I always find myself explaining Keith Sehnert as the George Washington of self-care. Keith graduated from Western Reserve School of Medicine in 1953. After working as a General Practitioner and later as Medical Director of Dorsey Laboratories in Lincoln, Nebraska, he joined the Reston-Herndon Medical Center in Herndon, Virginia. There, in 1970, he taught—and largely invented—the first of the modern breed of self-care classes, classes in which laypeople learned basic medical skills formerly reserved for doctors only.

The class drew wide media attention. In 1972, Keith became a visiting professor at Georgetown University and in 1974 founded the Center for Continuing Health Education at Georgetown.

The Center for Continuing Health Education did self-care research, taught health professionals from all parts of the country to conduct self-care classes, and prepared course materials for these classes. In 1977, Keith became Vice President and Director of the Health Promotion Group at InterStudy, a health-policy and health-futures think tank in the Minneapolis area, and joined the University of Minnesota School of Public Health as clinical professor.

It is in large part because of Keith’s efforts that there are now self-care classes in forty states. He is the author of How to Be Your Own Doctor (Sometimes).

TF: You were saying that you were a student of Ben Spock’s at Western Reserve.

KS: Yes, back in the early fifties. Spock was just starting out as a teacher there, and his book, Baby and Child Care (reviewed on page 207) was just out. Of course, no one had any idea then it was going to become so popular.

Did he have a big influence on you?

He did. He was very concerned that most patients were getting a great deal of treatment but very little teaching. He felt that was a mistake.

I don’t think there’s any doubt but that his book planted a seed for me. I’ve always thought of my book as a kind of Dr. Spock for adults.

Were there any other experiences at Reserve that nudged you in the direction” of self-care?

Yes, the influence of another very important teacher, T. Hale Ham. In those days the whole business of a doctor’s empathy for the patient and communication skills were spoken of as one’s bedside manner. We were all very concerned about our bedside manner. Dr. Ham used to say, “Keith, you just talk to your patients in whatever way is most comfortable to you—but keep in mind that if you’re a good teacher, your patients will think you’re a good doctor.”

How did you happen to end up teaching that first self-care class?

Well, you know, serendipity plays such a big part in these things. I’d just joined a family practice group in the Reston area of Virginia. The guy who’d actually planned the class was leaving to join the Family Practice Department at the University of Wisconsin. One day he just casually asked me, ” Look, as long as you’re going to be here, would you mind picking this thing up for me?” And of course I said yes.

How many students were there?

I think there were forty, maybe forty-two. About 80 percent women. Almost all of them were patients at the Medical Center.

What was the first class meeting like?

It was an interesting experience. Many of the people in the first class were women whose husbands had been recently laid off by a reduction in the Johnson administration space program. Some of them were living on unemployment insurance for the first time in their lives.

As we got to know each other better, a lot of anger toward the health-care system started to come up. Frustrating experiences. Times when they’d been treated insensitively.

The old authoritarian doctor image was hanging over our heads, even though I wasn’t the typical authoritarian doctor. There was a lot of asking, is this something that’s okay to talk about? Is it all right for me to ask this question? And when I made it very clear that it was, they really began to share their experiences and concerns. They began to express feelings they may never have expressed to anyone before—certainly never to a physician.

It soon became clear that they had a lot of health needs that weren’t being met by the health-care system. They’d been put down and ripped off. The women’s movement was beginning to be active around that time, and the women especially were beginning to look at their lives in some new ways.

Pretty soon people started saying, “Why can’t I take my father’s blood pressure?” “Why can’t I give my kids allergy shots?” “Why can’t I use an otoscope to look in my little boy’s ear when he has an earache?”

And I found myself saying, “I don’t know why not. Let’s do it.” So the whole course evolved out of the things people were asking.

Had there been any other similar classes up to that time?

No, to my knowledge, it was the first class of its kind. There had been orientation tours for new patients in certain clinics and patient education for some specific diseases like diabetes, but nobody had ever really gotten into this area before.

How would you define this new area?

1 think of it as directed toward a new kind of medical consumer, what I call the activated patient. In my Herndon class, their questions went well beyond the boundaries of what had been thought of as patient education at that time. They wanted to know why they couldn’t have their own black bags of medical tools at home. No one had ever thought of teaching laypeople to use such tools before. There weren’t any models for that. So we just had to go along and figure out how to do it as best we could.

What motivates a person to take a self-care class?

We’ve looked at that, and there seem to be seven basic reasons people give, over and over, for their interest in self-care:

1. wanting to save money on health expenses;


2. wanting to be able to take better care of their family’s health, to be able to make effective family-health decisions;


3. wanting to take more responsibility for their own illness care—like hypertensives who want to be able to keep track of their own blood pressure;


4. wanting to learn how to hook into the medical system like a number of older people who outlived their doctors and weren’t able to find a new one they were satisfied with;


5. wanting to learn more about their bodies and how they work;


6. people with illness in the family, wanting to feel more confident in dealing with it;


7. people who’ve gotten turned on to healthier life styles, wanting to hear more about jogging, nutrition, yoga, meditation, and whatever else there might be to this whole healthy lifestyle business.

So you include more than just traditional Western medicine in your classes?

Oh, yes. Of the really alternative approaches to health, yoga is the main one we’ve used—mainly because a neighbor of mine happened to be a fine yoga teacher. If I’d lived next door to a Thai chi teacher, we might have included that. The introduction to yoga has certainly been well-accepted by our students.

I think giving these kinds of alternatives is awfully important, particularly because through them people can learn to get the same kinds of things they might now be getting from alcohol and various other chemicals. And those are not ways I like to see people relieve their stress.

How long did the Course for Activated Patients go on?

We ran two classes a year for almost three years. Then, in February of 1973, Howard Eisenberg did a story on the class for Parade magazine, and I got over two thousand letters as a result. That made me realize that what we were up to might be something with a much wider appeal than I’d thought.

About that time I began getting inquiries from the federal Department of Health, Education and Welfare, from a number of foundations, and from several of the faculty and deans who were interested in doing something more in the way of self-care at Georgetown University.

Several publishers started wining and dining me and convinced me that there was a need for a book on what we were doing. So I took a six-month sabbatical and collaborated with Howard Eisenberg on How to Be Your Own Doctor (Sometimes). Shortly after that, the Center for Continuing Health Education was formed at Georgetown, and I became its director.

So you were there until 1977?

Yes. Then our grant ran out, and the functions of the Center were divided between the Health Activated Person Program at the Georgetown School of Nursing, where they’re continuing to give an ongoing self-care course for the Washington community, and the Health Activation Network (see page 268), who put out a newsletter, “The Health Activation News,” to train self-care teachers and help people establish new courses.

You know, Keith, I have a feeling that if it had been some other doctor teaching that class, it might have ended up as just a lot of boring lectures. Have you had special training in communication, or are you just good at it?

Well, as you know, one of my daughters, Cindy, is deaf, and that’s made me very aware of the importance of getting and giving feedback. It got me very interested in good communications, and when I was talking to a patient I would always give and ask for feedback to be sure we were understanding each other.

And then the other thing was how much I loved doing it. I discovered that I liked being a facilitator better than being an authority. There was a feeling of real partnership. It was wonderful to relax out of my professional role and, if somebody asked me a question, to say, “1 don’t know. How do you suppose we’d go about finding out?”

It was a very rare thing in my medical education to hear a doctor say, “I don’t know.”

Incredibly rare. We were taught we were supposed to know all the answers.

How have health professionals reacted to self-care classes?

I like to say, scratch a doctor and you’ll find a teacher underneath. Most doctors have been too busy with day-to-day practice to develop as teachers, but once they do it, they find that it’s fun.

I’ve brought a lot of health professionals into selfcare classes, and while at times I’ve had to more or less drag them kicking and screaming into the pit, once they take off the white coat, loosen the tie, and get their shoes off, they find they’re having a fine time. It’s a real relief to be able to show your human side, and the people in the classes are always so appreciative.

There’s a real sense of working together for a common goal. Most of us went into medicine for pretty altruistic reasons. We’re not all dollar-sign guys. And when you start relating to people as active partners instead of passive pawns, they really appreciate it, and they let the doctor know.

In my medical school training, except for a little bit in psychiatry, I didn’t receive any formal training in communicating with patients. Many people would say that medical education makes doctors less capable of communicating on a meaningful level. Are there any signs that this is changing?

Well, coincidentally, I just finished reading a report on self-care from the Association of American Medical Colleges. They’re getting together a major project in which they will begin teaching self-care communication skills in a number of medical schools. Dr. James Hudson is going to be the Project director.

The American Medical Students Association also has modest self-care programs going at a number of medical schools. And of course there are all kinds of new and fairly informal projects at individual schools—there’s something here at the University of Minnesota Medical School, the University of Arizona has one, as does Georgetown University. There’s a big interest at UC Berkeley, and you were just telling me about the self-care class you visited at Wright State School of Medicine in Dayton. There’s actually quite a lot going on in the medical schools already.

Any signs of health insurance companies being willing to reimburse policy holders for self-care education expenses?

Blue Cross of Montana has started doing this on a very small scale, and some of the other Blue Cross plans have been saying they’re going to get into this area— they’re putting on some prevention education programs now. Several other insurance companies are looking into self-care education. International Group Health in Washington has started several projects. IGP’s head guy, Jim Gibbons, is a real self-care advocate.

Could you comment on the kinds of people who are—and should be—teaching self-care classes?

I’ve always felt that the ideal teacher was the nurse. Certainly the greatest enthusiasm for self-care has come from nurses, nurse practitioners, and physicians’ assistants. Many of these allied health professionals feel much more strongly about prevention and self-care than about diagnosis and treatment—which continues to be the main concern of most physicians.

Do you think it’s important for the people teaching these classes to have clinical experience?

It certainly helps. One of the real dilemmas these days is that people hear this from Reader’s Digest, that from the National Inquirer, and something else from Prevention. They need to be able to ask someone who has done more than just read the books.

How about in the schools? Do you think it would be an advantage to include people with clinical experience as a part of health-education classes?

