Friends, I Got Injured!
Published: (January, 2020)
Take a look at this picture. Ever wanted to do this? Perhaps you already have—some as adults, many as kids. Your own wish to bend over backwards likely has never been a big thing in your life. But mine was an intense desire.
You always want the very thing, you were deprived of as a child. After discovering Hot Yoga it became important to me to do some moves I could never do in childhood. I went to great lengths to correct my body’s misalignment, the result of a lifetime limp and numerous hip surgeries. Sometimes the effort I put in felt massively strenuous, but the results felt close to miraculous.
One day at the gym I saw a couple of youngsters doing a backbend bridge. I thought: Doing that with my grandson, how wonderful that would be. What the heck? I mused. I’m almost 62. It’s now or never. I’ve already come so far. I am doing the frog pose comfortably. And I’m only a couple of inches away from a full split. Surely there’s nothing I can’t achieve, given enough effort. Why not try a backbend bridge?
You can do it! My SilverFit classmates encouraged me. You have the flexibility, our instructor said, offering a little coaching. And…I did it. The rest of the day I walked six inches off the floor. I was very happy and I ignored a slight discomfort I felt in my chest, dismissing it as mere muscular soreness. In the morning, I awakened with severe pain in the middle of my chest bone.
Life is truly unpredictable. One day you are on the top of the world. Next day you are in the deepest pit. One day I was in the best shape of my life. Better complexion, muscle tone, flexibility than any time in my adult life. Next day my world crumbled and debilitating pain became the primary focus of my life. Now my only relief is lying flat on my back with a heating pad on my chest. Exercise—any exercise brings even more pain. Inactivity is stealing my hard-earned muscles. Internet medical sites are not encouraging: Ribcage injuries are painful and take a long time to heal.
I am writing this, while my family’s gone skiing. I’m lying here, more than an occasional groan, trying hard not to feel sorry for myself. Why me? I’m asking. How did I attract such a trauma, while I haven’t caught so much as a cold in 20 years?
Naturally, this has nothing to do with raw foods. Rather, it has everything to do with the chest misalignment I developed as a child. Raw foods work. In fact, they’ve worked so well in my case that I came to believe there’s nothing my body couldn’t do.
Difficult times are given to us for the lesson we need to learn. Here is what I have learned:
1. We must enjoy as intensely as we can the body and face we have now. Believe me, when something nasty happens, you’ll regret deeply you didn’t appreciate enough the good health and good looks you had before. Concentrate on what you like about your body. Don’t fret about what you can’t do or don’t have.
2. No matter what’s going on in our life, we must not forgo of our beauty routine. When you’re in physical or emotional pain, that’s when your emotions etch your suffering on your face the most. When you’re in the middle of turmoil, you don’t think to place a patch on your forehead at night or perform a cupping massage or do facial brushing. But you must.
If you look good, you’ll feel better. That’s what I am doing. Telling myself that regret, that disappointment, that pain, all of them will be etched on my face if I abandon my beauty routine. I follow my beauty practice even on the days when this is the last thing I feel like doing.
3. We must always remind ourselves that every problem has a solution. Whenever something bad happens, we need to believe: Something good will come out of this.
I can attest, it’s hard to believe wholeheartedly that somehow I’ll benefit from the pain I am experiencing now. But I'm trying to make this belief the focus of my thoughts these days. And some possible solutions are beginning to present themselves. I am definitely learning a lot about new healing modalities in general and about my own body in particular.
Always remember: it's your believing in a good outcome that will help you to see opportunities, will help you recognize solutions when they arise, and your positive attitude will help you avoid attracting more drama into your life.
I have written about the power of belief and intention in my most recent book and now I am focused on applying these principles during this new challenge in my own life. Read this FREE chapter from my book The Quantum Key: Transcending Life’s Trials. You can download it here. I hope it will make it a little easier for you to find solutions to your own life's trials.
How To Relax Your Forehead Muscles
Here is an email I received recently:
I’m 47, and have been near vegan, mostly raw for about 20 years. People guess me to be thirty-something. But starting just last week lines on my forehead appeared suddenly. I have always taken care of my skin, but recently I have become conscious of the heavy upper lids and some sagging below the eyes. Can you please recommend what can I do to uplift my muscles?
A: Forehead furrows take decades to form. And then they typically appear suddenly, usually in your mid-forties, as if your skin can no longer hide what’s going on underneath.
Wrinkles on your forehead—why do you get them? The answer: Tensed forehead muscles.
Have you been worrying? Felt upset, disappointed? Felt pain, anger, judgment? We all have. Each time we experience an emotion, specific muscles contract. Unfortunately each muscle tension doesn’t go away without leaving a trace. There’s a cumulative effect. With time, these overworked muscles stiffen and become shorter under the skin. Gradually, what we see on the surface is creases and wrinkles.
That’s why it’s so important to relax these muscles—especially when negative emotions overwhelm you, as in the case of physical trauma or emotional drama. Remind yourself: This too shall pass. This is when you need to help your face to forget hard times, even if your mind cannot. You don't want the record of those difficult times to remain on your face.
Do a simple test. Try to move the skin on your forehead at your hairline. Skin, with its underlying tissues, should move in all directions ideally 1 inch. If your forehead is stuck—immovable or moves very little in any direction, then you’ve just learned why your upper lids loom over your eyes like awnings. Your stuck forehead muscles don’t allow your brows to lift.
The good news…you can “unglue” and even out this area. Our Strigil will be of a great help. In a daily scraping motion for a few minutes, move your forehead vertically and horizontally.
Another way to unglue your forehead is to use our RejuvaCup on your forehead area. At first, it might be a little painful, but keep doing it. Be patient and consistent. This will take a few weeks. But once you’ve unglued your forehead, your brows will rise, and your upper lids will no longer hang over your eyes.
You can do Strigil scraping and cupping of your forehead anytime. But I recommend just before bedtime. The anti-stress effect will help you fall asleep fast and sleep better through the night.
Removing this tension will have several beneficial effects…
• reducing or eliminating forehead wrinkles
• raising dropped eyebrows, and
• restoring the smoothness of your forehead skin.
Add forehead tension releasing practices to your New Year Resolutions. Make it a part of your daily beauty routine.
By relaxing forehead muscles daily, we block muscle memory, and the muscle “forgets” its desire to contract with every change in your emotion. The shorter the lifetime of the affected wrinkle, the faster and more lasting the favorable effect. So the sooner you get started, the better!
Observe yourself and you’ll notice that you are tensing your forehead even when you are relaxing in bed. It’s mostly the nighttime sleep produces wrinkles on the forehead.
Applying special patches such as our WrinkAlign Forehead Liners allow you to immobilize the musclespack at night and train them to release tension. This provides an effective mechanical control of the forehead and prevents wrinkling during the night.
