Lifestyle Choices

There is more health and beauty through natural movement than you will get from vigorous aerobic exercise alone. For no matter how far you run, no matter how fine an athlete or dancer you are, unless your muscles and joints move freely through the full range of motions possible for them you quite simply won’t feel fully alive. Neither will you have full freedom of locomotion nor will you get the complete enjoyment of your sensations.

The body is the medium of experience. Everything you do—walking, writing, playing, working, making love—you do through its movements. In fact, all life is made up of the action of living flesh and muscle on moving joints and bones. These movements are composed of finely controlled positions and motions. When your joints and muscles are supple and mobile your body remains free, glowing, alive and highly resistant to stress. To get it that way, unless you are a child or unless you happen to be gifted with exceptional flexibility, you need to teach your muscles to stretch to their limits and encourage your joints to move fully.

This calls for some slow, sustained isotonic movement such as yoga or stretching. Practicing for a few minutes three or four times a week will not only increase your vitality and your capacity for experiencing joy and pleasure, it will also eliminate the chronic tension that results in headaches and menstrual complaints and the other long-term problems some women believe they either have to suffer in silence or treat with tranquilizers and pain-killers. You don’t!

 

A “LIVING DEATH”

Most important of all, because your body is the physical expression of your experiences and your relationship to life, when chronic muscle tension and flaccidness are widespread enough, you become pervaded with a feeling of numbness which many women experience more emotionally than physically.

The world is full of people walking around feeling indifferent to themselves and their lives. They seek highs through artificial means such as alcohol and drugs. This numbness usually develops gradually, unnoticeably, until in time the victim loses much of her sensitivity and her capacity for experiencing pleasure from everyday things. In a sense her body, which has gone unused, dies.

Many women remain unaware that the sense of ennui they have is a physical problem and not some basic disillusionment with their lives. In fact, many people come to think of it as being normal—that is, until serious depression develops or severe back pain or a chronic illness. Then they wonder what went wrong. Long-term chronic tension in shoulders, around hip joints, in the back of the legs, in the neck and head and elsewhere does something else too. It robs you of vitality simply because much of the energy you could be using for living has to go into maintaining the rigidity of the muscles.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU STRETCH?

When you stretch a particular muscle you squeeze the blood (especially the veinous blood) out of it. This blood does not depend on the beat of the heart for its circulation. It depends on the contraction and relaxation of muscles that, when they move, compress the veins and capillaries, pushing the blood back in the direction of the heart. Only by this periodic contraction and expansion will any muscle be properly cleansed of the cellular wastes that accumulate in it and only then will it get the circulation of blood needed to bring nutrients and oxygen in optimum quantities to the cells. For as soon as the stretch is finished and your muscle springs back to its normal size, it becomes automatically bathed in fresh blood which cleanses and nourishes it. This is one of the reasons stretching brings with it a wonderful sense of renewal to the whole body.

While dynamic, aerobic exercise brings great benefit to your heart and lungs, tones many of the muscles in your body, and brings you greater vitality, the slow, deliberate stretching of specific muscle groups will give you extraordinary grace, improve the flexibility of your joints, and eliminate muscle tension, which is so limiting not only to your physical well-being but also to your personal sense of being free.

TRUE GRACE

Once you start to untense your muscles by stretching, you become physically and mentally lighter as the energy that was once wasted in maintaining muscle tension is freed. Your movements become more economical and your natural grace begins to emerge. The interesting things about this natural grace is that it will differ from one woman to another because it is an expression of her individuality. It bears little resemblance to the stereotyped, controlled balletic movements or the supposedly graceful movements that have traditionally been imposed on women by teachers of one kind or another. It is, instead, a grace that speaks for itself and seems to say, “Set the body free and it will find its own way.”

I first became aware of what this kind of stretching could do for me when I met two young British teachers, John Stirk and David Stebbing. Both men had discovered the value of this kind of movement and both believed that the secret to releasing chronic muscle tension and at the same time tightening and toning flaccidness lay in learning to make “effortless effort”—in other words, in putting oneself in specific postures that work against the tension and then learning to let it go by allowing the body to move naturally the way it falls. This is where gravity comes in. There is no need, John and David taught me, to go through complicated and exhausting movements stretching and straining one part of the body against the other as women do in the traditional calisthenic movements designed to trim a thigh or arrest a spreading waistline.

 

GOING WITH GRAVITY

The force of gravity imposes a natural pull on every human body. Since muscle tension is ultimately the result of strain (although usually unconscious) against the natural full movement of a muscle, why, asked Stirk and Stebbing, could one not eliminate it by putting the body in certain positions where gravity will gently urge muscles to give up their stiffness while toning their opposite flaccid muscles? Why not indeed?

They taught me a series of exercises. I tried them and they worked, beautifully. Not only did these exercises realign the body and bring areas deadened by chronic tension back to life, they also helped women find their own natural grace in movement while restoring normality to the musculature all over the body, from the top of the neck to the bottom of the foot.

In the process, these postures also whittle away excess flab far better, I have found, than the unpleasant and compulsive repetition of calisthenics designed to work on specific areas. They also restore good circulation all over the body, particularly in cellulite-prone areas where it is needed most, and they restore good tone where before there was excess tension or unsightly flab.

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