I once entered a martial arts tournament and came away with an injury to my hand. 12 months later my knuckle still hurt every time I moved it. Every time I knocked it on something I would feel disappointed that I still hadn't healed properly.

Perhaps you too have had injuries that didn't heal the way you might expect. Whether you trusted your body to heal by itself, or you gave it additional support in the form of exercises, stretching or gentler movement - the process might have taken much longer than you anticipated.

And perhaps, as is so common, the end result was a body part that was slightly less mobile, slightly less functional than before the injury. It can feel like the slow movement of time gently taking it's toll bit by bit.

If you're anything like me, you value the movement of your body. The way it can jump and run, the joyful way it can play, the satisfying way it can do hard things like lifting a heavy rock. You probably want to extend the life of the one body you have for as long as humanly possible. I know I do.

But this process of injury rehabilitation seems to always end a little bit worse off than we were before. It seems that if you accumulate enough injuries over your life that inevitably you will end up old and crunchy before your time.

This fate has never felt satisfying to me. I would love to have a free, healthy, strong, flexible and trustworthy body right to the day I die.

How do you envision your body as you move towards the later stages of life?

A new way forward in life

If I am to move forward in a way that feels satisfying, I need to write a different story. One that goes beyond the act of rehabilitating (because as you'll see in a minute, I don't believe this is enough)

The new way forward that I'm proposing is called...

Crescentia Potentiae

Tada!!! I know - it sounds like a Harry Potter spell. But hear me out.

If we look at the latin roots of the word rehabilitation we get

re → again
habilitare → "to make fit"

So rehabilitation means to make fit again. The implication is that you were fit. Then you got injured, now we need to restore your ability again.

The limitations - as with any viewpoint - are hidden in the unspoken implications of that viewpoint.

In this case - "you've already peaked and the goal is to get you back to where you were"

It's sneaky. But now that we've spotted it, we can choose a different way.

Crescentia Potentiae on the other hand conveys something far more alive. The latin roots are:

crescere → “to grow, increase, arise.”
potentia → “power, ability, capacity, potential.”

What if your injury was an opportunity to grow your capacity, to increase your potential, to evolve your ability?

The implication here is that you will go beyond your ability prior to your injury. It just keeps getting better!

Take a moment and breathe that one in. Feels good right!?

Does that feel like a good fit for progression into old age? If so, then let us continue this discussion.

How do we keep evolving?

What does it take to go from simple rehab to crescentia potentiae?

Well rehab requires a period of rest for an injury to heal. General advice also advocates for gradually increasing the amount of load on your body part so that it can start to function normally again.

Basically: don't overdo it until the pain stops and you can start participating in the activity you were involved in before.

I think these are great. They make sense.

And... they're mechanical solutions that address the tissues. Let the tissue heal. Strengthen the tissue. It's purely mechanical. Again, there is limitation by the viewpoint.

They ignore the fact that those body parts are from a living organic system. An organic system that is integrated with a nervous system.

Your brain.

If we include this missing part of the picture, it allows us to align more with our true nature. As living, learning, intelligent organisms. Organisms that can adapt and evolve and improve.

What I propose is that training your nervous system is crucial if you want crescentia potentiae

This is the thing that will improve your ability beyond what it was originally. It will also reduce the likelihood that you'll hurt yourself again.

And it doesn't need to wait until an injury to get started either.

What is nervous system training?

When human babies are born, they suck at moving - they can't even focus their eyes. Other animals by contrast can get up and run within minutes of their birth.

What human babes excel at, is learning. Our nervous systems are wired fundamentally differently. The reason we suck is also the reason that long term we are such adaptable creatures. We have a lot more flexibility built into the system.

We're like clay that stays soft. A baby zebra hardens fast — it’s shaped and set within minutes. We stay malleable for years, which means we can be reshaped, reformed, and reimagined countless times over a lifetime.

But just because we have this ability, it doesn't mean we make the most of it.

Nervous system training takes our unique human gifts and leverages them so that we can keep evolving.

It is a process of consciously using our senses to improve the way we move. It's about using our in-built capacity to learn, to soften

This type of training deeply changes the way an injury heals. Why?

Pain interferes with healthy movement

Pain changes the way we move — and not just because it hurts.
It changes the way our brain maps our body.

