Walking on Eggshells

Morning is a "held sacred" time for many of us. By sacred, I don't mean holy. I mean personal, set apart,completely our own, inviolable. The one time we want (and need) to prepare ourselves for each day, however peaceful or frenetic that may be...depending on our worlds. Something I have felt, no matter where I traveled, or visited or had to stay for a while, if it was in someone else's home, was the sense of needing to "walk on eggshells" when I first leave my room and enter the space of the person I'm visiting. It isn't due to any action or intent on their part, it's something I just always experience...a hesistancy, even shyness upon intruding into their private world of waking up and doing the typical morning routines of making coffee, reading the newspaper, journaling or whatever their particular habitual practice is. We all have one (or two), but those habits are usually partially unconscious as we are leaving our other world of dreams and sub-conscious meanderings, wanderings or odysseys.
Oddly enough, I don't ever feel that when someone comes to visit me, unless they have stayed too long - then that quiet resentment that is hardly noticable, creeps in just before the smile goes on the face and the cheery "Good Morning" is rung out. The little girl in me is always happy to see whoever is visiting since it's such a rare treat.
I think that reactions to intruders into our morning space is completely natural and probably common. I will be interested in getting feedback from you readers as to whether you know to what I am referring.
Evenings are different. That's the time you let your hair, your guard and your defenses down. A few sips of wine can do wonders to sidestep perimeters, barriers and yes, boundaries; but the solitude of sleep does wonders for forgiveness and even forgetfulness. The new day is always the "new day" and a chance at redemption. Visiting is a wonderful treat for both visitor and visitee...as long as one knows when it's time to leave. That knowledge is what sets the stage for another visit, because we never want to lose the preciousness of looking forward to another one.
n

(This is another transfer from my Moment by Moment blog.  I start some new material here when I see I'm getting new viewers.)

Where has it gone?

This is the latest blog on my nancyswayzee.com blog, Moment by Moment...
I decided to share it here to see if readers to this site share the same reaction to my musings as they do on MBM.  I'm anxious for feedback, so feel free....

It has been a year since I started this blog. I had just come back from visiting my daughter Lori, in Washington state and I was so full of sweet images that I had so consciously taken in, I began to share my thoughts about learning to live in the moment,from the book I was writing.
Well, I'm about to go back, this time to spend Christmas with her which is something we have not been able to do for over 7 years. I am full of anticipation (not expectations), about seeing her new home, revisiting the beauty of where she lives and the joy of just getting to BE with someone I love so much...my precious daughter.
Anticipation and expectation are two very different things, and I think we sometimes let our anticipation be built on our expectations, which often leads to disappointment.
When anticipation is experienced through the eyes of a child, we are open to surprise, wonder and the delight of the unexpected...always feeling new and magical. When each moment is seen with openness, accepting each moment as "Being as it should be", to quote Deepak Chprah, our hearts and minds capture the experience as a whole,so when we remember that time in our lives we automatically smile, rather than pick and choose the things we liked about it. It makes life so much more joyful and satisfying. Expectations are a direct path to discontent, and discontent is a direct path to a mind that is not focused and clear and an immune system that doesn't work as well as it should.
To move on to another aspect of living in the moment...my title of this blog, "Where has it gone?", is also a result of packing our life so full of trying to "do, be and have" it all, one minute bumps into another in our scurrying to fulfill that unreasonable effort.
I have been guilty of that myself this year, even tho this year has been full of miraculous events, some expected (there's that word!) and some not. This year has flown by at lightening speed, and since that literally is impossible - time stays the same, it means I have tried to get two moments out of each one, and therefore appeared to cut the time in half. At 71 that probably isn't too bright. My goal for 2011 is to slow down...Stop! and smell the roses.
n