Yes. Not only are clinical workers more likely to have experience with these matters, but it’d be very valuable for kids to be able to talk to a health worker at some time other than when they’re sick or need shots.

Do you see a connection between the widespread popularity of running and the developing self-care movement?

Absolutely. Because as people start feeling better from jogging, and begin to sleep better and eat better, they’re going to discover they have more energy than they ever did before. Then they begin to realize that health is a resource to be conserved, not something you can waste and then discard like a cigarette butt or a wrecked car.

Yes. Your body is a temple. Why treat it like a motel?

Yes, that’s a good one. So when people increase their nutritional awareness, or start jogging, or get into stress reduction, they feel better. And taken they say, “Well, gee, maybe I can kick smoking and kick alcohol and practice a healthier lifestyle. And it’ll pay off.” And it does!

What other cultural changes are we likely to see?

One we’re already seeing is a change in men’s thinking and behavior. For so long we’ve had this macho male image about everything that’s harmful or illegal.

If I smoke and it’s bad for me, I must really enjoy it. It’s a sort of bad-boy mentality. To have fun, you’ve got to be destructive—driving too fast, abusing your body or those of people around you.

That tough-guy mentality is softening. As I go into groups of my peers—men in their late forties or early fifties—I find I seldom hear the sort of thing which was the rule not very many years ago. You know, ” Boy, did we have a good time last night. I bet old Fred and I drank a fifth of booze . . .” and so on. That kind of bragging.

Now I’ll more likely hear a guy say, “You know, I’m so proud of myself. I finally quit smoking after twenty-two years.” And everyone is very interested in how he did it. They’re talking about jogging and cutting down on their drinking.

I had some unpleasant experiences—before going to medical school—when I tried to find certain health information in a medical library. It would have been much easier to look for comparable information in just about any other field—engineering, physics, biology. But technical medical information—for someone who is not a medical professional—is almost impossible to come by.

I recently called the National Arthritis Foundation to ask how our readers could order copies of a book they put out. It covers arthritic diseases in depth, it’s comprehensive, and it’s cheap—one of the best available sources of information on arthritis. I was told that it wasn’t available to laypeople, ”because they might misunderstand it. ” A medical librarian at Yale told me that she had been taught to discourage laypeople who came into the medical library in search of information, “because it was probably somebody looking for evidence for a malpractice suit. ” Why is medical information kept so secret?

Until recently, the medical mystique was much like the religious mystique in the days of Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation—the language of the laity was one world and the language of the clergy was another. They didn’t even say their prayers in the same language. It was a priesthood. There were things that the layperson wasn’t supposed to know about.

I think that what we’re seeing now, with the demystification of medical language, is comparable to the change Luther made in bringing Christianity into the language of the people.

That’s the most important thing that happens in these self-care classes. First, you let people know that it’s okay for them to step into this formerly forbidden area, and second, you guide them in their first steps. So the main thing is not the class itself, but the fact that it can get people started. It’s a perceptual door opener.

It should be the goal of every health professional to transfer useful and accurate tools, skills, and knowledge to his or her clients. To hide these “professional secrets” and keep them for one’s own aggrandizement is a malfunction of one’s professional role.

One last question, Keith. Would you look into your crystal ball and share your thoughts about the kinds of changes we’re going to see in the next ten years as a result of the growing enthusiasm for self-care?

When I first moved to Minnesota last year, I picked up a paper and saw that a man was considering running for governor on a health-promotion platform. I think we’re going to see mayors and governors and other political leaders picking this up—and probably in your state of California, too. I think self-care will be one of the big political issues of the next decade—in the way that education and agricultural reform and honesty in government have been hot political issues.

A second thing is that the business community is going to get increasingly involved in health promotion, self-care, and helping their employees become wiser buyers and wiser users of health-care services. The big corporations especially are feeling the pain of rising health-benefits costs. In fact, the guys bathe executive suites are hitting the ceiling. These decision-makers are suddenly realizing that health insurance premiums, disability insurance, early retirement, days lost from work due to illness, are all things they can do something about. Several companies last year paid more for health benefits than they did for any other product or service. So I think we’re going to see a lot of self-care promotion on the part of industry.

Third, I think a lot of leadership in this area is going to come from senior citizens. I think that women will continue to be especially active in self-care, and I think we’ll begin to see unions taking a major role.

Fourth, we’re going to see school systems putting in really high-quality self-care programs running all the way from kindergarten to high school. There are some exciting things happening along such lines in Maine, Montana, and Minnesota schools already.

And finally, I think we’re going to see a growing number of fitness/self-care/health-promotion groups, health-information centers, health clubs, self-care classes and study groups, alternative health centers, stop-smoking clinics, and exercise facilities, more widely available black-bag tools, and so on.

TF: How did you happen to leave college to study at the Esalen Institute?

KD: By the end of my junior year, that was 1970, I’d read every book on awareness, growth, and body work I could find. The authors of many of the best books turned out to be at Esalen. It was clear to me that something new was going on out there that wasn’t happening on my campus. I decided to go right to the source. It was probably the smartest thing I ever did. I spent six months at Esalen, taking dozens of workshops—yoga workshops, encounter workshops, massage workshops, sensitivity workshops, t’ai chi workshops.

You were also saying that Maslow’s book, Toward a Psychology of Being, was a very, important one for you around that time.

Yes. It’s a great book. It provided the whole context within which I was starting to think. It talks about life as being a continuum, with sickness and problems on one end and creativity and vitality, aliveness and brilliance on the other. Maslow suggests that we should experience ourselves as including that whole continuum. We are both the problems and the brilliance. He talks about a kind of growth in which we come to accept both. He calls this kind of acceptance “actualization.” I would recommend that book to anyone interested in body work or personal growth.

Another important book was Will Schutz’s Joy. It spoke of honesty and sensitivity and authenticity. It was a very revolutionary book when it came out in 1967. Since then these ideas have been widely accepted in education and religion and psychology.

Fritz Perls’ books, too Gestalt Therapy Verbatim and In and Out of the Garbage Pail. I really liked his notion of seeing yourself as a whole variety of sometimes disharmonious parts in relation to each other. And working with the separate parts to achieve a more integrated state.

What were the main ideas that the work at Esalen was based on?

I thought of them as realizations. One of the main ones was self-responsibility. I realized that I was responsible for myself to a much, much larger extent than I’d ever imagined. It soon became very clear that I was making choices in the way I breathed and the way I got sick and the way I perceived other people. I learned that I had many more alternatives than I had realized. I began to discover a much greater degree of freedom in my life than anyone had ever led me to believe.

Somehow, up to then, I’d picked up the belief that I wasn’t really empowered in my own right. That I needed to depend on my parents and my teachers and other kinds of “experts.” It was an amazing realization to discover that I was really at the root of my own life. It was pretty shattering, too, because I had to assume responsibility for a lot of situations I’d been blaming on other people and on institutions. On the other hand, I suddenly felt immensely powerful, almost godlike. I realized that if I chose to work on it, I could run a marathon, raise my IQ, learn to control my heartbeat—to do all kinds of things I’d never let myself believe I might be able to do.

What were some other realizations?

Another significant one was seeing the ways in which the mind and body were so intimately involved—like dancing partners. The mind really wasn’t separate from the body. Thinking and feeling and perceiving didn’t take place in some little box behind the eyes, as I’d always believed. My mind was present in every cell in my body. That was why the group leader in that early body work group had been able to read out my whole character. It was all there! I got so I could tell a great deal about a person by seeing them stand or sit or walk.

I learned that stress and emotional tension can become focused in a specific part of the body, and that if this happens over a long period of time it will permanently shape the person’s posture so that every movement will express that pattern. And the parts of the body in which emotions are trapped will be the parts most likely to develop malfunctions. For example, if a person needs to cry, but won’t let himself, he may stop the crying by clinching his jaw. If the jaw is held tightly, over a long period, chronic tension is likely to develop in the tempero-mandibular joint or grinding of the teeth or headaches. Or unexpressed anger, trapped in the abdomen, can lead to a wide variety of disorders.

So illness can come from unexpressed emotions.

Yes, and the opposite is also true. If a person in creative or unusually vital or energetic, it’s not just a matter of genetics or blind luck, it’s a result of choices—conscious or unconscious—that he or she is making every day.

So, the body isn’t just a static object, but a constantly-changing, pliable organism.

Yes. We are constantly in process. Our bodies are constantly being shaped by the choices we do—or don’t—make. We can passively let things go on as they are, or we can choose to make changes. I can notice that certain joints are tight and do yoga to loosen them up. If I’m feeling tense and scattered, I can meditate and actually change the kinds of brain waves I’m generating. If I’m having difficulty in personal relationships, I can get feedback from friends on my personal style of relating to people and try some new alternatives. I create myself with the choices I make every day.

So that’s what you started doing at Esalen.

Yes. I started noticing what kinds of choices made me feel good and what choices made me feel unwell. Later, when I started working as a therapist, I tried to help other people learn how to make similar kinds of choices, to design their own lives healthfully. I found that there was a real hunger for tools and skills of physical and psychological self-care.

Why do you think we are seeing this sudden interest in self-responsibility?

I think that a lot of us, whether we’re psychologists or housewives or shoe salesmen, are discovering that we’re not as healthy and fulfilled as we had dreams of being. A lot of people are discovering that giving all your faith and power to your doctor isn’t going to make you any healthier. The feeling that “I don’t know anything about my health and I don’t want to know,” which has been the predominant attitude in this culture, is really changing. People are realizing that an authoritarian medical system in which patients give over all their power to the doctors and function as though they’re deaf, dumb, and blind just isn’t meeting their needs. People are ready to take back a good deal of that power. People want to take care of themselves. And I think that the various kinds of body work are a big part of that.

What are the main approaches to body work?

One useful way of getting your bearings in the field of body work is to group kinds of body work by the general approach. Let me outline ten general kinds of self-care skills in the field of body work:

1. developing muscular strength and tone;

2. developing aerobic fitness;

3. developing flexibility:

4. developing relaxation skills;

5. developing breathing skills;

6. developing neuromuscular coordination;

7. using massage to develop sensory awareness and to fulfill our need to be touched;

8. working on emotions through the body;

9. using the mind to influence the body;

10. using the body to center the mind.
Of course, there’s a great deal of overlap among these ten general approaches.

