Hello and welcome to my world of wellness and fitness and overcoming limitations in life as I seek unique ways to take the lid off and allow life the freedom to fly unfettered by life’s challenges. Not the least of those might be trying to exercise and get healthier when bogged down by back problems!
My name is Cinda and I hope that the stories of my own journey as well as the retelling of many experiences from my past working with others to teach unique or unconventional methods of self-development in fitness, in creative pursuits, in stress relief practices will connect for you and be of some help to those of you struggling, particularly with your fitness workouts, athletic pursuits or injury rehabilitation. I specialized, in my work in the past, in helping people get back into exercise when injuries and back pain have created seemingly impossible limitations. So now I am working extra hard to practice my own teachings at this later stage of life in retirement and contemplating the addition of online classes and coaching to help others move through their own challenges with this.
It’s not enough to chant affirmations all day although that certainly can’t hurt. It’s not enough to just jump into a class and get moving especially when back pain or an old injury may prevent that. It’s not enough to pull and push and stretch and force movement, even if you can. That is the very thing that will re-injure or put stress on joints that break down over time. One has to think holistically and view your structure as you would the foundation of your home. Damage to the foundation can bring down the walls, the plumbing, etc. It can, if harsh enough, bring down the entire building. And mistreating the body by unknowingly creating damage to its structure can negatively affect other systems in the body. It can chip away at one’s overall health.
I have personally suffered for many years from the many side effects of severe scoliosis. That is hard to imagine for people who know my past profession as a classical ballet dancer. Even harder to imagine for anyone who saw me perform in the past. But it is a fact. The greatest challenge of my life was to function fully as a dancer with a debilitating physical deformity that caused various injuries and pain. Necessity, being the mother of invention as they say, helped me devise ways to work with and around my limitations. Dancing did not harm me in itself. However, performing on too many inappropriate floors set on top of concrete in some studios and some theaters around the country did tremendous damage. The good side is that my training kept my muscles strong which was one reason I was able to maintain a fairly supple and balanced structure in spite of a very curved “S” shaped spine.
As a 15 year old, being told I had this spinal disease and should go into a brace and never dance again, after just receiving a coveted award of a scholarship to study dance was traumatic for me at such a young age. I was one of only 10 girls throughout the country out of hundreds who was chosen as a recipient of a Ford Foundation Grant to study dance year round and mentored personally by a famous ballerina, Violette Verdy. But suddenly it felt like someone was pulling the entire floor out from under me and telling me my life was over.
That is exactly what they were telling me and my father who hated my dance career was overjoyed. I, on the other hand, was not having it! I don’t recall exactly how I got my way on that subject and avoided living in the brace and quitting dance but I did. Many years later we came to learn that the brace and its forced inactivity would have been a devastating choice for me. Fortunately today there are better options for young people dealing with scoliosis. But for me at that time, I did what I could and worked extra hard to become very strong physically to support what my spine needed to fulfill my life as a professional dancer. And I did!
One of the things I conjured up in my mind was to teach myself to visualize everything I did or was about to do. I even visualized every exercise and step I was taking as I trained and as I stepped out onto stages all across the country. I visualized when I was in pain to stop it and I visualized when I was injured to heal it. No one taught me how to do this. I had no idea at age 15 that meditation and visualization was even a thing. I just did it naturally because I was in pain and it helped instantly.
In the years since those days and after a full career though short lived as dance tends to be, perhaps a bit more so for me because of the injuries, I moved on in life to teach and choreograph and produce student workshops and performances. I also studied and became credentialed as a Certified Clinical Hypnotherapist so I could learn and use and teach more about the role of the mind in all things physical. I taught what I learned to others. I taught my dance students. I taught my fitness clients. I taught my hypnotherapy clients how to ease stress or lose weight with the aid of visualization. I even taught business people and a few athletes how to visualize to improve their effectiveness and productivity.
My thinking as far as fitness, and all wellness in general, is that it is always best to treat or to train the whole person…. Not just one limb or one system of the body. The mind absolutely must be involved. No mindless exercising! And no mindless meditation. The mind leads in all that we do. Does that mean I think that this is a cure all and that sitting around visualizing will cure all areas of disease or distress? I do not. However I am open to the possibility that one day we will all learn more and find that this is wrong and that we actually have far more control than what we are now aware of. What I do believe at this point, from everything I have tried myself or taught or witnessed others do, is that the mind is the best tool we have in all things fitness and wellness related. Not to use it fully is to greatly limit our chances for success in anything.
My life in dance was many years ago. But I can also say that I could never have done what I did onstage nor would I have a way to teach others to do it today, if I had not gone through the pain and emotional distress of having this physical limitation and learning to overcome the many limitations it threatened to create for me professionally and in my personal health.
Yes, I still struggle today with pain and I still work on myself. It is ongoing. But I hope my experience and the stories about those I taught will give you all hope that there is so much possible beyond the limits that life sometimes fools us into thinking we are stuck with. We may be in a structure of this manifest universe and a muscles and bones structure of this little body we have been given in our lifetime. But there is SO MUCH we have yet to learn about the mystical aspect of the human body/mind and the way we access it and what exactly the mind is, what it’s role is, and how to use it to better our lives! When you put together the incredible power of the human mind with the efforts of the body and honor the whole person in a natural way, you can and will experience what I refer to as the miraculous! Thus, the name of my blog, Body Mind and Miracles.
Please join me for more in the weeks to follow by subscribing! Comment and let me know what you are working on in your life if you wish or even what you might like to read about on this general topic. I hope that something here will help and inspire you!