The Fountain of Youth by Anita Boser, LMP, CHSIP
An excerpt from an upcoming book by Anita Boser, LMP, CHSIP.
Everybody wants the wisdom of old age, but nobody wants the infirmities that go along with it. So if something as simple as swaying side to side in a chair could turn back the hands of time, wouldn’t you jump at the chance to learn how? You bet you would! Without drugs, without pain, without any money going out the door other than the cost of this book, you can learn and use this very simple technique to better your life, called undulation
Chapter One
The Fountain of Youth
By Anita Boser, LMP, CHSIP
(www.anitahellerworker.com)
Everybody wants the wisdom of old age, but nobody wants the infirmities that go along with it. So if something as simple as swaying side to side in a chair could turn back the hands of time, wouldn’t you jump at the chance to learn how? You bet you would! Without drugs, without pain, without any money going out the door other than the cost of this book, you can learn and use this very simple technique to better your life, called undulation.
The term undulation refers to the gentle wave-like motions that can be produced with various parts of the body, mostly your spine, but also your fingers, arms and hips. I’ve taken the term and technique from my vocation doing Hellerwork Structural Integration and added to it from my continuing explorations. Undulation can help you to put infirmity on hold. What’s the most exciting thing about undulation? Anybody, and I do mean anybody, no matter what age, health or physical limitations, can practice it.
Hellerwork identifies gravity as the major force that affects our bodies all of our lives. When the body is correctly or vertically aligned, it is able to move effortlessly. If the body is misaligned however, it is continually struggling against gravity in almost every position. Hellerwork practitioners consider aging to be the consequence of losing ground to the power of gravity. But we also believe that succumbing to gravity is not inevitable.
There are an abundant number of legends passed down generation to generation from around the world that illustrate the belief that people can escape the detrimental effects of aging. We see it in ancient stories from Persia, which tell how Alexander the Great searched the Land of Darkness for the ‘Well of Life.’ And out of ancient Hawaiian lore is the saga of a priest, Kamapiikai, who traveled to Haupokane and found the wai ora roa or water of enduring life. It was said that if a person bathed in the wai ora roa, ‘however infirm, emaciated or deformed they might be, they emerged from the water young, strong and handsome.’
Also, from the Caribbean comes the tale of Binimi. The land of Binimi was a place where the blue waters could heal the sick and rejuvenate the old. This was the very fable that inspired Ponce de Leon’s legendary voyage of discovery for the Fountain of Youth.
It’s no coincidence that all of the stories relate youthfulness to water. Fluidity is the one indisputable quality that distinguishes the young from old, expressed persuasively in this verse from the Tao de Ching.
Men are born soft and supple;
dead, they are stiff and hard,
Plants are born tender and pliant;
dead, they are brittle and dry.
Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible
is a disciple of death.
Whoever is soft and yielding
is a disciple of life.
The hard and stiff will be broken.
The soft and supple will prevail.
Joseph Heller, the founder of Hellerwork Structural Integration (www.hellerwork.com), puts it this way in his book, Bodywise:
“The process of life may be seen as one in which we start out 99% water
and end up virtually solid… In the course of aging, most of us find ourselves
increasingly sedentary and confined, moving less and less. We may claim our
static state results from pain, fatigue or laziness, but which, in fact, comes first?
To function properly, the body relies heavily on the movement of fluids, and as
rigidity sets in the fluid flow is impaired.”
The exercises that I'll be showing you in this book are calculated to reactivate parts of your body that might be asleep and/or locked up. The desired effect is to rebuild fluid and youthful movement. Each exercise is presented with a scale of modification to best meet your own personal ability, so that no matter what your age or health, there’s something here that should be a good fit. It's never too late to regain lost agility or too early to prevent rigidity.
I’ve laid the exercises out in an uncomplicated, 52-week plan that takes a mere ten minutes a day. It’s an easy, take-it-nice-and-slow way to help your tissues become more fluid again. Why a whole year? Well, since these movements are deliberately gentle and moderate, they are delivered in tiny pieces over a long period of time, purposefully, so that each provides a building block for those that follow. Daily undulation will give you a wide variety of new ways to move. And, more importantly, they will teach you valuable ways to continue the growth. If you follow and respect the ‘no pain’ guidelines in Chapter 4, the risk of injury is minimal.
Undulation enables you to move better and when done regularly, you may start to notice that other forms of exercise like golfing, swimming, walking, tennis or dancing, begin to get easier; because a fluid body is capable of moving in any direction, as well as being equally both strong and flexible.
Young children are able to move in a variety of directions with ease and simple pleasure. You did too when you were a child. Cast your mind back to all the wonderful things your body could do when you were little.
Dance Sit on the floor
Walk miles Stand as tall as possible
Squat Jump
Kick your legs Walk on your toes
Shake your hips Run
Reach way up high Skip
Twirl around Climb a tree
Swing Jump rope
Craw more than five feet Put your foot in your mouth (literally)
The conditions that we normally associate with aging – stiffness of the joints, arthritis, osteoporosis, hardening of the arteries, the drain of energy, loss of strength, and those all-over general aches and pains – are completely opposite of the soft and supple conditions we associate with youth.