It Is What It Is

I find it so interesting that so many new experiences are happening to me in my 70's. It completely wipes out any pre-conception of how old age was going to be dull! To those of you who have been following my Moment by Moment blog on my website,  you know I've been having some reticence about getting out there in the big wide webb world. Well, I jumped off the end of the diving board, so to speak. I joined something called "Biznik", a networking site for professionals and entrepeneurs who want to connect with others to increase their visibility. Fear of failure (an emotion most people have in common), has kept me from putting myself "out there", yet here I am...doing it.
I guess it's been one of the things on my "bucket list". Anyway, within just a few hours of submitting my article, I got published and some positive comments, This is an enormous shot of adrenaline. Now I want to write articles everywhere. I just submitted another one to a website called ezinearticles.com, which is interested in articles from professionals about their area of expertise. I kind of snuck in, not writing about the brain, but about how we live our lives - another big topic of interest for me.
I have submitted 2 other articles and have now been upgraded to an "Expert Author".   Beginning this new blog here, is an attempt to gain some recognition as a writer (my NY agent suggested it!), but also to see how many others are pondering their lives in these difficult times. 
When things get tough (and as we get older), there is a tendency to look back at our choices and to also evaluate our values.  Now I'm not talking about self-judgement.  I don't believe in mistakes, I genuinely believe that what ever path we choose when we are faced with a choice, has enormous value.  Maybe we don't see it for years...maybe we don't ever see it at all - but our children do, or our choice ultimately benefited someone we didn't even know.
In the middle of a sleepless night, I finished reading a book I had read 40 years ago... "Siddhartha".  In it, as he comes to his moment of enlightenment, he says, "The world is not imperfect, or slowly evolving along a path to perfection. No, it is perfect at every moment;every sin carries grace within it, all small children [are potentially old men and dying people - eternal life .  It seems to me that everything is necessary, everything needs only my agreement, my assent, my loving understanding; then all is well and nothing can harm me".]  
So although the path I am on right now is a little scary, at 71 I am moving from the goldfish bowl to the big pond.  A big step...but as Deepak Choprah wrote so many years ago, "This moment is as it should be".  
nancy

Breathworks for your Brain

How do I add Reactions to my blog?

How do I add Reactions to my blog?

Wow...Expert Author!!

I am totally excited.  I just received an email from ezinearticles.com (a website for writers), that they have accepted both my articles and listed me an an "Expert Author".  Of course, I sort of knew that myself, but to have them say so is sooooo cool!  I have written 3 articles in the last week. Check out ezinearticles.com and also biznik.com and look under my name, Nancy Swayzee.  I'd love some feedback.

Seeing the magic of BWFYB

Breathworks For Your Brain

I am a 71 (almost 72!) exercise specialist, who didn't even begin to teach exercise until I was 47.  So, the first good news is that you can begin a whole new life of passionate involvement, self-energizing creativity and exciting new discovery at 50!  This discovery was initially about myself…at that crucial point of my life, middle-age, I found something that got my attention so deeply, I couldn't wait to learn everything I possibly could. I'm still teaching 5 classes a week

Are you thinking "Is she crazy?, at 70 I want to start to slow down a little, stop working so hard, begin to enjoy the fruits of my labor.

Breathworks For Your Brain is based on a simple physical principle, Increased Demand creates Increased Use creating increased Function.  This is how it works:

During the pattern-based exercises, the brain must connect:

Auditory & visual input with processing of the information

Planning with anticipation

Balance with meter, rhythm and pace

Spatial awareness, direction and force

coordination in partner activities

Focused attention on where they are in the pattern

Short-term memory retrieval of the pattern itself.

Every nerve & muscle (both large and small) are involved in the coordination of the physical movements.

The body is moving fluids within the body:

Oxygenated blood

Neurotransmitters & hormones

Cranial-spinal fluid

Lymph

Extra-cellular-fluid

The dance - ball playing and strength exercises

Activate, engage and integrate the body & the brain simultaneously.

These activities over-ride age boundaries, disabilities, depression and negative self image, while they are strengthening the heart, lungs, bones and muscles.

Dance and play allow us to explore our relationship with our body and with others.  These activities create new interoceptive maps within the brain.  This increased body awareness plays a huge role in fall prevention.

The aging brain normally slows down in its processing of information, but if free from disease can remain as vital and as good at learning & performing tasks as a young brain.  The biggest change is the decline in our sensory perception and awareness, which is the way we take in most of the information we learn.

Our eyes, ears, hands & feet are all enormous transmitters of information during our lives.  The optic nerve is connected to 80% of our muscles, and there are nerve receptors in the bottom of our feet to tell us if our weight is evenly distributed.

Our physical body is design to be an information-gathering system by way of our sensory receptors.  Our eyes, ears, nose and nerve receptors in the muscles and joints take in the details of our surroundings and send the information to the brain to prepare us for action.

As we age, and our vision becomes less sharp, we pay less attention to detail…because it's too much effort and the body is always finding ways to reserve our energy.

As our hearing diminishes - we pay less attention to what people are saying and what's going on around us.

Without stimulating input from our eyes & ears - our brain doesn't take in as much information…so we use less of our brain.