Every movement we make relies on an internal map — a constantly updating sense of where each part of us is in space. When we get injured, the brain blurs that map around the painful area to protect it. It’s as if the lights dim there. The problem is, when that dimming stays too long, we lose coordination, accuracy, and confidence in how we move that part.

So even when the tissues have healed, the programming hasn’t.
You’re left with a slightly scrambled line of communication between brain and body.

That’s why nervous system training matters.
It’s how we brighten the map again.

Through gentle, precise awareness-based movement, we feed the brain new information — richer sensory data that helps it recalibrate. The pain quiets not because we’ve forced the body to be stronger, but because the brain trusts it again.

That’s when crescentia potentiae starts to happen.
We’re not just repairing damage; we’re upgrading the system.
The coordination improves, movements become more efficient, and the risk of re-injury drops — because the old faulty pattern that led to the problem in the first place has evolved into something new.

This is what separates mechanical rehab from organic growth.
One restores function.
The other expands possibility.

How can you tell if your “map” needs updating?

There are little clues — subtle signs that your nervous system hasn’t fully integrated a part of you yet.
You might notice:

• A feeling of stiffness or restriction that doesn’t match the actual injury.
• Movements that feel cautious or jerky, like your body’s second-guessing itself.
• A strange lack of sensation — parts of you that feel fuzzy, dull, or absent.
• Or the opposite: a part that’s too loud, overprotective, quick to flare up.

These are all signs that the communication between your brain and body could use refinement — not through pushing, but through re-learning.

A few examples

• The ankle that never quite trusted itself again.
  A man sprains his ankle, goes through rehab, and regains strength — yet months later he still avoids walking at heights. When he learns to sense the movement of his toes, knees, and hips in relation to each other, the nervous system rebuilds trust. Within weeks, his balance returns, and his gait feels smoother than before the injury.
• The jaw that feels tight on one side
  A woman with a lifelong jaw issue after a childhood trip to the orthodontist gone wrong. When she slows down enough to pay attention to the pathway of her jaw through space, the tension melts. Immediately her range increases without strain, she discovers a new ease she never had before — even pre-injury.
• The chronic neck pain that began after a single awkward lift.
  Years later, the tissue has long healed, but the brain still perceives vulnerability. Through mindful micro-movements and re-mapping the ribcage and it's relationship to the head. What replaces it is a new coordination — lighter, more efficient, more integrated.

These stories are about more than recovery.
They’re about evolution.

An invitation

If you’ve ever felt betrayed by your body — by its slowness to heal, by its recurring pain, by the creeping sense of limitation — I want to offer a new possibility.

What if this isn’t decline?
What if it’s an invitation to grow more skillful?

To become more precise, more attuned, more alive in your own skin.

That’s the path of Crescentia Potentiae.
It’s not about getting “back” to who you were. It’s about becoming someone new — someone more integrated, more fluid, more capable than before.

Every movement you make is a chance to re-educate your nervous system, to refine the dialogue between awareness and action.
To grow your potential from the inside out.

So instead of asking, “How do I get back to normal?”
Try asking, “What new capacity is trying to emerge?”

That’s the seed of lifelong vitality.

Coming Full Circle

When I think back to that martial arts injury — the stubborn ache in my knuckle that lingered for months — I see now that what frustrated me most wasn’t the pain. It was the story I was living inside.
The story that said, I used to be whole, and now I’m slightly less.

But what if that’s never been true?
What if every injury, every strain, every small limitation is the body’s way of saying, “There’s more intelligence available here — if you’re willing to learn.”

In that light, healing becomes less about fixing what’s broken and more about refining what’s possible.
And growing older becomes less about decline and more about evolution — the gradual, graceful deepening of coordination, sensitivity, and wisdom.

That’s what I want for myself: a body that’s not only strong, but well-listened-to.
One that continues to surprise me with new ease and subtlety.
A nervous system that’s still curious, still learning, still reshaping itself right to the end.

Crescentia Potentiae isn’t a technique — it’s a relationship.
A relationship with your own capacity to grow.

So if you find yourself in pain, or healing slower than you hoped, take heart. You haven’t missed your peak — you’ve just reached the next invitation.
The next opportunity to grow your potential.

Bit by bit, awareness by awareness, you’re not just repairing the past —
you’re shaping the future of how you live inside your body.

And maybe that’s the real gift of being human:
We never truly “set.”
We keep softening, sensing, learning, evolving —
until our very last breath.