Developing muscular strength—would that be something like weight lifting?

Yes. That’s one specific way. Pushups, swimming, tennis, basketball, housework, walking, running—any activity that uses the muscles. Anything that makes us really exert ourselves. Muscles that aren’t used get flabby and lose their tone. In addition, it’s important to remember that all the muscles in the body need to be developed in a balanced way. So activities that use a broad range of muscles are the best.

I’d like to ask you, as you go along, to suggest some of the best books for each of the ten approaches.

Sure. For developing muscular strength, the best overall- book is The East-West Exercise Book, by David Smith. General approach number two is developing aerobic fitness, building up the heart as a muscle. It’s a very valuable addition to an exercise program to get a stethoscope and just spend some time listening to your heart. And, of course, monitoring your pulse is an important part of such a program.

In developing an aerobics program, it’s important to remember that you need to perform a vigorous activity such as running, swimming, rowing, or rope jumping—wherein your body is exerting itself to 75 percent of its maximum pulse rate for at least fifteen minutes at least three times a week.

Two other excellent books on improving the health of your heart are Type A Behavior and Your Heart and The American Way of Life Need Not Be Dangerous to Your Health. The best book on aerobics exercise programs is The Aerobics Way, by Kenneth Cooper.

The third category on your list was developing flexibility.

This is where activities like yoga come in. Hatha yoga is a system of postures and exercises designed to gently stretch and tone all the muscles of the body. Yoga works to systematically lengthen, vitalize, and integrate the muscles of the body and to improve circulation and glandular nervous system function. It not only makes you more flexible, but it serves as a means of centering meditation as well.

Four beginning yoga books that many people have found helpful are Richard Hittelman’s Guide to Yoga, The Light of Yoga Society’s Beginner’s Manual, Jess Steam’s Yoga, Youth, and Reincarnation, and Swami Vishnu Devananda’s The Complete Illustrated Book of Yoga. A good introduction for older people is provided in Easy Does It Yoga for People Over 60. My favorite introduction to the philosophies behind doing yoga is Joel Kramer’s The Passionate Mind. And the very best advanced book on yoga is the classic by B. K. S. Iyengar, Light on Yoga (revised edition).

You also list relaxation skills as an approach to body work.

Few people are really good at voluntarily relaxing their bodies. As the stress of modern life increases, it becomes essential that we learn relaxation skills and take the time to practice them regularly. One of the pioneers in relaxation training was Edmund Jacobson. His system is called progressive relaxation. It’s described in his book You Must Relax!—I’ve always thought that was a pretty funny title. Another system of relaxation training is autogenics. It’s well described in Norman Shealy’s book 90 Days to Self-Health. There’s also a good cassette tape, Autogenic Training, by Vera Fryling, and a good anthology of approaches to relaxation is John White and James Fadiman’s Relax. My favorite book on preventing stress is Ken Pelletier’s Mind as Healer, Mind as Slayer.

Another approach you cite is developing breathing skills.

Paying attention to breathing is one of the most underrated approaches to body work. The air we breathe gives us life, yet most of us use only 20 to 30 percent of our lung capacity. We’ve used deep breathing exercises with older people at SAGE, and we’ve found that when people begin to breathe more deeply, their bodies and minds become revitalized. They become more alert and alive. Depression and anxiety often fall away.

Breathing exercises can also help you relax. Working on breathing can be a way to get more deeply in touch with feelings, too. People who are tense and depressed tend to breathe shallowly. A person in a relaxed, joyful state will automatically breathe more deeply.

The best practical book on breathing skills I know of is Breathe Away Your Tension, by Bruno Geba.

Describe what you mean by neuromuscular coordination as an approach to body work.

As we grow up, we learn to walk and to move in certain ways, and then, in early adulthood, our neuromuscular development diminishes and, unless we become dancers or acrobats, we fall into a few familiar patterns of moving our bodies. Many kinds of exercises, like running, involve the repetition of a limited range of movements and therefore leave much to be desired in the way of developing our full neuromuscular capacities. These approaches either encourage us to perform common, everyday movements in new ways or to move in some totally new ways. Improvisational dance and Feldenkrais exercises are two good examples of such approaches.

You can make up your own ways of doing new things with your body, too, like cleaning the house or washing the dishes with your other hand. Or learning to write with your nondominant hand. Or your toes. Or blindfolding yourself and exploring the world using only your other senses. Anything that takes you out of your normal patterns of muscular or sensory activity can be considered valid body work.

These approaches try to get your mind out of a rut. For examples, runners can experiment with adding play, movement, and dance to their regular run. Try running at varying speeds or sideways. Or backward. Of course, there are other sports, like basketball, that require constant improvisation. Aikido, a noncombat form of the martial arts, requires constant improvisation. It’s a good example of high-level training in neuromuscular sophistication. So is playing a musical instrument.

What are some good books in this area?

Two books by Moishe Feldenkrais, Awareness Through Movement and The Case of Norah, and Mabel Ellsworth Todd’s The Thinking Body. A good book on dance is Sweigard’s Human Movement Potential.

Approach number seven is massage.

In massage, one person uses his or her hands to touch and manipulate the body of another. There are many types of massage. Ideally, massage will accomplish several major goals.

Receiving a massage is an excellent way to become comfortable being touched by another person. This sounds pretty elementary, but for many of us, being touched in a nonsexual, caring fashion is not a usual part of our daily lives.

Light massage can facilitate relaxation and stimulate the sensory nervous system. Deeper massage can actually release the tension in our muscles. All kinds of massage can increase circulation and glandular functioning and promote a greater sense of well-being and aliveness.

The best overall how-to-get started book on massage is George Downing’s The Massage Book. Another book that does a nice job of summarizing the importance of being touched for our development and well-being is Ashley Montagu’s Touching.

The eighth approach is working on emotions through the body.

Emotions live in the body, and if they’re not allowed to express themselves, they may become lodged in the body as tension. Many of these approaches make uses of expressive activities in order to relieve the body of stress, frustration, and unresolved feelings. For example, instead of just stretching, you might stretch and scream or yell or make faces. Or you might hit a pillow or kick the floor to release tension. Or you might have a pretend fight with someone using Doffers kind of big, well-padded bat.

In some approaches, like bioenergetics, a therapist manipulates different areas while you focus on the memories and feelings that come up as the tension in the various parts of the body is released.

Nearly all the emotion-focused kinds of body work have grown out of the work of Wilhelm Reich. Rolling, Reichian energetics, Postural Integration, Radix, neoReichian therapies, bioenergetics, gestalt therapy, sensory awareness—these are some examples of body work methods that deal with feelings. Reich’s big contribution was the idea that when emotions lodge in the body, they can distort the body’s structure and impair its function. He then found that it was possible for these emotions to be released, leaving the individual not only feeling better but less susceptible to illness.

Would you recommend any books by Reich himself?

Probably not to start with. Reading Reich is like reading the Torah. There are some good books about Reich, though. Boadella’s book, Wilhelm Reich, The Evolution of His Work, is the best biography. Man in the Trap, by Elsworth Baker, is the best book on his clinical practice, and Bioenergetics, by Alexander Lowen, is a good introduction to Reichian thought. Then, and only then, for a general introduction to Reich’s own writings, I’d suggest The Selected Writings of Wilhelm Reich.

How about number nine, using the mind to influence the body?

In recent years there’s been a growing appreciation for the ways in which the mind can influence the functioning of the body. While most mind-body relationships take place outside of our conscious awareness, we can learn to train our minds to influence our bodies in positive, healing ways.

If you close your eyes and imagine that you’re getting beaten up, your mind will generate one kind of body state. If you imagine that you’re making love, it’ll generate another.

If I asked you to imagine that you’re lying on a warm, sunny beach on a quiet tropical island, your body would probably become more relaxed. Obviously, by choosing certain kinds of visualizations and following certain kinds of suggestions, you can put your body into various states. Some of these states can be useful for relaxing or for healing. Some techniques that make use of this approach are biofeedback, autogenics, selfhypnosis, and visualization.

A good book on visualization is Samuels and Samuels’ Seeing With the Mind’s Eye. Some others on influencing the body through the mind are Mind as Healer, Mind as Slayer, by Ken Pelletier, and The Mind /Body Effect, by Herbert Benson.

That brings us to the last category using the body to center the mind.

In these approaches, the idea is to focus the body in such a way so that the mind becomes quiet and clear. Just as stress and unwellness in the body can generate confusion in the mind, stillness in the body can help to produce a deep state of peace of mind.

Probably the most well-known of these approaches is meditation in its various forms. These approaches involve sitting in an alert stillness in order to develop a very centered, transpersonal aspect of the mind. Some of the approaches to mental centering are phrased in religious language. Others are strictly secular. Yogis and meditators have been practicing these kinds of disciplines for years, but contemporary science has only become aware of them recently.

Herbert Benson’s The Relaxation Response is a good overview of meditative approaches. Probably the best how-to-do-it books are Lawrence LeShan’s How to Meditate and Ken Pelletier’s Mind as Healer, Mind as Slayer (again). A favorite is Chogyam Trungpa’s Meditation in Action.

Body work covers a big area!

It certainly does. For some people, body work means yoga. For others, dance. For others, sports or massage. The best thing for you may be to sit quietly in a peaceful place for a long time. For me it may be yelling and laughing and hitting pillows.

The fact that there’s no “right way” has made my work in this field very exciting. Instead of some set of rules to follow, there’s a real freedom to explore. There are many, many ways for us to develop our bodies and our minds. All the books I’ve mentioned are ultimately talking about the same thing—each of us has our own unique path to happiness and fulfillment.

DiCarlo: Please describe the origins of the human potential movement… What was your involvement and what sparked your interest in the exploration of human potential?

