Elements of Good Health
Seminars@Hadley
Elements of Good Health
Presented by
Mel Scott
Lisa Salinger
Moderated by
Larry Muffett
April 6, 2016
Larry Muffett
Welcome to Seminars@Hadley. My name is Larry Muffett. I’m a member of Hadley’s seminars team and I also work in curricular affairs. Today’s seminar topic is Elements of Good Health. Our presenters today are Mel Scott and Lisa Salinger. Mel is the founder of BlindAlive and brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to this subject. Lisa Salinger works with Mel in furthering BlindAlive’s mission of providing eyes-free fitness. Her background as a rehabilitation teacher and technology instructor will round out the presentation. Today Mel and Lisa will share their professional insights on the health benefits of movement and exercise. So, without any further ado, let me welcome our presenters and we’ll get under way. Welcome.
Mel Scott
I’m Mel, and Lisa is here, too, but I just want to say that I am so honored to be here today. I remember that little brown book I got, I think I was 11, that showed all the braille alphabet and the contractions and I never imagined that I would be doing a seminar for Hadley. It really is a privilege. Lisa Salinger is my team member who supports me and keeps me on track and I am very grateful. Let’s hear your voice, Lisa.
Lisa Salinger
Hello, I’m very pleased to be here. I’ve enjoyed taking several Hadley courses and participating as a guest in seminars just like this one, and so it’s an honor to, this time, be on the other side of the microphone.
Mel Scott
Okay. What we’re going to be talking about today are elements of good health, and I’m going to be targeting movement specifically, but we need to get through some of the other elements before we get to that part. Later on, Lisa’s going to be talking about some more concrete ways to get movement into our lives on an everyday basis.
The first element of good health is, what we’re gonna be focusing on today, is taking care of our bodies. The second one is learning to use our mind for the purposes for which it is intended. I will elaborate on that in a little bit. The third and the core tenet element is to pay attention to our consciousness, pay attention to that part of us that is not our mind, the part that is not our body. We can call it our soul or spirit or whatever works for you, but it’s the part of us that knows things, it’s the part of us that yearns for that purpose driven life, and the part of us that wants to take care of our bodies, and it’s that little voice that whispers, you can make a different choice, you can make a new choice. That’s what we’re talking about today is making the choice to take care and to move our bodies.
I think I can safely say that everybody in the room today wants to feel good in our bodies. We want to love and play and work with children, our partners, our friends, and our families, and it’s the part of us, the part that is not our mind, and is not our body, that’s the part of us that can make that choice to choose differently. It’s the part that can make the choice to override our mind, that spinning mind. I don’t know about you, but my mind really can a lot of times just – it just takes over. It spins and whirls and it doesn’t – it’s very annoying. It says things like, “Well, I don’t want to get out of bed.” “I want to sit in the chair.”
We need to learn that the mind is a tool. Our mind is just like a screwdriver or a hammer. Our mind is to be used to do a task, like creating a talk, or to create a blog post, or whatever it is. Our mind is our intelligence, and if we can learn to pick up that tool, use it, and put it back down, we’re going to be better off. That way we can listen to the part of us that is not our mind, the part that says, move, take care of our body. It’s the part that can choose to take care of our most precious gift, which is our body.
Today I’m going to talk a little bit more about movement, but I think we need to get through some of the other basic parts of taking care of our body. The first one of those is eating. I love talking about eating. But don’t worry, I’m not gonna get crazy about it. It is true that we are what we eat. You are what you eat. Another addition to this that you may have heard as well, you are what you eat ate. In other words, the animals and the plants that we consume have also consumed food and nourishment, and so when we eat them, it translates into our bodies as well. So we need to eat as well and as cleanly as we can. It’s harder to do in some cases, I realize that, but we just do the best we can.
The next part is drinking. Drinking water. It is so important to keep our bodies hydrated. We can virtually eliminate a lot of the aches and pains that we have in our bodies because we don’t drink enough water. You need to try this experiment. If you have a headache, just go drink a glass of water and see if it goes away. Do that before you start taking the medications. Or if you have a pain in your back or whatever, drink some water. Water helps you think more clearly, too. Believe me; I’ve been drinking a lot of water today. I can go off on water, I’m not gonna do that either.
The next thing is sleep. We really need to schedule sleep into our day. I know it’s fun to watch TV and play games and do whatever it is that’s your favorite thing to do, but it’s really important to schedule in that sleep so our body can rest and rejuvenate and repair. Sleep is when we repair from what’s been going on in the day.
The last thing is we need to control our stress levels to the best of our ability. That is by learning how to quiet our mind and to lay it down when we don’t need it anymore. There are a whole lot of resources that people can access to learn more about these pieces, eating, drinking, sleeping, and stress reduction, but now I get to talk about my favorite subject, which is moving.
How do we do that? How do we move our bodies when we have limitations? I have limitations, and I expect everybody in the room today has limitations. It’s important that we – let’s not let our mind grab hold of those negative thinking, those thoughts of I can’t, it hurts, I don’t want to. Let’s override our mind. Let’s choose to listen to the part that isn’t our mind and let that part of us speak. I really, truly do believe that everybody in this room today has a part of their body that they can move that doesn’t hurt. I want you to try it right now. Find a part of your body that you can move that doesn’t cause you pain. Maybe it’s your thumb. Maybe it’s blinking. Maybe it’s taking a deep breath. Maybe it’s wiggling your toes, or smiling. Smiling’s always good. I actually like to pull my hair. I love pulling my hair. It’s crazy, but it feels so good, and why it does is it brings me into my body, and it lets me know that my body is a good place to live, and it feels good to pull my hair. That sounds a little odd, but it helps me to feel grateful for my body.
