There are so many ways to take care of yourself, especially in this hot summer heat wave but what if you are injured, paralyzed or dealing with a serious health challenge, can water therapy help? The answer is yes! While in the water we are more buoyant and able to maneuver without the added weight of gravity pressing down on us. Especially when there is the need to rehabilitate, water or hydrotherapy is a reliable way to do the work in awakening our brains, nervous and musculoskeletal systems, in fact, all of our 11 systems that make up the human bodily functioning but that’s not just for us!

Many years ago I took my beloved Shembala, an English Black Lab for hydrotherapy to aid and improve her elbow dysplasia.  By the time we became aware of this condition it was too late to attempt surgery.  That is often done when the dysplasia is in the hip but elbows are another story all together and if a surgical intervention is to be considered it needs to be while they are still pups.  The results were impressive.  Shembala regained much mobility and although we could never get rid of this condition, we improved her ability to function and live life to her fullest while we had her in our lives.  And now here’s another story of a 6 year old cat named Nazzaning.  To learn more about this wonderful success story of Nazzaning who after an accident suffered with a paralyzed front paw and quickly rehabilitated the use of his arm and paw/fingers with hydrotherapy. To learn more, click here.

We all know that best intentions don’t always lead to desired results, and when they don’t, who’s to blame? We are too willing to give our power over to someone we consider an authority to teach us how to do something but are we really listening, sensing and feeling what we are doing? Too often the answer is no and then when we incur a problem we are frustrated, angry and sometimes resentful to try something new. We become jaded and either don’t explore other possibilities especially if immediate results aren’t guaranteed or we jump to the next trend in hopes it will be the magic bullet that fixes the problem! Thereafter, it’s the doctors office for a diagnosis and often a prescription to try and fix us or allay the problem we created for ourselves with the best intentions of improving our dynamic. So the question is do our actions best serve our intentions?

A little knowledge goes a long way and if we took a little more time to investigate and really sense and feel if what we are doing is the best approach we could stave off a lot of the compiling issues we create for ourselves. Well, good judgment is a by-product of bad judgment! How quickly do we learn from our experiences to make better calls that serve our intentions?

Stuart McGill, professor of Spine Biomechanics at the University of Waterloo, Canada has outlined a healthy, balanced approach to improve and maintain the concept of true “Core Stability” without straining, damaging and pushing our spines to the point of trauma. Have you ever heard of, it’s how you do what you do that matters, and “less is best”? What is your intention, to strengthen, flexibility, how about both! Think about saying yes and no at the same time! How easy is it to drink and talk at the same time, not very, so why is it so difficult to understand that there are times when we are saying yes and no in our musculoskeletal organization that compromise our actions and over time create a lot of the aches and pains, bulging, herniated, slipped disks that we as a multitasking, driven culture experience. It’s more about what we are doing and how we are going about it. Here is a site from the New York Times that dispels the myths of the latest trend of core exercises. To read more, click here.

Eleven years later Aimee Mullins, Olympic athlete, model and humanist returns to TED to share a conversation about our potential. How we can ignite our imagination and provoke our senses so that we can learn how and what to do with our potential. This is a beautiful expression of our humanity and all of our potential in it that makes us beautiful! To follow her story up to the present click here.

Have you heard of Aimee Mullins?  You need to!  She is an amazing young woman who was born with a birth defect, missing both her fibula bones that required her to have both her legs amputated below the knees when she was one year old.   That hasn’t stopped her from making her dreams come true.  Here is her first interview on TED, telling her story that is truly amazing.  To learn more click here.

Here is a wonderful approach that can be applied to any and all disciplines to enhance the ease and effortlessness in performance whether it be sports, music, theatre… These are the comments of an athlete who partakes of Awareness Through Movement (R) classes from Stacy Barrows, a Feldenkrais practitioner and PT.

“…The students in this ATM class ranged from PT’s, Pilates instructors and personal trainers. They were patiently ready to follow a discovery process that led them to easier movement and softer postures. All with more comfort and less pain by report.” This blog appeared the next day from one of the participants:
“The workshop consisted largely of the instructor leading the ten participants through a series of nearly-imperceptible movements, usually done lying on the floor in a darkened room. I’d done a few hours of Feldenkrais work in graduate school and so knew a little about its wonders, but I sensed the skepticism among some of the other students: What could THIS be doing? It didn’t last long, because almost instantly, most of us felt different. Taller, longer, more aligned, more easy in our movements. As a guy with some theatre background, I noticed that the voices in the room sounded richer, more resonant. And, as cheesy as it sounds, people looked happier. I was, once again, blown away, and totally sold on its benefits.”
To learn more read here.