Leonard: In the mid-60s, I was a senior editor at Look Magazine, one of the most prestigious and award-winning magazines of its day. I was also west coast editorial manager and I had done lots of award-winning feature articles on education, starting in 1956 with “What is A Teacher?” I did a piece in 1964 called “Revolution in Education”. In the last paragraph I said something about “human potential”. As a result, we must have received at least one hundred letters from readers, which essentially said, “That’s what we really need to do, focus upon the human potential.” It occurred to me put in a request to do an article on the human potential and my request was granted.

Those were the golden days of journalism. Look writers had total authority to do anything they wanted to do. So I began criss-crossing the country. When I was finished I had interviewed 37 experts on the subject of the human potential. Psychiatrists, psychologists, brain researchers-even theologians and philosophers. Not one of them said we were using more than 10% of our capacity. In later years, I came to realize that was a very conservative estimate-we’re using about 1% I would guess. Maybe less.

During the 7 months in which I was criss-crossing the country, I had heard something about Michael Murphy and this little institute called Esalen in Big Sur, California, the programs of which ran under the banner, “Human Potentialities.” When I finally had the opportunity to meet Michael, we hit it off immediately. We went to the house of a woman we both knew to have dinner. After we had left, we kept on talking, till three in the morning. We’ve been talking ever since. I met Mike February 2, 1965 and it changed my life.

He was really into the subject of human potential and we had what you might call a dovetailing of interests. I knew quite a bit about various social movements, such as the civil rights movement, I covered that story from Little Rock, right on through Selma and Ole Mist-the whole thing. I also knew a lot about brain research and behavioral psychology from the work I had been doing on this human potential article. Mike was very well versed on Eastern philosophy and religion, humanistic psychology and some of the more frontier developments of the day, such as biofeedback. So when we started exchanging stories, everything seemed to go together. It made a complete picture. So we just immediately started brainstorming, saying what could we both do and what should be done. A number of the events of that time indicated to us that some sort of transformation really wanted to happen. Of course these were the 60s when such things seemed imminent. So we would just toss out ideas, which I would scrawl down on a piece of paper and throw onto the floor. The accumulated paper looked like a snowstorm, we were throwing so many things. At one point I said, “How about this….we’ve got a civil rights movement and we’ve got a free speech movement…how about a human potential movement?” So I just wrote it down and threw it on the floor. I guess that was the beginning of it.

We started talking about the human potential movement almost jokingly. And that was about the same time the national media discovered Esalen. I never did a story in Look specifically on Esalen, because I thought, “Maybe I’m too close to this and maybe I shouldn’t do it. Maybe somebody else should do it.” Sure enough, by 1967 and 68, the media was in full force, and they picked up the term “human potential movement.” About four years later, Mike and I looked around and said, “My God, this is not what we had in mind at all.” In the beginning, like a child who is attracted to the brightest toy on the floor, the media was fixated upon the mixed baths, hot tubs and encounter groups. So they assumed that the human potential movement must have a lot to do with people getting into hot tubs and crying or yelling things at each other. So we said, “Let’s un-name this movement.” We told others there was no such thing as the human potential movement. But we found that it’s much harder to un-name a movement than it is to name it.

Over the years we have come to accept it, and actually it’s a wonderful term. What we had in mind was not just the emotional side of human experience. We had the idea of integral transformation-of mind, body, soul and heart- from the very beginning. So that’s how the human potential movement started.

DiCarlo: In light of the many years you have been at the leading edge of the human potential movement, I’m wondering if you can help put things into their proper persepctive. More specifically, how have the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s set the stage for the new paradigm which is now emerging?

Leonard: First of all, I must say that a lot of people don’t want to take a look back at the 60s. All the big 60s books really haven’t sold well. We still haven’t come to terms with that decade. I think that many people are still afraid of the 60s and the ideas that were presented. Some people think the 60s were a period in parenthesis-a decade that really didn’t count-when our whole culture suddenly got out of step. But I don’t think that’s true. I think the activity of the 60s was a very much needed and long overdue reaction and at certain times over-reaction, to years, decades, and centuries of repressiveness and injustice. In think what the 60s basically did was set the agenda for necessary change that we still haven’t gotten around to. And I’m hoping the 90s can be a time when we get to work on that agenda.

Look at all the things that came up in the 60s-the whole idea of ethnicity, race, of gender. The women’s movement. The gay movement. The environmental movement. All of those things began in the 1960s. There was a sudden sunburst before the powers-that-be reacted by clamping down on much of it. There was a counter-60s movement. To use a body metaphor, it is true that many of us during those years were kind of short sighted, but we were literally ahead of ourselves. And a lot of things were done without too much wisdom. But it was a very euphoric and crazy time that clearly and powerfully set the agenda for change.

The 1970s, on the other hand, was a period of what I would call “cultural diffusion.” The ideas that had been circulating around college campuses-mostly in certain enclaves on both coasts but also scattered throughout various pockets in the country-began to diffuse throughout the whole culture. Some of the ideas were better absorbed than others. The sexual revolution, according to Yankalovich surveys in the late 70s, was the most pervasive. Certain sexual practices that were only being promulgated by hippies and the like on the West Coast began to show up wildly throughout the culture- in Des Moines and in Texarcana-wherever you wanted to look. Many have said, “Well, these ideas were co-opted. They have lost some of their fine purity.” Well, that’s OK. Compromise is part of change. But there was a tremendous cultural diffusion.

Also, the 70s was a period of rationalization and commercialization of a lot of good practices. Organizations like “est” took ideas from gestalt therapy and Zen, and so forth, and packaged it very neatly and put it out in hotel ballrooms. I think those organizations probably did more good than harm. But here again, it was a little too pro-forma, it was a little too pat. Of course some people who wouldn’t go to Esalen might go to a hotel ballroom where they could still wear their coat and tie where they could see there was another world and that other possibilities could exist. And we really are a bizarre culture in not recognizing these other spiritual possibilities that have been our birthright since the human race became human. Humankind emerged on this planet with vision, with tremendous vision of an unseen world, of a spiritual realm that held meaning and guidance for us all. The consequences of lack of vision are quite clear- “Where there is no vision the people perish” as the bible says. So all these things were part of the cultural diffusion. Some of these new, “old” learnings, which go way back yet seemed new in the 60s, spread. Ideas found in Eastern philosophies were introduced in the 1960s and spread widely in the 1970s.

Then in the 1980s, it continued spreading quietly, but at the same time, there was a tremendous backlash against it. The twelve years of Reagan and Bush presented much opposition. They were very, very opposed to many of the ideas. Of course, a lot of democrats were also opposed to the ideas of the 60s. It’s interesting, Reagan was elected to be governor of California on the basis of his promise to clobber the University of California. That was his primary platform. And he did it. He held back the free-speech movement. The Reagan administration sent helicopters to drop tear gas not only on the university but all over Berkley. I was over there during the People’s Park uprising and I was gassed-we were all gassed. All the Look people were trapped right in the middle of the campus. We were the only ones there on The Terrace who were watching this battle unfold beneath us. It was very bizarre. But there was that kind of backlash. So the movement entered into national politics in the 80s.

Now, during the 90s I think we are kind of teetering on the brink. We can go forwards or backwards, but I feel necessity will force us to realize that the old ways are simply not working. That repressiveness is not the answer. On the other hand, total license is not the answer either. Total freedom to do anything, the freedom to buy assualt weapons or do anything one wants, doesn’t work. There has to be some kind of long-term, disciplined practice. There has to be this understanding that that’s the way things work. I think there are quite a few hints that’s now happening.

DiCarlo: Do you think the 60s represented a kind of a “dress rehearsal” for the true transformation taking place in the 90s?

Leonard: The 60s certainly put the agenda for transformation up there. Now we’ve got to do it. There is so much more transformative activity going on now than in the 60s. Everybody thinks the 60s was radical. What was considered radical back then is kindergarten stuff compared to what’s going on now.

DiCarlo: What are some of the more hopeful signs that you see that we will move forward?

Leonard: A lot of things…. For example, never before in human history has so much of the great wisdom teaching of all ages and all cultures been so available throughout the world. It really is a global village. You can go to the corner drugstore and buy the Tibetan Book of The Dead. The easy availability is something new. Even a thinker as wise as Hagel did not have as much access to Oriental thought as an average college student does today. And of course a lot of information is being spread throughout the world via the satellites, through the communications network-the bad as well as the good. And that is something new. Very revolutionary. It contributed towards the downfall of communism. Havel said rock-and-roll caused the Berlin Wall to go down. That was his quote.

Another significant development is all the understanding we’re getting now on human evolution. You see new headlines constantly about the new male Lucy, the early ancestor of our species, for example, and the understanding of the power of the evolutionary process. One of the hallmarks of the project that Mike and I are working on, is the idea that evolution has not ended. The Future of The Body is about the next step. We are still evolving and I think things are really moving.

We have such a rich legacy of positive accomplishments. Just consider the Eskimo, Aruba tribesman, East Indian, Japanese Samurai, Christian Desert Fathers, the shaman, the Penitenti, Victorian Novelists, 20th century scientists…consider all the different kinds of governments, governance and philosophies that we have had. Embedded in this flamboyant richness, we’ve always had hints of further evolution. But now, all this diversity is becoming accessible everywhere on the earth. No one living before the mid-20th century-even the privileged king or monarch or greatest scientist of the time-has had as much access as we do today to the descriptions of metanormal capacities in people. Never before was there a medical science that could precisely measure the physiological changes produced by transformative practice. At no other time have so many people practiced so many different disciplines for growth and transcendence.

In public meeting places you find people practicing Sufi exercises that were once reserved for initiates. This stuff is really happening. Shamanic practices of Stone Age people are offered at workshops. It’s really spreading, more now than ever before. There’s a magazine called “Common Ground” published in the San Francisco area that has advertisements for literally hundreds of these activities. It is incredible. In the 60s this was simply not available. We have much, much more of this paradigm-busting lore now than we had back then. It’s not even close-it’s a thousand times more than what we had in the 60s.

Psychoneuroimmunology has had a powerful influence in the medical profession and is showing that emotions and feelings influence every aspect of bodily functioning. Ideas of the mind-body connection grace the covers of the news magazines now…The Bill Moyers Special, “Healing and the Mind” has had a very powerful influence on a relatively large audience. Not like Roseanne of course, but it doesn’t take all the people to make changes. It takes some of the people who are controlling the instruments of power, like those in the media.