Movement of our eyes, head, body & feet, all stimulate the vestibular system, which plays a crucial role in our development & learning throughout our lives.

As we move less, our muscles weaken, our bones become more fragile and our balance and stability gets poor from lack of use.  It's all connected.  The health & use of one system is dependent on the health & use of other systems.

Movement is necessary, not only to promote the flow of oxygenated blood throughout the body and to the brain,

But also to produce acetylcholine, a primary brain chemical for memory & attention.

Acetylcholine is a "messenger".  When it is released into the muscle fibers, it sets up a chain of events that result in muscle contraction.  Our muscle fibers contain special proteins that stabilize the nerve receptors.  These nerve receptors are like "docking stations" for the acetylcholine to go.

Inactivity (lack of muscle contraction), causes a breakdown in the proteins that make these docking stations.  Without the proteins, you don't produce the docking stations…and without someplace for the acetylcholine to go, the brain doesn't produce this important brain chemical.

The loss of receptor activity reduces the number of signals within the brain, and the loss of use ultimately results in the loss of function.  Coordinated movements are particularly important.  They stimulate the production of other brain chemicals that stimulate the growth of nerve cells and increase connections.

Breathworks For Your Brain actively uses the eyes, ears, muscles, specifically targeting the cerebellum and basal ganglion, responsible for the organization, timing, control, force, spatial awarenesss and speed of our movement.  Rhythmic movement allows a fluid interaction between the muscles and the cerebellum & Basal ganglia, which in turn send signals to the neo-cortex (the frontal lobe of our brain) which organizes our thoughts.  It's all connected.

Increased use of the body, results in increased & improved use of the brain.  Go to my website to see some short clips of older adults and seniors ranging in age from their late 50's to well in their 90's.  You can visibly see the speed with which they are processing the visual and auditory information I am giving them.  The results speak for themselves.  I hope I'm not overloading you with TMI,  but I think all of this is so amazing and sooo perfectly orchestrated...   and we tend to take it all for granted.  Watch these video clips andthen think about what is going on between the body and the brain.  It's magic!

- and let me know what you think!

n

Moment by Moment and the Brain

Hello to all of you new readers.  I've been blogging on my website, nancyswayzee.com for a little over a year.  My blog there is Moment by Moment...An Ageless Process.  I've had a good following and have used it mainly for my musings...about life, my feelings about life and how important "noticing" is.  My initial reason for the title, is that I have a book I've been working on for several years, before I got involved in developing the Breathworks For Your Brain program and book.  The first book, Moment by Moment...An Ageless Process, is based on the theory, that learning how to really be "in the moment", even for short periods of time, slows down the cellular clock. When we stop "running", all our patho- physiological systems get to stop "running...over working. Our cells literally have time to pause and take a deep breath.
This "running has become our way of life, we've become obsessed with doing and having it all, and the tragic result of our lack of control or far-sightedness, is that we're burning ourselves out, so many reach their "golden years" only to be faced with disease that was primarly caused by lack of care of their bodies or their energy.  Bruce Lipton, a cellular biologist, who did cutting edge research at Stanford, and is also a fellow author in Audacious Aging,

In AA Bruce describes how life began as single-cell organisms, who basically learned how to "split themselves apart" to produce progeny, because as a "community", life was easier than single, i.e. Two can live as cheaply as one.  At that early stage, cells didn't die, they simply split into pieces and kept on going.  The problem began when they began to split so many times, they began to fragment. Their "splitting" mechanism wore out.  They just couldn't split themselves up anymore.  Cells began to "age" and die.  That is a perfect description of what many of our lives have become...so fragmented that we are prematurely aging.  Okay, I'm not talking about getting gray earlier, or more wrinkles, I'm talking about the impact of ournstressful lives on our immune system.  Regardless if the old are living longer, many of the young are dying earlier...from heart attacks and cancer; diseases directly related to our life styles.  I want to use this blog to talk about how learning to live "moment by moment" is a wonderful way to take care of both your body's cells and your brain cells.  "Noticing" is important to brain health.  Noticing, slows down the cellular clock.

I'm assuming that this is an unusual enough opinion to create some debate, or at least desire for some dialogue.  I'm hoping so.  That's why I decided to blog here as well as on my own website.  I'm passionate about this subject, so I have a lot to say.  Let's talk.  (more on this subject next blog)

n

p.s. excuse the different fonts and size.  I'm not too tech savvy and couldn't find how to correct it on this page.  Bear with me.