Geared for the Climb of Life

So far in this series, I’ve shared these climbing lessons:

·      Plan your breaks

·      Allow some falls - you can count on your safety rope

Today I’d like to speak about two more topics

• good climbing practices aka preventative care
• falling with a good rope aka fall-back scenarios

Day after day, I am experiencing how being a regular Tai-Chi practitioner immensely contributes to my prevention and wellness program. I do a number of things right, and a few poorly.

I’ll start with the poorly done ones – precisely the places where I believe Tai-Chi is my safety rope, and makes up for my shortcomings.

From old wisdom, including my practice of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), I know that I should go to bed by 10 pm.  But I don’t.  TCM says you should get 7 - 8 hours of sleep a night. I usually don’t. I am chronically sleep-deprived. Though I binge on sleeping during week-ends and vacation, TCM makes it clear that you need good quality sleep every night, and you can’t “make up for it another time.” Let’s just say I have plenty of room for improvement in this area.

Luckily, I still have tons of energy, and I rarely get colds (touch wood.) On that note though, I am currently getting over a nasty one, my first bad cold in three years. I wondered what temporarily weakened my immune defence and could find no obvious connection. Wait a minute, actually a few days before the cold started I learnt something that really moved me and made me quite sad (I wrote  about it, http://15min2health.blogspot.ca/2013/02/no-ordinary-day.html).  In TCM, immunity comes from the Lungs, and the emotion affecting the Lungs is sadness. Maybe it was just a coincidence.

Still, on average, it’s digestion that is my weak spot (some might see that as a positive, as it keeps me from gaining weight), but my diet is well-tuned to my health and energy needs.

Most important of all - and yes, TCM together with modern neurosciences agree this is very important - I delightfully enjoy life!

The question is, what should your health safety rope look like?

To be honest…I don’t know.

In TCM, we customize lifestyle and diet to a person’s type, constitution, and health condition. In Tai-Chi, everyone moves and stands differently depending on their temperament and body type. But in both TCM and Tai-Chi, there are inner principles that provide wise guidelines and are amazing for their applicability and effectiveness in everyday life.

I tried to think of my inner principles, the ones that define who I am and what I do.  Beyond the details of a diet or exercise regimen, what are my core life guidelines?

This is what I came up with. Here is my life in ten keywords:

Intention, loving, peaceful, natural, nurturing, laughing, warming, resting, moving, learning. And last but not least, there is even an eleventh keyword: breathing! (Eleven was my lucky number when I played basket-ball as a teen).

Puzzled?

At this point our rock climbing story is over, as I will be posting a sequel on the above keywords and other stories. But I’ll be moving my writing over to my blog. If you’d like to get a notice as to when I’m posting new writing, please subscribe to my blog at http://15min2health.blogspot.ca

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Sincèrement, et bonne santé!

Patricia

Life’s Safety Rope

Having a good rope and using it properly is something you do when you climb.

Not because you sign a disclaimer at the climbing gym. Not because a regulation says you should.  But because it’s your life.

Obviously,  you want to act safely, whether climbing or just living your daily life. I bet you always fasten your seat belt before driving, even if your schedule is terribly busy, or you’re going through a crisis, or even if you are so depressed that life becomes flavourless.  It’s second nature to buckle up when you get in the car, and similarly, you tie that rope properly before climbing.

Climbers use ropes for a reason: when it gets too hard, they have something to fall back on. In French,  we say “prendre un vol” rather than “fall”.  “Prendre un vol” translates as “take a fly”. It’s something like the English “go flying”. In one sense, it looks like you’ve lost control. But if you look at the face of the climbing champion in this video, you’ll see a big smile at the moment of “son vol”. The sensation can be exhilarating, a feeling of complete freedom.

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93vLLh5rAiM, starting on the video counter at 1:12:00. His flying moment comes at 1:16:40. )

Did you notice in that spectacular climb how many times he rests? When he stops moving forward, even when he hangs face down, he is resting his arm muscles.

The rope is there, making a fall look like flying. The same goes with health.

The thing is, we tend to forget that we have this safety back-up. So we often follow poor health practices in our daily life, not tying the rope well or not bothering to invest in a good quality rope.  Falling from poor health practices is generally a slow-motion process. So slow, in fact, that we may fool ourselves into believing we can ignore it.

Yet life goes on, one climb at a time. And it can be so much fun! Next time I’ll speak about health safety practices, the ones we should all prepare for our own care.

Stay tuned - we are actually getting to the top of this climbing story!

Sincèrement, et bonne santé!

Patricia