A lot of experiments are going on, even though mainstream science is very loathe to admit it, which demonstrate that the minds of individuals can influence living tissue at a distance. They can influence bacteria, plants and other human beings. And these have been demonstrated in good, rigorous experiments, where the protocols and the procedures are much more closely monitored than they would be in a normal scientific experiment, where people are not so suspicious.

The anthropologists and sociologists have made so much progress too, in showing how our facial expressions, the way we walk, the way we move, how these things are influenced by culture. And how we can break out of these cultural traps.

Such martial arts as aikido, which I think is transformative, is now spreading throughout the world. It is a very transformative martial art that is based upon love and harmony. And that’s a very radical idea.

DiCarlo: Qi Gong also..

Leonard: Qi Gong and T’ai Chi continues to spread.

Very quietly the shift is occurring.

Also, the attitude of the media towards things such as Esalen has greatly shifted since the 1960s. In the very beginning before they knew what was happening, there were some wonderful articles about Esalen. Then by the 70s everybody who wrote about Esalen would talk about “touchy-feely” things while sticking their tongues in their cheeks. There was so much sticking of tongues in the cheeks that on Madison Avenue they had to develop a special operation to plug up the holes. But now, I have a whole press kit of articles that were written in 1987 about Esalen and every one of them is favorable. Part of the favorable response was simply a celebration of survival. Esalen endured and that’s pretty good. Nobody expected that. And when it hit its 30th birthday in 1992, there were even more favorable articles. It’s almost as if it’s now in the mainstream, an edge of the establishment. Recently Vogue and the New York Times all had very nice articles about Esalen. Today, Esalen is packed-you can’t even get in. So very, very quietly these “new/old” ideas are integrating into the very fabric of our society. It’s about something that appears to be almost essential to humanity. Without vision, without the understanding that there is the realm of the spirit that can give us guidance, that can give us meaning to life, I don’t think we can do anything. Life that is just consuming is totally an empty life. You can never get enough of what you really don’t want.

DiCarlo: Speaking of this realm of the spirit-Do you think there are beings that exist on different levels of reality that somehow guide the unfoldment of human potential?

Leonard: Well, I don’t think there is any question. What an impoverished universe it would be if what we see with our senses, and what we can pick up with our instruments of science represented all that there is in existence. Before the understanding of radio waves anybody who said you could hear a message from someone far away would have been labeled a kook. Are we arrogant enough to say that now our instruments have picked up all the emanations of life that exist? Of course there are more! Wherever you go, there is always more. And I don’t know what they are. I am not one of those who follows the idea of aliens and angels, but I would by very surprised, in fact, it’s unthinkable to me that our science and our senses have now picked up all the forms of life or energy that exist. There’s no question about it.

In my own L.E.T. work, Leonard Energy Training, we do exercises that are absolutely reliable, where average, untrained folks can wander around the room with eyes covered with cloth so they cannot see. When I clap my hands, the great majority of these people can point to the location of their partner who might be anywhere in the room or even outside the room. It takes a little induction to get people ready for this. One half hour-that’s all. But this is now routine. This is not special. This is not extraordinary. This is routine. We call this, “The Synchronization Process”.. I describe it briefly in the back of my book, The Silent Pulse.

So obviously, there is some kind of energy there that is not in the electromagnetic spectrum. We don’t want to be electro-magnetic chauvinists you know. There’s got to be more to the world than the electro-magnetic spectrum.

But there’s no question, there are other beings. There have got to be.

DiCarlo: Do you think scientists who are attempting to map and measure these other dimensions of “subtle” energies are heading in the right direction?

Leonard: Yes. Many years ago, myself and my ex-wife went to the University of California at Davis and were measured as we attempted to move our life energy from the right to the left hand. I still have the graphs. They were picking up electrical potentials off the back of each hand, and just by intention alone…we would say, “move energy right” and you would see the pulsations going up, up up, above the mid-line on the graph. Then we would say, “now bring the energy to the left” and you would see the line on the graph go down and over to the other side. Now, how is that done? I don’t know.

So I think, yes, let’s try to measure these things. You have to keep trying or else you’re not a real scientist. You’re not a scientist on the edge of discovery. I think it’s a wonderful idea.

DiCarlo: Could you elaborate on the integral practice for the development of human potential you have developed with Michael Murphy?

Leonard: Mike and I have written a book called The Life We Are Given. In a sense it is the follow upto Michael’s, The Future of The Body but it can stand totally alone. You might say that it is a book of instruction for the average person, which tells them what they can do to begin an integral transformative practice. Integral means, to integrate “mind, body, soul and heart.” Transformative mean that it’s based on positive change. Practice is a wonderful word, meaning something you do on a regular, disciplined basis. Not primarily for the goodies you get out of it, but primarily for the sake of doing it. A practice is the path you walk. You do it for its own sake. Paradoxically, the people who follow a practice for its own sake are the ones who get the most extraordinary results.

In part three of The Future of The Body Michael posits that the best way to achieve metanormal capacities, of perception, communication abilities, vitality, volition, etc. is through integral transformative practices. So for two years, throughout most of 1992 and 1993, we ran an experimental class. There were 33 people in the first group and 30 in the second group. We met for just two hours every Saturday but everybody had a number of commitments, things that they had to do every week. We kept very close statistics. We also had affirmations as to positive changes in their life and especially in their bodies. That’s something a lot of human potential workshops and experiments don’t do. They don’t keep close statistics which helps make things more understandable. We are offering a way for the average person to embark on this practice, just through reading this book and getting together with other folks.

DiCarlo: So this is a step-by-step methodology for individual transformation?

Leonard: Well, we have developed a step-by-step methodology for integral transformative practice. By doing that-and you can’t be sure-the odds are very good that you will get some positive transformation, because almost everybody, especially in the second cycle in 1993, got some very, very significant, positive changes. The amount of change is really quite spectacular. All sorts of wonderful changes in their body, some of which would have to be called metanormal and extraordinary.

DiCarlo: What would be some of the key elements of this practice?

Leonard: First of all, before we started these classes, I developed a less than 40 minute “kata”. Kata is just a convenient term in the martial arts which simply mean “form”. It’s a specific form where you go through a certain series of moves, always in the same sequence.

We asked that everyone in the course perform this kata at least 5 days a week. Some people did this seven days a week. It takes only 40 minutes because from the very beginning we wanted to make this a “householders path”. That is, a practice that can be engaged in by people who have jobs and a family. Not just people who live in a monastery or go on a retreat. So we wanted to do something that was feasible, and that was an important part of the experiment. These people all had jobs and families of sorts-they had a life other than this practice. But by doing the practice they got really remarkable results.

We asked all the participants to attend the class punctually and regularly. Also, we asked that everyone do at least three hours of aerobic exercise every week, in no increment less than 30 minutes. Everyone was also asked to be conscious of everything they ate, and a very low fat diet was recommended. We also recommended strength training but that was not absolutely required. We asked that everybody stay current in their emotional relations with all the people in the class, the teachers, and the people in their lives. We also did some emotional group work in the class, but we allowed people to do whatever they needed to do to handle that and report on it. Staying current in other words. Not letting things build up. Keeping the emotional information flowing to the appropriate people.

We also had affirmations. Everyone made four affirmations near the beginning of the class. These affirmations were written in the present tense, and went something like this, “I George Leonard, intend to see that the following circumstances have occurred by November 21, 1992.” Then, the rest is written in present tense, and for affirmation number one, we asked people to do things that are normal-not metanormal by any means. In other words, something that if you just did what you were supposed to do, you would achieve it and nobody would be surprised. It would be quite understandable through all the canons and concepts of present day science and medicine. For example, a person might affirm in writing, “My waist measures 32 inches” whereas it might measure 34 inches in the beginning.

All participants fill out a record of their affirmations, which is kept in a file. At the end, on November the 21st using this example, they would make note of their progress. If they have really watched their diet, and if they have done the aerobic exercises and perhaps the strength exercises, no one should be surprised that they have achieved this intended outcome.

The second affirmation for the first year was what we call, “exceptional”. Something that could still be explained by modern, mainstream science, but which would be an exception. Such as, “I measure 5 foot 6 inches” and your measurement right now is 5 foot 5 inches. Well, to grow an inch at age forty is kind of unusual isn’t it? I think most people can grow about a third of an inch or a half of an inch just by improving their posture. But to actually grow measurably a whole inch would be kind of exceptional.

We rated people on a scale of zero to ten to see how well they achieved their affirmations. We tried to make it as objective as possible with measurements. We didn’t restrict it to the objective because that would be too limiting, but we had people make it objective as much as possible. In other words, if a person were affirming an improvement in eyesight, we asked them to go to an eye doctor and have the eyes measured and have a record of it in the beginning and again, eleven months later. Incidentally, in that particular case we got remarkable results.

The third affirmation was the metanormal, something that could not be explained by traditional science and something that rarely happens to people. For example, a metanormal affirmation might be to grow two inches. And we got fascinating results. In fact, during the 1993 program, the success in achieving affirmation number three was 6.67 on a scale from zero to ten.

The fourth affirmation was the same for everybody, “My entire body is balanced, vital and healthy.” We wanted to cover this base because we didn’t want someone to achieve an unusual metanormal state at the expense of their health and balance. And that was one that we really excelled at with an 8.2 overall improvement in health on a zero to 10 scale.

Taking a look at all this gave us some ideas for some very practical applications. We cannot solve our health care crisis in a financially viable way. It is impossible to do it no matter what method we use, as long as we continue to use our present method of medical technology, which is sickness based and relies upon expensive drugs and expensive technology. The only way we can make it work is through a radical change in lifestyle. And if we can change the lifestyle of a group of ordinary Americans, improving their health by 8.2 on a scale of 0 to 10, we can save hundreds of billions of dollars in this country. So it’s very practical.

So we asked that everyone fulfill their affirmations. In other words, they continued to speak their affirmations in various ways. In practice we used focused surrender, which was one of our best methods and inductions for achieving these meta-normalities.