It’s really important to feel gratitude for the parts of our body that we can move that don’t hurt. What happens is when we do this, we begin to connect; our brain connects the dots, the dots being moving and good feelings. We move our bodies in a way that doesn’t hurt and complete that task. Our brain says, oh, my body can move without hurting. That’s how we move, because our body wants to bounce and spin and jump up and down and fling ourselves around into free space. That’s what our bodies want to do. We can get there if we move a little bit every day and move that part of our body that doesn’t hurt. And then tomorrow you can move another part of your body that doesn’t hurt, and continue to increase that. I promise, I promise, we will, you will, begin to feel more confidant and able to move your body in the way that it wants to move.
I understand that depression and sluggishness happens. I understand it. I know it. I was there. I also know that movement helps our body to get out of that depression, to get out of that sluggish feeling, and we need to lay down our fear, and our mind, and listen to the part of us that knows the truth that our body wants to move, and needs to move, in order to be healthy.
I’m going to stop talking, because I get so excited about it, and let Lisa talk a little bit more about some concrete ways that we can get movement into our everyday lives. And then we’ll take some questions and then we can talk more about some other things if we have time. Okay, Lisa.
Lisa Salinger
I’m very pleased to be bringing you this information because this is something I have struggled with for a while. It’s not just doing a workout, picking a workout and doing that, which is very good, but it’s also about finding ways to move more in your daily life. I don’t know about you, but I’m kind of an information junkie. I will see these articles online and they say – they talk about, oh, just for example, “21 ways to move more in your daily life,” and they start with, “Park your car farther away when you’re going to work.” Well, that kind of makes me feel alienated from the start because: A. I work from home, and B. I don’t have a car. For a couple years, I would just close the browser. And then one day I kind of shook myself and I thought, “No, that’s really not the way to go, because you use this creative problem solving in other ways that are related to your blindness, so how can you make this work for you?”
As I’m speaking to you right now, I’m sitting in front of my desk on a stability ball and I can bounce gently or I can just remain still. Either way, it will help with the balance. It will help strengthen the muscles in my hips. If I’m waiting for water to boil, or I’m on the phone, I can pace, or I can do leg stretches. Those of you who have little kids, or maybe even if you don’t, you just put music on that takes you back, and it’s a wonderful thing to just be able to move to that music. The really neat and magical thing is that if you are in your own home, you can experiment. I am very conscious, and I know from talking to some of you with my work with BlindAlive, that others of you are as well, about how you look when you’re moving around. Most people who are blind, when we talk about moving around spontaneously in our own homes, the greatest fear is not injury, although that can be a concern; you need to make sure your environment is safe. But the greatest concern is, am I gonna look stupid? Who is gonna see me? Who is gonna laugh? If you’re in your own home, you really can experiment. You can experiment by moving fast or slow or larger or small movements.
Actually, I used to think that I wouldn’t ever move anywhere in any way in public. And then I remember hearing about the phenomenon called break dancing, where people do this stuff on their heads and their shoulders, and I thought, well, that sounds pretty silly to me, I guess there really are no limits.
Another thing you can do. Let’s say you are going down the block to get food or to visit a neighbor, and maybe that’s three or four doors down from you. Consider taking the scenic route. Go around the block the other way and come at it from the other end, and you will have given yourself a little bit longer time. I know a lot of us have apps or clocks that talk, and they can be set to announce the hour. Sometimes I think we just need reminders to move, and those hourly chimes, those hourly reminders, can do that. I have one set on my computer and on my phone, and it’s my reminder on the hour that I need to stand up and move, whether that is moving in a way that will get my blood pumping, like walking, or marching in place, or anything like that, or whether it involves stretching. Sometimes even just reaching both arms up over your head, stretching, lunges, reaching down to the floor, stretches that will counteract whatever you’ve been doing.
If you’re sitting a lot, you want to do a little bit of stretching of your hips to counteract that. Maybe you’ve been doing a lot of typing. It’s important to remember to stretch your fingers, circle your wrists, to help relieve the stress. If you have sight and you are reading the screen, even if you’re not seeing much of it, even if you’re only using screen magnification software in a very limited way, it’s important to remember to move your eyes and move them away from the screen and back, and look up and down, and do various kinds of stretches to release tension in the muscles that you may be holding. For some people, this is the way in which they begin to exercise. It’s how they start. They start doing these little things, and good sort of feeds on good, and it allows you to consider and be, I think, more open to the possibility of doing actual workouts.
There are so many things, really, that you can do. One thing I advised someone to do – they were talking about, “Oh, I love to play games on my iPhone,” and they spent about $20 and they got a stability ball, and I said, “Okay, now what you do is you make a rule for yourself. The only time you can play games on your iPhone is when you are using the stability ball. Or the only time you can watch your favorite TV program is when you’re using the stability ball.” You can put exercise equipment in front of your TV. You can set aside books that you read only when you’re exercising. You have to be careful, though, when you are a beginner. I did this once and made myself very sore because I ended up walking for about 2 ½ hours. But I did find out how the book ended.
There are lots of ways to incorporate movement. You can also get exercisers that are – basically, you put them under a desk or in front of your chair and you pedal. You say, “You know, I don’t really have a lot of money. I don’t have two nickels to rub together.” It really doesn’t matter because you have your body and you can move your body, you can walk, you can lift small weights by just using cans. We have a sculpting with weights workout and I jokingly said that – the first couple times I did it I hadn’t yet gotten weights – and so it was sculpting with lentils. I had two cans of lentils, and it worked. I think the important thing is not so much what you do and what equipment you have – although, some of us are equipment junkies; we like the equipment, or we like to be able to monitor what we’re doing – but the most important thing is that you are doing.