If we look around us, we can see varying degrees of degeneration even among people of the same age. For instance, over a million and a quarter adults age 75 and older were residents in a nursing home in 1999. And yet other seniors are still full of life, able to spring up in the morning and go strong throughout the day. The International Health, Racquet and Sportsclub Association reports that 25% of their 41.3 million members are over the age of 55.
The 50-plus Lifelong Fitness Association is just one of many organizations dedicated to ‘encouraging fitness and a more active lifestyle’ for adults. This association began at Stanford University in 1979, as a direct result of medical research that demonstrated the value of exercise for seniors. Part of their mission is to ‘show that misuse and disuse of the body and mind are a larger cause of disability than chronological age alone’.
Did you know that there are even seniors who are elite athletes? Sixty-seven people, aged 70 and older, completed the Boston Marathon in 2005. Wow!
How is it possible that some 74-year-olds hobble to the bathroom, while others run marathons? While genetics and luck play a part in the aging process, I will show you that how you move your body is also a huge factor. If most of us start feeling some stiffness and inflexibility as early as age 30, is it truly possible to remain fluid and healthy? Definitely! I’ll get you started on your way with the low-impact exercises in this book. Best of all? A marathon is not required.
In this era of disposable everything, many assume the body to be disposable, too. We expect it to wear out and fail, like a car or coffee maker. And like mechanical objects that deteriorate without care, so too will our bodies if we neglect regular maintenance. Lavish the care on yourself that you would a fine Rolls Royce. After all, your body is more valuable than any car.
However, unlike machines, our bodies are actually living organisms. As living organisms, we have an amazing ability to heal and regenerate. But since all our repair cells and immune system cells need to flow through the connective tissue to get to all areas of the body, healing is a fluid process.
Connective tissue is any tissue in the body that has a connecting function. Muscles, tendons, ligaments and even blood are all connective tissue. But since the topics I’ll be covering here are based on the Hellerwork Structural Integration theory, this book deals primarily with the connective tissue called fascia. Fascia is the tissue that wraps around every muscle, every bone, every organ, and every blood vessel in the body.
So, back to our healing process… Healthy connective tissue is fluid, very much like Jello. This liquid state allows the repair cells to stream easily to wherever they’re needed most. On the other hand, unhealthy connective tissue impairs any fluid healing processes. The result? Our joints, bones and arteries all suffer degeneration.
The movements we associate with aging are those well-established patterns of limited motion and stressful habits: wake up – eat – work – eat - sleep - repeat. The illustration below shows how we begin to limit movement throughout our lives. This gradual and continual elimination of activity significantly contributes to the aging process.
Illustration by Dana Young
In our grown-up pursuit of perfection, we perform the same activities over and over so we get ‘better’ at them. These repetitive motions create intentional stiffness, because our tissue responds by reinforcing the structures we use to perform these motions. Over time, we’ve replaced a variety of activities with fewer and fewer movements. Our tissue reacts to that by limiting the range of motion available. As our physical activity wanes, the ability to perform physical activities wanes as well. Eventually, we become incapable of doing them at all.
When and if we do attempt one of those lost activities, we injure ourselves. These injuries result in scar tissue, and scar tissue by nature’s design is inflexible and stiff. The whole repeating cycle of activity, inactivity and activity creates many tiny, internal scars embedded in our tissue. This in turn escalates the cycle of rigidity that inactivity promotes. And so on - and so on - and so on.
Another common mistake many of us make is to equate flexibility with stretching. However a muscle may be long and still not be flexible. Note the rolled-forward posture in figure A. In this habitual posture, the upper back, neck and shoulders are elongated, but stretching these tissues actually creates more stiffness, not less.
Figure A
Drawing by Dana Young
The good news is we can reverse this caustic process with the careful movements set out in the undulation exercises, which are designed especially to generate lubrication in connective tissues and joints. Undulation makes it possible to slowly add some of those long forgotten activities back into your routine.
Undulation helps increase the fluidity in your body, lubricate your joints, get you moving better and keep you moving longer. As your body begins to feel better, the possibilities for you to add new forms of exercise and activities will keep growing too.
However, if you are already feeling the stiffness of inactivity, be extra-sensible with this program. Use caution and please remember - injury can create scar tissue, and scar tissue can further restrict movement. As with any new exercise, I recommend that you discuss undulation with your physician before you begin. Take this book with you, so that you can provide your doctor with a visual aid of the movements involved.
I want to emphasize again that nearly everyone can undulate. It's super-simple to do and doesn't require any specialized equipment, strength or technical knowledge. And even though undulation is gentle, it’s proven itself to be a very powerful exercise experience.
So go ahead - crawl over the couch every day to loosen your hips - join a yoga or water aerobics class. If you want to improve your body's ability to move, you must move it in new ways. But you have to get moving to do it - and the sooner you do, the more beneficial it is.
With regular undulation, you can awaken those sleepy core muscles and increase your range of motion. Most importantly, undulation empowers you to break the cycle of habitual movement patterns.
Undulation can generate a deep well of fluid flooding up your spine and spreading out through your connective tissue. This is the fountain of youth that you can discover.