💛 Is This Inevitable Aging? 💛
My Dear FierceOver50 One,
This is happening:
😫 You travel and your back goes out.
😫 No amount of coffee will wake you up.
😫 You seem to wake up just when it's time to go to sleep.
😫 You wake up in the middle of the night and can't get back to sleep.
😫 Your doctor tells you your rotator cuff is torn.
😫 You can't stop worrying about your daughter [or, whomever: fill in the blank!]
These things happen and they often get worse after we turn 50. It's easy to give up and think that these patterns are the unavoidable result of inevitable aging.
Sara Gottfried, leading health expert and graduate of Harvard Medical School and MIT, says, in Younger (HarperOne, 2017) they are not. She claims,
"The truth is that around 90 percent of the signs of aging and disease are caused by lifestyle . . . not your genes."
She goes on to explain that the "neighborhood of your body -- how you live and the world you create, internally and externally" is the most important factor in the next 50 years of our lives.
Dr. Gottfried goes on to explain that unlike wine, our bodies do not get better with age. In fact, aging accelerates after about your 40th year. That is, unless we take a different approach.
I felt it this shift in my forties and I'm sure you did too.
My first solution -- before learning how to solve these issues -- was to get back on the dieting bandwagon and to exercise even harder. And those solutions were a colossal fail. Gottfried talks about how her own ambition to turn around what felt like inevitable aging often caused her to push herself right into injury. (p.145)
The simplest way that I have found to explain the problem is that we exhausted achievers have been holding stress and trauma in our bodies for decades.
These decades-long , chronic patterns of holding stress and trauma in our bodies are typically driven by our rational brain. We push; we persevere; we work toward goals.
In fact, we learn how NOT to feel, because feeling seems to get in our way. And these chronic patterns are the key factor in accelerating aging.
After 50, we need to approach our healing differently. We need to learn to listen to our bodies in new and subtle ways. We need to recognize that we are holding onto pain, heartbreak, frustration, and anger, often physically in our guts and in other places in our bodies.
And so, we work on releasing these long-held tensions and then we can build the strength we need to move ahead into the lives we imagined would be waiting for us on the other side of 50.
And this is why I started the FierceOver50 Gathering as an ongoing series of weekly workshops (usually 3 times a month). I thought my private clients needed to be with other women, in addition to working with me on specific issues. I also saw that one-off workshops could be eye-opening, but the work was not sustainable.
How many classes have you enjoyed for a while, but then slowly drifted away?
What is needed, I realized, was an ongoing opportunity for women to gather and work together in an informal setting where questions can be asked and issues can be discussed along with practicing the very sophisticated and effecrtive body-centered practices that I have learned over decades studying with Ana Forest, Steve Emmerman and Talya Ring, Jill Miller, in Stephen Porges's programs, and now, truly focusing on women's embodiment practices with Anahita Joon.
Now is the time to join the FierceOver50 Gathering and, instead of hopeless new year resolutions, create a new neighborhood for your body and your life.
I feel so strongly about the life-changing opportunities offered by the FierceOver50 Gathering that I am gifting a custom, private, zoom session for women who sign up for the Gathering by January 19.
This free session will be designed especially for you after you have attended 5 Gathering workshops, so that you can benefit from an understanding of what sort of private work would be most impactful.
If you would like to chat to see if the Gathering is right for you, hit reply and we'll set up a time to talk.
Let’s create a vibrant and healing neighborhood for our bodies together!!
Love and Gratitude,
AnnMerle
P.S. If there is someone you know, who needs to hear this message, please share this newsletter and invite her to try out my free mini course.