Futurist • Global Asé LLC • May 2026 • Strength
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