DiCarlo: Focused surrender? What’s that?

Leonard: While writing The Silent Pulse , I noticed there seem to be certain magical moments in life, which I call periods of perfect rhythm, where everything seems perfect. If you go one way that’s exactly the right way and you’ll find something marvelous there; if you go the other way that’s the right way, and so forth and so on. These moments of perfect rhythm generally come in a period where you have concentrated very hard on something. You are really focused. After this period of intense concentration, you surrender. You let go of that which you were focusing upon. Focused surrender is a combination of these two actions.

There’s a big debate going on right now: Is the petitioned form of prayer, where an individual requests something specific, like a cure from an illness, more effective than accepting prayer, thanksgiving prayer, like “Thy Will Be Done”. There has been research studying the effectiveness of various kinds of prayer on various kinds of organisms. The debate is still open. Some people come down on the side, “Thy Will Be Done” as the best way to go about it. In other words, surrender.

Now what I have done-and I did this way back in the 70s-is to devise a way where you really get both. A combination of the two. And it’s really at the point where you surrender that magical things might begin to happen. Extraordinary things. What I call this is a “mental-material interface”. In Integral Transformation Practice training we have an activity where we sound a gong. As long as the participant can hear the gong, they are to focus with all their power on making whatever state they want to achieve absolutely real in their consciousness. This is real in the present moment in this universe, because your consciousness is a part of this universe. If you want to experience yourself as being an inch taller, you see yourself as an inch taller. That exists in your consciousness and it’s real. Take the example of the wiring diagram of a little radio. The radio itself is real. No one would dispute that since it is concrete and exists in three dimensions. Of course, if you drop it and step on it, it won’t work anymore. It’s broken. There’s also a wiring diagram. That’s real too, it’s just on two dimensions primarily. Now, how about the diagram as it exists in the mind of the inventor, of the person who works on that radio. Is that real or not? My argument is that these represent three different forms of reality, but they are all equally real.

So next, the person is instructed to follow the tone of the gong down into the void itself, into the nothingness. When it reaches that void and nothingness from which all things arise-the creative void-they completely let go of whatever they are envisioning. The way we do it, you are lying on your back and you hold your left hand up over your abdomen as long as you can hear the sound. If you can no longer hear the sound, drop it. Say, “I give up.” What we have found-and we can’t prove this-is that at the moment of surrender, the mental-material interface somehow clicks in. In other words, what was real in the mental realm, to some small extent becomes real in the material realm. Of all the methods we have tried, focused-surrender has turned out to be our most effective induction.

The great warrior works to achieve control, then acts with abandon. In aikido, I have worked and worked and worked on certain techniques, but when I’m being attacked, if I think about the techniques, I’ve had it. You have got to let go totally. Just let it happen. Achieve control, then act with abandon. Many great sports achievements, and many great achievements in the world, I think, result from the combination of the two.

DiCarlo: I like that because then you get a blend between personal will and perhaps Higher Will. There’s no conflict, just a creative dance between the individual and the universe.

Leonard: Boy, you’ve got it exactly. It’s not one or the other. The idea of focused surrender in which the mental and material can touch, individual will finally letting go to grace. As Mike said in his book, “The winds of grace are always blowing, you just have to raise your sails.”

DiCarlo: What sort of metanormal capabilities have manifested for some of the people?

Leonard: There’s one woman in her mid-40s whose grandfather on her mother’s side went practically blind from cataracts. This was before the condition could be treated through surgery, and this man could barely see. Her mother had the cataract operation in her 40s. This woman has three older sisters, and each of them had the cataract operation while they were in their 40s. It was an absolutely genetic condition. When this woman in the class had achieved the age of 42, she developed cataracts, which was noted in her yearly examination and she assumed she too would have the operation since one of the cataracts was near the middle of the cornea.

So she made an affirmation in the 1992 class that her eyes were free of cataracts. Unfortunately, when she went in for the first examination, she told the eye doctor. He scoffed at the idea. He said, “well, you can change some things, but cataracts you can never change.” Still, she was a good student and did that work and every time she did the kata she would take the palms of her hand and place them three or four inches from each eye, kind of stroking the eyes with the energy in the palms of each hand, saying, “My vision is clear. My eyes are free of cataracts.”

When time at the end of the 92 cycle came, this woman just couldn’t face going in for her eye exam because the doctor had been so certain the condition could not be healed without surgery. If you’ve ever wondered why people don’t achieve their potential, this is one example. The cultural pressure of the current paradigm is extremely powerful and is enunciated in so many different ways by the experts and the acknowledged authorities in each field.

Although the woman had given up on it , she continued doing the affirmation every time she did the kata, which was five times a week. Near the end of the second year of the program, she needed some prescription sunglasses and her old prescription was out of date. She went to the same hospital as before and after she had the exam she waited for the usual cataract lecture. The doctor said, “Do you have any inherited eye problems?” She responded, “Don’t you know? How about my cataracts?” “What cataracts?,” said the doctor. They were gone.

DiCarlo: That’s an incredible example of realized human potential. I’m wondering, how does this potential, which is inherently in us all, get blocked? You’ve already mentioned cultural pressures…

Leonard: Let me give you some examples…. You know how as schoolchildren, we all worried that we didn’t have enough ability. We weren’t sure that we were going to do well enough on the achievement tests. Well, I really believe that the biggest threat to the establishment is not underachieving, but rather it’s the threat of overachieving.

When I was covering education back in the 1960s, I was going around the country doing an article on programmed education. In fact, it was that same story , “Revolution in Education” that gave me the idea for the human potential story. It was in Roanoke, Virginia, where I had heard about this student at a local junior high school who had taken a simple programmed course on solid geometry home for a long weekend. He finished one semester’s worth of work over that period, Friday until Monday. Now do you think the school system would cheer about that?

DiCarlo: You would think they would marvel at the accomplishment..

Leonard: No, they thought, “what the hell do we do with this guy?” What do you do with the kids who come into first grade reading very fluently? The system is set-up to keep everybody in lock-step. Those who are not in lock-step are a threat to the system.

I think that humans natural tendency is to learn. We are learning animals. We are put here on this planet to learn. We are genetically endowed to learn a great deal over a lifetime rather than having to wait through the mechanisms of evolution, of mutation and selection and so forth. Because of this, changes can be made during one lifetime. But unfortunately, there is actually very little positive reinforcement, and much adversive conditioning which is opposed to people achieving their full potential.

DiCarlo: Would you say that it’s a control issue?

Leonard: Control?

DiCarlo: In so far as certain people in society wanting to control us in certain ways…

Leonard: I don’t think it’s any conscious control. In my book, The Transformation I offer the whole idea of the human individual as being a component of society as an example of one of the inventions of civilization. The first pyramid building gangs you might say. We specialize and standardize components so they are reliable and predictable. A true learner is none of those things. A learner is eternally surprising. Unpredictable. Not necessarily reliable to do the same job the same way every time. So the entire system works against the full development of human potential. The system works against learning. Our present school system actually set-up to stop the human organism from learning in a really radical and deep way.

To learn is to change. Education is a process which changes the learner. How much are we willing for our students to change in school? You know, they see, “Two plus two,” and before they have learned elementary addition they will just look at it with a blank expression on their face. After being taught they can say, “four.” And that is a change. So that’s definitely a learning. Our children are learning certain amounts of symbolic manipulation and the memorization of a bit of the common cultural material, but in learning to be a learner, and learning to create, in learning to love, in learning to feel deeply, there is a tremendous constraint against learning, if learning is any kind of significant change. And if learning is not any kind of significant change, then what the hell is it? In other words, if you don’t change after a learning experience, if you are not different from when the learning experience started, you have not learned much. Learning is not truly respected. Education as it is now constituted really works against learning in the deepest sense. You don’t want people to change deeply because it would be very worrisome to the system.

I have often thought about this: Let’s say that learning is done in segments. I am not sure that’s even the right way to do it, but if learning is done in segments in school, at the end of each segment, the teacher should not be necessary. In other words, the teacher should fade from prominence. Maybe one of the jobs of a teacher is to set the learners on a course of learning, and then gradually fade himself or herself, so that the last day, the students wouldn’t even notice the teacher there.

DiCarlo: That would be a switch..

We need to cultivate a real respect for learning. You know, people’s thought of the human potential movement does not normally include calculus. I think it does include calculus. Mike and I both feel that way. Another requirement we had in our Integral Transformative Practice Club (ITP), was that everybody would agree to read assignments and write essays. That doesn’t sound very New Age does it?

DiCarlo: Not at all…

Leonard: But that’s integral transformative practice-it’s across the board. We feel that to neglect any of those four aspects of being human-mind, body, heart or soul-is a big mistake. People will do things if they know why they are doing them. If they have some kind of vision as to why they are doing them. We need vision. Every viable culture and every successful individual needs at least two guardian angels-vision and practice. Both of those have been totally lost. They have become endangered species in the culture of the freeway and shopping mall.

Vision is given away to obsession with short term goals; practice is given away to the quick fix. “The One Minute Manager”, “Total Fitness in One Week”. Almost all “how-to” books; New Age books are mostly quick-fix books. And you don’t learn anything by the quick fix. It takes long-term regular practice.

There’s an old Eastern idea that “where there is no practice, nations fall into ruin.” I think we have to get the idea of long-term, regular practice for everybody, rather than “10 Easy Lessons” or “Fast, Temporary Relief”-all the slogans you hear in this culture.

Just take a look at the areas in which we have our biggest problems: the economy; health care; politics; pharmacology; crime; and environment, the most important one of all. Look at each of these. The factor that is common to each problem involves long term versus short-term. In all of those, we tend to do what seems best on the short term, but what we are really doing is losing the long term. Almost always, the short term is inimical to the long term. Sometimes you have to do both, but we’ve almost totally neglected the long term. So I think that factor, long term versus short term is something people need to take a look at.

