Did you know?
Black-and-white thinking makes you age faster.
On the other hand, being able to see that nothing is all good or all bad has been found to slow aging in your DNA because it spares you the stress of extreme emotions. Here's how Rolfing, by improving your posture, helps you mellow out and keeps you young.
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"It's amazing, I can see the silver lining!"
"Things that used to bother me just don't anymore."
"You know that movie The Matrix? That's me, dodging all the bullets, but instead I'm dodging stress at work."
I hear it often from my Rolfing clients. It's similar to what I felt when I received my first Rolfing 10-session series back in the 90s: At the time, I was in a double-degree program studying cello and biopsychology in Boston, and to top that off, I was pushing myself through pre-med, preparing for the MCAT, and applying for a Fulbright Grant at the same time.
Needless to say, the stress was high. A C+ on an exam, an audition that I didn't have time to practice for, a glare from the conductor when I got to orchestra rehearsal late... Life was full of little awful events that made me feel horrible.
But how bad would I feel, and how long would it bother me? Those changed while I was getting my Rolfing series. I remember telling my Rolfer, Aline Newton, "It feels like stress used to cling to me like rain on a cotton jacket. Negative thoughts would hang around for days or weeks. But now it feels like the stress literally slides away. It rolls off me like water." In addition, I told her: "I can see how things are never all bad."
And unbeknownst to me, I had gained a powerful tool for staying young and healthy, longer. In my 20s, it mattered little, but now being "greater" than 40 (ahem), this is worth gold.
Put another way, Rolfing had helped me to increase my capacity for emotional complexity, the ability to accept that everything simultaneously has its positive and negative aspects, nothing is truly black or white.
And you know what? Twenty-five years after my college graduation, laboratory research has found that emotional complexity strengthens our immune system and, fascinatingly, helps to prevent aging. An excerpt from the book The Telomere Effect by Drs. Elizabeth Backburn and Elissa Epel:
"Typically, older people experience more positive emotions than negative ones in daily life. The experience isn't purely 'happy.' Rather, our emotions grow richer and more complex over time. We experience more co-occurence of positive and negative emotions, such as those poignant occasions when you get a tear in your eye at the same time you feel joy, or feeling pride at the same time you feel anger -- a capacity we call 'emotional complexity.' These mixed emotional states help us avoid the dramatic ups and downs that younger people have, and they also help us exercise more control over what we feel. Mixed emotions are easier to manage than purely positive or purely negative emotions. Thus, emotionally speaking, life just feels better. Better control over emotions and enhanced complexity means more enriched daily experiences. People with more emotional complexity also have a longer healthspan."
In other words, people who experience mixed emotional states enjoy good health longer before the effects of aging set in.
But how does Rolfing, a therapy that improves posture, also slow the aging process?
I describe it as follows: Your body is the vessel for your experiences and your emotions. Your gut instinct and "inner space" is literally located in your belly, right in front of your spine. When you have good, natural posture, you also optimize your emotional space. Rolfing helps you achieve this; basically, it makes your body and mind more spacious.
When the body's inner space is tight -- think of a stiff and collapsed posture -- the emotional result is a one-sided, overly simplified view of the world. Correspondingly, the mind ping-pongs between narrow thoughts, "It's like this, but also like that, but I don't mean to sound like this, but I want to say that...," in an effort to verbally describe the un-describable.
However, when our bodies are balanced and our physical inner space is optimized, we can operate full-time from the elegant motto: Yes, it all is. We are spacious. We are contained. We don't repress scary thoughts because we can see how there's always a silver lining.
Does it reduce stress levels? Indeed.
Does it help us to more thoroughly assess life situations because we're not hiding from scary thoughts? Definitely.
Does it keep us healthier, younger, and more pleasant as people? Yes.
Contact me if you have any questions or would like to come in for a free talk about any mind-body questions you might have! Audrey www.standard-gravity.com
