I often have a good amount I want to share, yet I know not everyone is always in the mood to listen. So blog I go. :)
I've read a book for my Holistic Health class on Somatics (among others)
and I think the last chapter was really great. I pieced together a few quotes I wish everyone could see. The way we expect to "get old" and be in pain is often nothing more than diseases of adaptation from our life struggles and old injuries. We are meant to enjoy each age of our lives, and growing into our best selves. If you care to read, here it is.
"In our worship of youth, and in our frantic scramble to falsify our age, we have blindly ignored a growing number of discoveries that can make life and aging a continuing process of growth, achievement, satisfaction, and pleasure. To despise the fact of aging is not only to despise life but to betray a pitiful ignorance of the nature of life...youth is a state to be put behind us as we grow [and yearn to be] taller and deeper and fuller...it is by losing this yearning that we forget the first principles of living and begin to worship a false and superficial image of youthfulness...Not to expect to grow is to misunderstand what it means to be human....We must reeducate ourselves to the full possibilities contained in the entire human life span...Life is ever redemptive and rejuvenating...We must make our future what we want it to be. That is what human freedom is for." -Thomas Hanna "Somatics"
This book is about SMA (sensory motor amnesia), which is really just a reversible condition and a way of explaining that what we as a culture attribute to "getting old" can actually be subconscious over-contracting of muscles over years of time. At the point of SMA, we actually don't know we're doing this, and have temporarily lost voluntary control of these muscles.
Since muscles are not visible in x-rays, most of the time the doctors diagnose many people with arthritis, scoliosis, compression of disks, one leg longer, simple chronic neck and back pain, impotence, shallow breathing, elderly people hunched over, or the "archer's back", even crows feet etc. When really, we have just made habitual "alarm responses" through muscle contractions over time that eventually stick with us and/or have learned to overcompensate for an old injury, either way changing our walk, and functioning. Rarely is it a structural problem, unless the person has been in a serious accident, but often functional problems of life that are preventable and reversible.
There are easy exercises in the back of the book that demonstrate how to help prevent and undo any problems, and it is never too late and they improve your overall quality of life, no matter what age. We have done quite a few in class and the results amazed me.
Here's his website: www.somaticsed.com