When you adopt a practice, you’re in it for the long haul. You work, and work and work on a thing. You diligently keep practicing the same thing over and over again. You are not getting anywhere- or so you think. But you are getting somewhere. It doesn’t show itself. Then finally when it clicks in, you have this little spurt of apparent progress. But where did the learning take place? It took place on the plateau.

Just think about all those years people worked against the whole communist system. Then in a period of a few weeks, the Berlin wall goes down. Then a few months afterwards most of the eastern satellites had given up communism. Some said, “My God, change occurred very fast.” But in reality, that change was occurring over the last 20 or 30 years. The change occurred because of long time learning. And the learning occurs on the plateau. So if I have any message, I want to preach the plateau…you have to preach the plateau to young people. Just hang in there.

Excerpted from the book Towards A New World View: Conversations At The Leading Edge with Russell E. DiCarlo. The 377-page book features new and inspiring interviews with 27 paradigm pioneers in the fields of medicine, psychology, economics, business, religion, science, education and human potential. Featuring: Willis Harman, Matthew Fox, Joan Boysenko, George Leonard, Gary Zukav, Robert Monroe, Hazel Henderson, Fred Alan Wolf, Peter Senge, Jacquelyn Small, Elmer Green, Larry Dossey, Carolyn Myss, Stan Grof, Rich Tarnas, Marilyn Ferguson, Marsha Sinetar, Dr. Raymond Moody, Stephen Covey and Peter Russell.

Russell E. DiCarlo is a medical writer, author, lecturer and workshop leader who’s focus is on personal transformation, consciousness research and the fields of energy and anti-aging medicine. His forthcoming book is entitled “The Definitive Guide To Anti-Aging Medicine” (1998, Future Medicine Publishing). DiCarlo resides in Erie, Pennsylvania.

Copyright 1996. Epic Publishing. All Rights Reserved.

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There is an old adage that active people seek active lifestyles, and that Darwin’s theory of natural selection applies to exercise. It has always been hard to truly tell if exercise is associated with improved health, or whether healthy people are naturally drawn to more active tasks. For those who are still not convinced about the benefits of exercise as part of a healthier lifestyle, it has been a tough argument to refute.

Back in the mid 1980’s evidence started to mount that if people engaged in exercise over periods of time, they may reduce their chances of acquiring certain types of diseases, such as heart disease, and other cardiovascular disorders. Research also pointed out that regular exercise may reduce premature mortality, thus assisting persons in living longer through maintaining a healthy lifestyle. These results were independent of their gender, places where they lived, their body weight, and other types of medical conditions, such as blood pressure status, and family history of a particular disease.

The concept of exercise in the past ten years has moved into a new realm – that of looking at the the effects of exercise on special populations. Special populations groups are persons with diseases, and other metabolic conditions that are usually under the care of physicians or other health care personnel.

Exercise and Special Populations – Pregnancy

One of the first special population groups to be studied directly under exercise conditions were pregnant women. For many years previously, obstetricians felt that exercise may harm the developing baby and cause unnecessary problems during pregnancy and delivery. This was in the absence of any concrete scientific information.

Over the past 15 years there have been many research reports on the effects of exercise on pregnant women, from their response to different exercise programs, to their birth outcomes. The results have been impressive, in that most women seem to fair better physically when performing regular moderate exercise regimens than those who remain sedentary over the course of their pregnancies. Although there is still a lag between information presented in journals and articles, and what many physicians recommend, the consensus today is that an active lifestyle with this group may be better for both mom and baby.

Current reports highlight the need for pregnant women to perform low-impact aerobic exercise that will help with metabolism after the second trimester, and not injure joints that are being softened up in the third trimester for delivery. Walking 1-2 times per day after meals seems to help burn excess energy, and aerobic exercises such as the UBE (Upper Body Ergometer), and Aqua-Jogging^TM in a pool with a special buoyancy vest are two very good ways to stay in shape without excess stress to joints. They can be performed using basic fitness guidelines of 20-30 minutes, 3-4 days per week, keeping the heart rate in the training zone. Your physician should be kept abreast of your fitness program, and any unusual situations should be discussed with him/her.

Exercise and Seniors

Another special population group receiving attention in the medical literature and lay person press is the senior age group (55 years and over). For most of this century we were told that gaining weight, losing strength, developing disease, and losing energy were simply a part of the natural aging process. With the growing number of studies looking at exercise and life span, body fat loss, increasing strength, and reducing the incidence of certain diseases, through regular exercise over the years, it is becoming clear that inactivity – not aging per se, is the culprit in most, if not all, types of chronic diseases.

The senior population has had a boost for performing fitness routines with a report from Tufts University in Boston showing increases in strength in persons over 80 years old. Strength changes were demonstrated in subjects over a training program, with increases totaling over 170%. Even after a period of detraining, subjects still tested higher in strength scores than before they entered the program.

These results clearly show the need for incorporating moderate exercise programming at any age. The beneficial effects are being seen in groups once thought to have no business being in the workout environment.

Two areas of most concern to seniors are both bone and muscle weakness – the former with the concept of osteoporosis, and the latter with a decline in muscle strength and endurance over time. Again, walking has been shown to have an impact on cardiovascular fitness, and the use of aerobic machines may provide an improvement in workload over time without the impact on joints. Thera-Bandsª or rubber tubing are helpful with a beginning resistance exercise training program, and signing up with an exercise class, or having an instructor consult individually is helpful in getting a program started. Common sense, moderation, and proper exercise progression provide the intensity stimulus in the first month or so of exercise training.

Populations at risk for disease

For pregnant women and seniors, the benefits of regular exercise have been highlighted both in research and health periodicals. The question still remains if these particular populations are any more susceptible to disease because of their status. So, if we as our original question – does exercise help enhance health levels, or do they naturally select exercise to start out with?

The study of medical populations may give us a clue as to how exercise may be beneficial at improving health, independent of other variables that may contribute to health in the first place (such as genetics, dietary factors, where you live, etc.).

Diabetes affects over 20 million Americans, with over 5,000 new cases of diabetes being diagnosed every week. For over 70 years exercise has been touted as being part of the trilogy of treatment for persons with diabetes (along with a proper diet, and regular insulin routine). However, exercise has received little practical impetus from the health community, mainly because no one was sure what type of exercise, or how much was needed to actually impact diabetes care. Inactivity is seen as one of the major risk factors for development of diabetes over time, as is increased the likelihood of developing glucose intolerance, and insulin resistance. These factors are the reasons why many older adults develop diabetes later in life.

With the publication of three relevant research studies in 1991 and 1992, the question of exercise and its benefits for diabetes has been answered to a greater degree.

Two years ago, researchers from The University of California looked at alumni records from former university students to see who had been exercising regularly since their graduation from college (as far back at 1927). University records keep tabs on all students as to job occupation, health status, medical visits, leisure time activity, etc. Data was collected for many years, and when it was analyzed, it was found at alumni who exercised frequently (3 or more times per week), had less incidence for developing adult onset diabetes. Their risk for developing diabetes was almost half that of persons who did not exercise at all. This finding was independent of their family history of diabetes, and other physical factors, such as body weight and blood pressure status.

Within that same year another study was published in the British medical journal, the Lancet, with essentially the same results as the University of California study, only this time in an entirely different group of people, using the same type of research methods. This ongoing investigation is called the Nurse’s Health Study – which looks at health objectives in a sample of the nation’s nurses, was the data base. Information was collected from this group over years to assess health status in these women. After comparing those who exercised regularly versus their sedentary counterparts, the same type of results appeared. Those who exercised had almost a 33 percent less incidence of acquiring diabetes over time, independent of other factors.

Almost a year after the first publication, the Physician’s Health Study looked at exercising doctors and compared them with non-exercising counterparts. Again, those physicians who exercised at least 2 to 4 days per week had less incidence for diabetes development by about 30%, and those who exercised 5 or more days per week reduced their risk by 40%.

These series of investigations lend clear evidence to the concept of a protective effect of regular exercise in different population groups who may be at risk for developing disease over the course of their lifetimes. As scientists follow other groups of persons over years, we will learn more about the effects of exercise on mortality statistics, medical care, and enhanced quality of life for individuals.

Persons with diabetes should be concerned with keeping blood sugar levels at normal ranges throughout the day. They must avoid low blood sugar (hypoglycemia) due to prolonged exercise, as well. This balance is achieved through self blood sugar monitoring – using a small reflectance meter and sample of blood from a finger stick to keep track of sugar levels in the bloodstream. Self blood sugar monitoring is the cornerstone of good diabetes control, and may help avoid long term complications of the disease, such as blindness, gangrene, and heart disease.

Most exercises can be performed with diabetic persons, as long as self monitoring is part of their program. By knowing current sugar levels, they can safely plan the intensity and duration of their exercise. If they have had diabetes for longer than 10 years, lower impact exercises may be beneficial to guard against damaging feet, which may have some neuropathy (nerve damage). Consulting with personal physicians, and exercise specialists will produce individual exercises programs for improved health.

Medical populations

Exercise with medical patients started with cardiac rehabilitation. Patients were weaned into low intensity exercise programs using aerobic machines, later walking programs, and at the present, supervised exercise consisting of aerobics, weight training, and stretching programs. Their exercise options have grown as to what types of programs they can perform, and how it may effect their risk for cardiac abnormalities later in life. The goal for cardiac rehab programs to date is to reduce the incidence of recurrent heart problems in patients who have undergone bypass surgery, or had previous heart attacks.

For persons at risk, exercise may have an impact on reducing the occurrence, or severity of disease. What about persons who are already afflicted with a disease, such as high blood pressure?

One in four American has hypertension, and exercise has been studied as to its effects on blood pressure for over 25 years. Most persons who exercise regularly know that training raises blood pressure during the performance of the exercise itself. Many health professionals have been reluctant to tell their patients to exercise because of this fact.

However, exercise training over time reduces blood pressure levels. The key is finding the right type of exercise program that will not raise blood pressure much during exercise, and have beneficial long-term effects.

It has been found that moderate aerobic training (walking, aerobic machines, swimming, etc.) have little effect on blood pressure levels, if they are performed at a certain heart rate range. Regular exercise is best at keeping blood pressure levels in check. Sporadic training routines have little effect in the long run, and persons may not get into their exercising “groove” in terms of figuring out their heart rate, and their exercise intensity.

