Monday 20 February 2017

Aging, Awareness and Exercise

There are roughly 5 places in the world where people reach, in almost all cases, at least 100 years old and where very few (when it is not none) develop cardiovascular diseases. The model of the social system they live in is based on the same values, although they are from very different ethnicities, continents and cultures:
- live in family clan (the oldest members stay in the family and keep participating in social and family life),
- focus is placed on priorities and true needs,
- eat organic or local grown food,
- no stress or pressure about the future, they live in the present moment and are happy with what they have,
- exercise regularly, most of the time through the work they do (physical work like farming, gardening, building, hunting, fishing, walking to commute, etc.), and keep going at all ages, all life long.
- keep strong connection with the environment and the Nature around, live in harmony with them and in respect of ancestral rituals and cultures,
- use local and ancestral medications, see healers as well.
The Guanacaste in Costa-Rica and the Island Ikaria in Greece belong to these very special rare places in the world.

It seems that our modern civilizations have lost touch with something essential, something that could prevent us to grow old too quickly... We have made the choices of ignoring what we always knew and which is deeply anchored in; the fact that we all have an infinite power to change our life and to reach peace, good health, happiness and serenity... and this power has been put asleep because of new beliefs, needs, desires that the modern society have generated. By making the choice to be moulded by the dictates of the society we have lost touch with our true self. But more and more people around the world have understood the limits of these current social systems and feel the desire of being back to the roots and finding alignment in between what they truly need and want, and what they truly are. We are rediscovering both; body and spirit, and understand that the spirit has the power to heal the body and the body is a tool, a support for the spirit to experiment the matter. If we take care of our body (not in terms of cosmetic aspects, but in terms of healthy choices like for instance; eating well, exercising, resting, meditating) we are already on a spiritual path that can take us as far as we want if we decide so. So by having "a healthy spirit in a healthy body" our chances to experiment the matter at its best are much greater, so are our chances of raising awareness on what's possible to achieve to slow down the aging process.

Deepak Chopra explains in his excellent book "Ageless body Timeless mind" that we can control the way we grow old and exercising largely contributes to it. Here is an extract of this book which tells a lot :
"When you start to assert control over any bodily process, the effect is holistic. The mind-body system reacts to every single stimulus as a global event; i.e., to stimulate one cell is to stimulate all (....) As one Noble laureate put it, "if you tickle the field here, it laughs over there." The fact that awareness behaves like a field is now deemed crucial to understanding aging.

On a wider scale, Walter M.Boritz, a senior Standford physician who specializes in aging, has coined the term disuse syndrome to describe how negligence in paying attention to the body's basic needs, particularly the need for physical activity, can destroy health and lead to premature aging. It is a well-known principal in physiology that any part of the body that falls into disuse will begin to atrophy and wither away.

Boritz took the next step and discovered that this effect was body-wide, spreading beyond the cardiovascular system. When a person decides to give up physical activity, he essentially invites his entire physiology to atrophy. As a result a constellation of problems appears:
1 heart, arteries and other parts of the cardiovascular system become more vulnerable.
2 muscles and skeleton become more fragile
3 obesity becomes a high risk
4 depression sets in
5 signs of premature aging indicate that the body is biologically older than its calendar years
(....)

The physical deterioration on this list are not surprising, but it seems unusual that being inactive, in and of itself, would lead to depression, long considered a disorder of mood of personality. However, studies from the Russian space program have found that young cosmonauts subjected to the forced inactivity of space flight fall prey to depression; when put on a schedule of regular exercise, this depression is avoided. The brain mechanism that controls depression appears to lie with a class of neurochemicals called catecholamines. In depressed patents, whose levels of catecholamines are abnormally low, healthy levels can be restored by giving anti-depressant drugs, but the natural way to accomplice this is through regular exercise.

Being holistic, exercise sends chemical messages back and forth between the brain and various muscle groups, part of this flow of biochemical information stimulates the production of catecholamines. Thus, whenever a doctor writes a prescription for antidepressant, Boritz declares, he is handling out a proxy for the boby's own inner prescription, which is filled by exercise.

The news that exercise offsets aging has been well publicized, although it is preventive on depression may not be as well known. What is far more fascinating, however, it is that underlying logic -function precedes structure- can be extended to say that awareness proceeds function. In other words, the parts of the body that age (losing structure) are not just the ones that are not being used enough (losing function); the person has also withdrawn his awareness from them."

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