How do others perceive you? How soon do you realize that you are getting
tense? How well do you anticipate their unspoken feelings? You ability to
understand these signals has an enormous impact on how well you get along with
others.
"The secret is all in understanding a code. It is a most elaborate code that
is written nowhere, known by none and yet understood by all."
Tour Your Body for Vital Signs
Your body is a hologram of your being; a three-dimensional movie that is
constantly on, showing others how you feel about yourself and the world.
As you walk through life, is your body saying what your words are saying? Your
body is a three-dimensional "full motion" billboard you are constantly showing
the rest of the world. Even if people are consciously reading your body
language, they will subconsciously react to your bodily signals.
For example, if you are literally uptight, that is rigid in any part of your
body, especially your face, where most people focus most of their attention in
conversation, people will instinctively resist or react against you and your
comments. This phenomena is akin to bounding a hard rubber ball on a concrete
surface and then on a soft carpet. The ball will bounce higher and faster
against the hard surface than the soft one of course, just as other react
against your "hardened surface." Suggestion: Whenever you are entering a
potentially volatile or even new situation, loosen up physically. Walk,
stretch, and work on the areas you tend to hold most of your tension.
For example, if you are like many conscientious, hard-working people, you
probably hold your shoulders higher and slightly more forward than is natural
and one of the tendons in your neck has tightened up even more than the other.
If someone will give you a quick ten or fifteen minute shoulder and neck
massage, you will enter the situation more relaxed and others will respond
more softly to you.
It's time to get to know your body. If you don't know where you hold your
tension, and most people don't, take a tour of your body, so you can know what
needs the most loosening - -and exercise. Are you shouldering the world's
responsibilities, or perpetually drooping? Or, in your determined drive toward
success, do you plant your feet solidly on the ground in a life gesture of
hostility, defiance or taking ground? Perhaps you have a forward leaning
posture, with the head tilted slightly forward, as if you are ready to spring
into action, expressing a lifelong pattern of flight away from psychologically
threatening situations, when you thought it was part of your make-up to leap
forward to new opportunities.
To be depressed is, in fact, to press against yourself. To be closed off is
to hold your muscles rigid against the world. Being open is being soft. No
instinctive muscle clenching, such as in the jaws, a growing pattern in
Americans, even into their sleep. Hardness is being uptight, cold, separate,
giving yourself and others a hard time. Softness is synonymous with pleasure,
warmth, flowing, being alive, drawing other people toward you rather than
forcing them away.
Are you itching to get at someone? Is your colleague a pain in the neck?
Are you sore about something? What is your aching back trying to tell you?
Is there someone or thing on your back? What about your ulcer, allergy,
muscle spasms? Is there someone you cannot stomach? What is it that you
would like to get off your chest, or your back? Your body speaks to you all
the time, telling you what your own needs are. Listen there. It is your free
and most sophisticated medical feedback testing system. It is constantly
showing you your inner tensions, state of mind and habitual life attitudes.
When you are misaligned and tense, you expend outrageous sums of energy doing
the everyday gestures of life. Since the body is a high viscosity substance,
that is 60 percent to 80 percent water, the bonds are floating in a
relatively fluid environment. Yet, over time, despite that apparent fluidity,
you have tightened the muscles around every major experience of pain, fear or
anger, and continue to tighten them each time you think you are experiencing
similar situations, thus guaranteeing that you make your own pattern of
uptightness familiar and increasingly habitual, until it becomes a permanent
condition you no longer recognize as not normal.
We all hold great muscle tension around certain bones in blind remembrance of
fearful events, long after the actual events are often long forgotten. You
may never recall what initially made you afraid, but you can note where you
body reacted to protect itself and spend more time in your exercise and
massage or other body work to relax and loosen those muscle groups.
In Western society, we usually hold the tension somewhere in our upper body
whereas in many Eastern cultures the tension tends to be held in the lower
body.
If you don't begin a regular practice of exercise and stretching, you are
guaranteed to lose mobility sooner as you age and rob yourself of the most
positive and alive personal presence you could offer the world every day.
We go through life making decisions, closing down and limiting ourselves
unconsciously. Stay open literally by getting in motion more frequently.
Stand and stretch at least every twenty minutes when you are sitting and
working. Try to walk, hopefully in sync with someone else, in fresh air and
sunlight, at least thirty minutes a day. As Dr. Dean Ornish wrote in his most
recent book, Love and Survival: The Scientific Basis for the Healing Power of
Intimacy, ""our survival depends on the healing power of love.
One of the safest and most natural ways to move closer to others is to walk
with them. Walk further to the restaurant. Walk and talk on the way to the
meeting. Walk with your loved one, rather than sitting at home, to come down
from your day, and come together. Motion is emotional and makes every event
more vivid and memorable. Literally move towards the one you want in your life
and loosen up together. Your life may depend on it. In fact, why not get up
right now and take a stretch, look around, call someone and suggest a walk.
Want to learn more about the importance of cultivating intimate relationships to
keep healthy? Consider reading, in addition to Ornish's book:
Cortis, Bruno, Heart and Soul, Villard Books, 1995
Dossey, Larry, Healing Words, HarperCollins, 1993
Goleman, Danile. Emotional Intelligence. Bantam Books, 1995
Keen, Sam. To Love and Be Loved. Bantam Books, 1997.
Lynch, James J. The Broken Heart. Basic Books, 1977.
Pert, Candace. Molecules of Emotion: Why We Feel the Way We Feel. Scribner
Books/Simon & Schuster, 1997.
Remen, Rachel Naomi. Kitchen Table Wisdom, Riverhead Books, 1996.
Scarf, Maggie. Intimate Partners. Ballantine Books, 1987.
Weil, Andrew. Spontaneous Healing. Knopf, 1995.
Getting What You Want : How to Reach Agreement and Resolve Conflict Every Time
Gut instincts expert, author, and speaker Kare Anderson is an upbeat conference opener or closing keynoter.
Her warmth, memorably titled tips such as "Go Slow to Go
Fast," dry wit, and frequent references to the situations of
hottest interest to attendees, cause people to leave laughing
and talking about what they've heard.
Learn ways to "Say It Better" in how you speak, appear, write, and
create the work and other settings of your life. Whether you want to
learn ways to lead, persuade, negotiate, sell, resolve conflict, or design
a compelling physical setting, Say it Better is the place to visit again
and again to see the latest ideas from our growing list of expert
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