Dr. Deepak Chopra, the author of “Quantum Healing”, has added much information as to the effects of changing lifestyle and its effect on cancer patients. Those who perform meditation, regular exercise, and dietary interventions have had a better recovery from their cancer-related therapies. Exercise plays an important part of cancer recovery by strengthening weak muscles, adding more functional capacity in persons who have little energy for daily work activities, and boosting self-esteem though successful performance of tasks, and achieving goals. Moderate walking and water exercise programs have been successful with this group. The use of rubber tubing substitutes for dumb bells in terms of muscle strengthening. In the future exercise may be a part of every cancer patient’s recovery package.

One of the most interesting areas of exercise and medical populations is the effect exercise has on blood lipids. As heart disease is the worst chronic disease afflicting Americans, anything that can reduce cholesterol and other blood fats in the diet, and by other means is regarded highly.

It seems that aerobic exercise (and to some extent, strength training), has an effect on lowering total cholesterol with exercise. It raises the protective cholesterol (HDL), and reduces the atherosclerotic-producing cholesterol (LDL), along with cholesterol sub-fractions which may have an effect on health status. Judging by its effects on hyperlipidemia (high fat levels in the blood), patients with this disorder may use exercise as a type of medicine, and the right “prescription” may help reduce their blood fat levels, reducing their chance of suffering a cholesterol-related heart problem.

Arthritis patients have had to deal with pain their joints with every movement. So why should they exercise – as exercise makes joints move in lots of directions, and sometimes with a heavier load than just getting around? Exercise has been shown with this group to have beneficial effects of lessening the pain and inflammation of chronic rheumatoid arthritis. Programs such as PACE (People with Arthritis Can Exercise) have opened doors for persons and given them options as to what types of exercises they can perform, and the effects of exercise over prolonged periods of time.

Exercise has been shown to have beneficial effects in patients with Cystic Fibrosis, Post-Polio Syndrome, Raynaud’s Syndrome, End-Stage Renal Disease, Pulmonary Disease, and Peripheral Vascular Disease. Exercise is also being studied as to its beneficial effects on newer diseases such as HIV/AIDS, and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. The American College of Sports Medicine has set guidelines for exercise professionals on dealing with these types of patients during exercise situations. With a joint effort by the health care community, patients who would have never thought of using exercise as part of their medical treatment may be working with their exercise specialist in addition to their doctor, nurse, dietitian, or physical therapist.

A Basic Medical Exercise Program

What constitutes a medical exercise program? Does an adult onset diabetic person have a different exercise program than an arthritic patient? As exercise programming is as individual as people, no two should have the exact type of program. Whether patients are working out in a supervised exercise setting, or participating in an aerobic exercise class, there are a few types of guidelines that are universal, and may help structure individual exercise.

1. Proper monitoring before exercise. Whether is is blood sugar monitoring, using a blood pressure cuff, taking a temperature reading, or stepping on the scale, performing a physical reading pre-exercise is important to see how hard and long you may be able to perform.
2. Proper warm-up. In a class full of students, or on your own, getting the muscles prepared for exercise is as easy as doing some light aerobic movements, and large-muscle stretching activities to get ready for the body of the exercise.
3. New goals and objectives. The goals for therapeutic exercises are – pain free movement, improved functional ability, learning new body movements, and perfecting technique on whatever type of exercise you are performing. If people thought about improving their technique in the weight room, or the aerobic dance floor, they would decrease their risks of ever having an injury – as the competitive nature of exercise takes a back seat to self-improvement and self-awareness. It has been said that Socrates learned to dance at 70 years of age because he felt that a part of himself needed improvement. Therapeutic exercise is half education, and half workout. Teaching patients new physical skills, and offering them instruction on how to deal with new movement is part of the objectives. It differs from mainstream exercise programs where individuals need much less guidance. The rewards are not just improvements in physical condition, but new tools to work with on their own (at home), and hopefully a new found sense of self acceptance and confidence to become healthier, and more self reliant.
4. Proper warm-down. In sports, warm down may mean a few stretches before going home. The importance of proper warm down in therapeutic situations cannot be overlooked. It is time for breathing (slow, proper belly breathing), it is a time for reflection and relaxation, and getting yourself “centered”, and it is a time to let the muscles flush out the extra work they have been asked to perform, and be able to function properly the next day without undue soreness. For patients who have been in stressful healing situations, the warm down serves as their focus to reduce pain, increase mental strength, and increase their own healing abilities.

There is no one type of exercise routine for medical situations, so no sample program is listed. A bit of reading and investigating by the individual will help them gain access to qualified professionals to help them start on their own program.

Tomorrow’s Exercise

Exercise in medicine, despite all of the research expounding its benefits, is still in its infancy. There are scattered programs around the country that provide exercise therapy for medical patients. Many health professionals are hesitant to refer patients to health clubs, as most employees are not well versed in medical aspects of disease. For those with extensive exercise physiology backgrounds, setting up private practice is also difficult, as the profession is not a licensed entity.

None the less, the future of exercise with medical populations seems to gaining momentum. More types of out-patient programs are cropping up, and some hospitals have adopted a rehabilitative format, performing therapy services in addition to acute patient care.

We would hope that it is part of a change in the system that now pays an enormous amount of money for medical procedures, to one which will help pay costs for “preventive health care”, which would include diet and exercise as the main components. Time will tell as to how the current political administration will handle today’s health care issues. If individuals are aware of the benefits of exercise therapy for special population needs, perhaps they will seek out exercise instruction in their community, and make a change in the system by themselves.

About the author:

Eric P. Durak received his Master’s degree in Exercise Physiology from the University of Michigan in 1986. His research and clinical interests include exercise applications for special populations groups, such as diabetes (IDDM, NIDDM, GDM), pregnancy, and metabolic disorders. He has published scientific articles in: The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Diabetes Care, Sports Training, Medicine, Rehabilitation, and The Somatics Journal. He is the author of “Exercise and Diabetes – a Guidebook for Health Professionals, published through Medical Health and Fitness, based in Santa Barbara, CA.

Ongoing research is linking high amounts of sedentary time – prolonged sitting – to increased incidence of cancer, heart disease, obesity, diabetes and early death. Excessive sitting may also be responsible for low back pain, according to researchers here who also say there is a way to burn more calories and increase one’s lifespan by tweaking one small thing – sitting less and standing more.

According to Dr. Anup Kanodia, a family medicine physician and researcher from the Center for Personalized Health Care at The Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center, lipoprotein lipase, an enzyme which is responsible for converting low-density lipoprotein (LDL), or bad cholesterol, into high-density lipoprotein (HDL), or good cholesterol, decreases 95 percent when you sit too long. This, in turn, could be one factor of excessive sitting which increases risk of heart attack by 30 percent.

“In a little over 150 years, we have gone from a society that stood or walked for 90 percent of the waking day to one that sits for 60 percent. Most people are coming into work and leaving sicker,” adds Kanodia, also from the Center for Integrative Medicine at Ohio State’s Wexner Medical Center.

Ohio State’s Wexner Medical Center is spearheading a “mobile campaign” which encourages university faculty, staff and students to participate in improving their overall quality of health and includes incorporating standing as much as possible. The campaign has been embraced and adopted by leaders who are setting a non-sitting example, starting at the very top with Dr. Steven G. Gabbe, CEO of the Medical Center. Gabbe uses an elevated table to complete paperwork and other tasks on a daily basis. In addition, many employees organize and facilitate standing meetings.

This allows for open dialogue among attendees about the health consequences of excessive sitting, and conductors can also empower those present to stand as well, if they wish. Another way Ohio State employees and students are proving their commitment to standing is by holding walking meetings outside when appropriate. They use modern technology to take notes and record minutes. Also, tools and equipment that encourage standing, such as podiums and treadmill desks, are being shared in conference rooms and offices.

“When you’re standing or moving around, your muscles contract. They’re moving around and insulin helps the body in terms of moving sugar from the blood into different cells. But, when you’re sitting, none of that happens. So, if you’re on a conference call or participating in a webinar, do yourself a favor and stand up,” encourages Kanodia, discussing the benefits to standing.

The following are a few additional easy tips for standing to consider throughout the day:

• Move from a sitting position to standing more often. When possible, get up and take a five-minute walk every hour.
  
• Use a timer or computer program that can provide cues or prompts at designated intervals as reminders to get up and move.
  
• Be aware of habits outside of the workplace or classroom and try to minimize time spent sitting as much as possible.
  

Provided by Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center on 7/3/2012

BDNF is a protein that stimulates your brain to put out new neurons and for those connections with other neurons to stick. It is critical to learning. Many of our neurons are fixed at birth and don’t change much over our life times. Our first couple of years have massive amounts of remodeling and making connections between our neurons with maturation continuing up into our twenties. But the concept of neuroplasticity and the ability of the brain to grow new pathways is also emerging and we are beginning to realize that the brain is not a fixed, static entity that gradually loses it’s ability to grow. At any time in life we can grow new brain cells. It is particularly active in the hippocampus, cortex and basal forebrain where we have the most important parts for neural memory and higher thinking type functions.

The New York Times article also references a study in older pilots who were asked to practice in a flight simulator repeatedly over several years. Their ability to function in the complex world of flying an airplane was shown to decline with age. More interesting was that those pilots with markers for low BDNF declined the most in their ability. This suggests that BDNF is particularly important to maintaining memory and cognitive function.

You can’t take BDNF as a pill. It is a complex, large protein. But at any age in life you can stimulate it to be more present. It’s hard to take humans brains out and examine them, but in rat models of aging, the NYT article references several studies in which aging rats were allowed to exercise and then had their brains looked at for BDNF content. Sure enough, exercise stimulated BDNF and its precursor molecules within a week. And the older exercising rats performed almost as well as younger rats on memory tests.

WWW. What will work for me.<.B> Now that winter is upon me, I need a little more motivation to get moving. I have to go somewhere to exercise because it’s not so easy to run outside. My BDNF might just be it. Very interesting concept. BDNF.