This guide is the result of my personal and professional evolution, experience and knowledge.
This program evolved as I worked my way from physical therapy clinics to offering my services in health clubs, spas, country clubs and resorts. As I worked with my clients, I found myself easily able to understand and apply various wellness techniques to address their in-the-moment needs and unique lifestyles. I have been a top trainer and fitness manager at Equinox on 63rd street as well as the Director of Fitness at a residential club and spa. I was both the Guest Services Manager and Energy Healing Practitioner for Canyon Ranch Miami Beach. I offered my work in Cancun’s Pariso de la Bonita and in country clubs in the Palm Desert area.
Being someone who was naturally interested in evolution, I gravitated towards many fitness and health techniques to improve my understanding of the body and how to better serve my clients. Learning along the way was a very pleasant experience as well as being beneficial to me because of the personal growth that resulted from it.
At the time I develop this program, I was living in NYC and getting to know the opportunities living in the big city. Eventually I found myself in environments, which encouraged individuality and self-expression. I began taking courses that encouraged taking responsibility for one’s feelings and actions.
The World of Personal Fitness Instruction
Because of what I was experiencing, I began questioning everything I knew about health. This questioning eventually led me to look at the world of personal fitness instruction. I soon realized that having my clients lift heavy weights that stress their already overly stressed system did not appear to be the health I believed we needed.
True health, I had decided was an acceptance of our physical, mental and emotional elements. With the information I had obtained and experienced, I knew that acceptance leads to mental, emotional and physical health.
My observations led me to understand that external stress becomes internal muscular tension. My clients were under such large degrees of stress that they were unable to perform the traditional exercises without compromising their body in some way.
A New and Fully Conscious Technique
I soon began to develop techniques to first reduce this tension and then follow it up with guidance to help them move with more freedom. Thus began the development of DeStress Therapy aka Energy Regeneration Therapy (To learn more about this virtual and in-office service visit www.energybasedhealth.com/therapy-sessions).
As my own personal evolution thrived, I began to examine other aspects of fitness and exercise. I questioned why we do it, why it is boring and what can it be used for along with what motivates us, what limits us, and what we really want.
I soon began to create my vision of what exercise could be. I believe it has lost its focus as a tool of personal development and has become something we do to avoid getting fat or getting old. It has become a chore and a stressful chore at. The details involved in working out “correctly” have filled many books, taken up much media time and created a neurotic outlook which limits personal growth and individual expression.
Ultimately what I wish to create is a form of physical movement and exertion that helps us improve attributes, which can directly help us improve our station in life. I am interested in taking the power away from others and re-instilling it back inside each of us where it belongs. Each of us is powerful in ways we cannot even imagine but this power is buried under layers of emotional debris. I wish to transform how we use exercise to promote the things truly important to our lives.
The road to this transformation begins with this simple understanding:
Pain causes the body/mind to close down.
Pleasure causes the body/mind to open up.
The result of a closed body is it:
An open and flowing body has:
Greater body awareness – The more aware you are, the richer your moment-to-moment experiences of life become. Greater awareness also brings a greater self-acceptance and empowerment to make powerful choices based upon your highest aims.
Deeper self-understanding – This understanding stems from greater awareness. The more connected you are to how you feel and think, the more you are able to learn how you create your life from the responses of each moment.
Better emotional coping skills – The challenges of emotional tolerance can be the difference between a healthy flowing body and a blocked and unbalanced one. This emotional freedom opens you to newer ways of experiencing yourself and your life.
Practice makes perfect. This is because anything we do over and over again becomes ingrained in us. This is how we evolve. Once you understand this concept, you can see, the more unaware you are of your body the more unaware you will remain.
Now, many of us may have good reasons to avoid self-examination for it may require facing a great deal of pain. However, the price of avoiding what is inside of you affects not only your life but also the lives of all you touch. If you are negative, you will spread your negativity to others. Not only that, but if you continue along this negative path your ability at being negative will improve.
The question is do you want to do your part to make this world a better place?
While the task of facing emotions and feelings may be unpleasant, no matter which way you slice it, you cannot ignore those emotions for long and remain healthy. Eventually they will find a way to surface and cause you problems.
On the other hand, there is a great deal of pleasure and learning found within being with our emotions. They make life worth living! They can take you to places within yourself that transform your understanding of yourself and what’s important in life.
The dual nature of emotions is something that can be harnessed to improve our understanding, experience and love of life. So, let’s stop making excuses about our emotionality and instead let’s find a way to make it work for us.
Harnessing this power requires understanding what being present means.
