Author: peterhunter1953

A simple, tried and tested way of slowing things down, relaxing and unwinding when your world gets busy.

I can’t get my head around why people don’t take more care of themselves. We only get one crack at this life, just one body in which to live our lives, yet we are so often careless about our bodies and our minds. We don’t exercise enough, don’t eat well, just don’t take ourselves seriously. We look after our cars, our houses, our pets – but do we look after ourselves?

OK some stuff happens to us that we can’t control, some things in life are down to luck or genetics. However, most of what happens is about our lifestyle, our choices, its about factors over which we do have control.

If you don’t look after yourself, who will? If we don’t look after ourselves, we are no good to those around us, family, friends, colleagues. We may talk about being too busy, about having other priorities, but realistically, you have to be your number one priority. If not you won’t perform at your best as a family member, a friend or a work colleague. Looking after yourself isn’t selfish, it is simple common sense from your perspective and from the perspective of those around you.

One body, one mind, look after yourself.

Another hour this morning jogging the local streets, parks, and canals of Coventry. I love it and am so fortunate to be able to do this. It must be around 20 years ago that I set myself the target of running for an hour once a week – and generally I’ve managed to achieve this. Don’t ask me how fast I’m running, that isn’t the point, the point is keeping my cardio – vascular system working as I “mature.”

This is all about taking responsibility for me. I could have been doing any number of things on a Sunday morning but looking after me must be my number one priority. If I’m not fit and well, I can’t do the other things in family and community that I want to do. It isn’t selfish, it’s common sense.

So, take your wellbeing seriously. I appreciate that there are many things that impact on our health that are out of our control – however, there is so much we can influence, so much is about taking responsibility for ourselves, our fitness, our diet, just looking after body and mind.

It has to start with doing what you can do – if you don’t run, do something else, walk, swim, ride a bike, do yoga, dance, whatever, do something. Start where you are now, focusing on what you can do. No excuses, no “I can’t do,” just start with what you can do whatever that is and build on that. Staying fit and exercising is the most valuable thing we can do to ensure quality of life as we get older.

Rant over – just do it!

I get so much from my yoga classes. Firstly, I enjoy the yoga and teaching 4 classes a week and running other events keeps me physically and mentally active. Secondly, I meet 50 or so great people every week at my classes. The importance of that socialisation can’t be underestimated. Finally I make a little pocket money from the sessions which is always useful.

I do try to spread the benefits of my classes as widely as I can. I aim to tailor my classes to meet the needs of participants to maximise what they get from the sessions, but I also try to maximise what I can put back into the wider community through the classes. I look to use community venues for my yoga so that the room hire fees go back into the local community. Also, the income from my yoga classes enables me to make donations to two charities on behalf of everyone who attends my sessions. Here in the UK, we make a monthly donation to Shelter, working with homeless people across the UK. Further afield, we support an elderly Tibetan gentleman, Mr. Kalsang Dorjee,  living in exile in northern India. He also enjoys simple yoga. Effectively, we provide him with a monthly pension / care supplement. I was keen to support Tibetan exiles because of the importance that I attach to the teachings of the Dalia Lama.

So when you come along to my classes, you’re not just providing this old guy with a little pocket money. We’re looking to spread the benefits as widely as possible.

Until I was 40 I thought there was nothing more pointless than going running for the sake of going running. OK, I played football, cricket and various other sports which required some running, but running for the sake of it seemed pointless. Then at 40, I was at a stage in life where I felt the need to set myself new challenges, so a couple of those challenges involved competing in a triathlon and running a half marathon (a full marathon always seemed a bit too much like hard work). Low and behold, very soon after 40 I’d achieved those objectives, and throughout my 40s I participated in a few triathlon events and a few half marathons. I was never very good at theses activities, but that was never the point, the point was being fit enough to be able to participate and to enjoy participating.

As I moved into my 50’s I ran less and yoga became more important to me. I never completely stopped running, but I didn’t do much and I didn’t run far. My excuse to myself was that being fairly big, 6′ 2″ and 13 and a half stone, I was never going to be a natural runner and running was just going to cause damage to my joints, knees in particular as I got older.

However, for a while now I’ve worked on the idea that my personal fitness strategy should involve yoga to keep me supple and relaxed, some weight work to retain muscle and body mass and should involve cycling and/or running to maintain cardio-vascular health. Clearly to do that I needed to stop trying to kid myself that running wasn’t going to be good for me in the long term. This period of lock-down has provided the ideal opportunity to put the strategy into practice – more time to do things. So the running has picked up and for the last couple of months, there have been a few more runs, getting longer and slightly faster. As previously I’m not particularly concerned about how far I run or how fast I run, much more about how the running feels and how it makes me feel. The great thing is that the running is feeling better and easier, leaving me feeling better and fitter. I pretty much always have the runner’s endorphin high at the end of a run and the sense of achievement from a run is remarkably positive. I’m slow and always will be, but the rhythm of my running is improving and the more I do, the better it feels.

So the challenge now that I’m in my 70’s is to keep this going in a manageable way. I don’t want to overdo the running at the expense of other activities, but having got to the point where the running feels good and is making me feel good, I need to ensure I stay in this place. I know from experience how easy it is to stop doing something like running (for all sorts of reasons that I can readily justify to myself) and then after a couple of months how difficult it is to start up again – and the older I get the more difficult the restarting becomes. My mantra about pretty much all of the positive activities that I’m involved in now is “keep on going” because I know that the older I get the more difficult it is to start things up again once I stop.

As I look at friends of my age, there is such a clear difference between the ones who have kept on going with activities that keep them fit, flexible and relaxed and the ones who, for whatever reason have stopped. It just reinforces my determination to keep on going

As a Yoga teacher, people regularly tell me that they can’t do this or that because they aren’t supple, because they are overweight, because they are poorly co-ordinated or because they just don’t have the time to practice regularly. Often they seem content to accept these constraints without challenge. Yes, there are some things about ourselves that we can’t change and we need a degree of realism about those, but in my experience we impose far tighter constraints on our ambition than are real.

We constrain ourselves by our own beliefs about what we are or are not capable of being or doing. Too often we have a narrow concept of who we are, who we can be, or what we can do – and we limit ourselves within that construct. The construct is based on our past, our upbringing and our experience of life to date. It’s a set of beliefs that we have created – and that we can change.

So let’s try to use our Yoga as a metaphor for life. Take a Yoga posture or exercise where you’ve convinced yourself that you’ve gone as far as you can go – and then gradually, gently, over time, just go that little bit further – go beyond your limiting beliefs to a new place. Then apply that approach in life.

• Develop stretch targets – both physical and mental – try to separate the physical constraints from the constraints in your head
• Use visualisation to picture yourself doing those things you’ve not done before
• Go beyond your limiting beliefs to new places that you’ve not been to before – create a new set of beliefs which empower you to do more, to do new things

Try it in your Yoga practice – then try it in life. Move beyond your self – imposed limiting beliefs.