Being present is the living experience of mentally focusing on our physical presence (both what’s happening inside and outside of us) while practicing emotional acceptance/observation. This is not just an inner focus but also an outer one. We are not shutting off any sense and instead we are embracing all we, have moment-to-moment.
When we begin to become fully present to ourselves and our circumstance we start to learn about ourselves. Learning something new is always exciting! Learning about yourself is always exciting! Experiencing yourself in new ways is always exciting!
The more we focus ourselves in being present, the more we open to new possibilities we may not have considered before. As we open to these new possibilities, our lives expand. Expansion provides the opportunity to make new choices. New choices provide us with even more information and experiences for us to learn and grow.
Eventually this relationship between being present and pleasurable experiences evolves. Once this happens another flow begins to develop.
The more we pay attention and allow ourselves to experience our lives as it occurs, the more we have the ability to make empowering choices for our lives. This is because you learn to operate directly from your highest good. The more we enjoy our lives, the more our physical, mental and emotional health improves.
Now, just like everything else in this life, the flip side of being present during pleasant experiences has a price.
As you develop your presence, life will eventually present you with painful situations. This cannot be avoided. However, if you see pleasure and pain as different sides of the same coin, you will soon come to realize, we cannot have one without the other. The choice we are given is to embrace our pain as much as we embrace our pleasure. One informs the other and the contrast creates value and meaning.
Now, as you already know, facing pain is easier said than done. Our automatic reaction to facing pain and unpleasant experiences is to run away and/or shut down.
However, this is where your courage and commitment plays a role. If you can face this pain and allow it to affect you, you learn from it as its presence creates major growth in your life. As long as you keep breathing you will, eventually discover peace in the pain. The pain holds important realization about yourself that you had lost.
Now, don’t worry, later on in this eBook, I will provide practical instructions as to how to meet your pain calmly and productively. You don’t have to let your pain control your life. Facing it is the only way to truly dissolve and eliminate it from you life experience.
For too long our bodies have been abused.
With the high demands of overwhelming and stressful days our mental, emotional and physical systems are suffering.
The anxiety caused by society’s image of perfection as it applies to our bodies have promoted a fear of being fat, along with an overwhelming need to look good in order to feel good about ourselves.
Thus, many of us go to the gym pursuing the “no pain, no gain” principle of exercise.
Stressful bodies and minds performing stressful body exertions as a result of stressful motivation equals a great deal of stress!
This guide is designed to change your relationship with exercise to associate:
1) Your physical health with 2) your ability to use your body in a more efficient manner while 3) remaining calm and 4) using exercise as a way to practice important attributes for you life’s goal and vision.
This program begins with helping you first re-connect to your body while clearing your mind utilizing relaxation, visualizations, meditations, strengthening, and stretching techniques.
The result of this work re-aligns, restores and revitalizes your body and mind.
Once you are in an open and flowing body, we then can introduce exercises and movement techniques designed to strengthen your ability to consciously direct your body to exert while remaining calm. These movements are based upon your body’s needs, your physical goals, your professional vision and the demands of your day.
The Internet, smart phones and emails create a constant stream of information, which needs to be absorbed and integrated into our daily lives. Reams of information are constantly threatening to overwhelm us with what healthy food we should be eating and which we should not along with which exercise programs is the “best” and which are the ones to avoid.
With all the scientific laden jargon and celebrity-touted fitness programs and diets how can one truly choose what is best? Furthermore, with the immense variety of our body structures, eating habits, and lifestyles, how can any one exercise routine or diet work for everybody?
In two words, they can’t.
Having worked with thousands of people of various ages in a variety of health settings, I believe, each of us needs to be treated with as much individuality as possible in order to specifically support our unique strengths and achieve the goals and dreams we set out to accomplish.
How I propose to do this is by reinventing the wheel.
The longer I spend my waking, semi-waking and unconscious hours contemplating exercise and its role in our lives, the more I see the need for major change in how we use and perceive exercise.
As a health professional, I help others discover, develop and enhance their personal greatness. I know this greatness lies in each one of you reading this now. For me to stand tall in my purpose I can no longer watch as we forgo this greatness in favor of ignorance and fear, or more specifically, boredom and “life-meaningless” exercise programs. For those of you who wonder what I mean by “life-meaningless” exercise programs, I simply mean that the particulars of most exercise routines have no direct correlation to your life. For example, the only time a bicep curl is performed is in a gym setting and nowhere else in your life. There is never a need to do this motion in this way.
To this end, I have been exploring the nuances of fitness and my own humanity. The results of my endeavors are the principles contained in this EBook. I have written it to provide you with an alternative not just to increase your exercise capabilities and choices, but more so to directly improve the quality of your life.