Dear Friend

Coming to you this week from Ko Samui!

This week’s Letter comes from Ko Samui, a dreamy tropical island and playground for holidaymakers looking to enjoy an idyllic escape from a hardworking life!

I am down here (it’s in the south of Thailand) with my family who have come in from Australia and England for a rare get together. Rare, because we span three continents!

Accordingly, amidst all the excitement of meeting them and catching up, and getting ourselves down to Samui, suddenly I find it’s time for this week’s Letter. So, what I’m doing this week is reproducing an excerpt from my book, Menu For A Spiritual Revolution: Health Harmony & Happiness.

I wanted to write about exercise, which is the E in the DEAL of my Living the REAL DEAL which was the title of Letter #5. Can you recall what it stands for?!

(Living with respect, empathy, awareness and love for oneself and others, and making changes to the four quadrants of life, namely diet, exercise, attitude and lifestyle.)

Now, in my book I wrote about exercise, and how we can make it easier for ourselves to both do it regularly and to avoid giving up and succumbing to our lazy gene. I shared tips, insights and understandings from my own experiences and research, and now I’d like to share this passage with you.

I hope it inspires you, either to take up regular exercise or, if you already include exercise in your life to perhaps look at it in a new light.

I will return to the subject of exercise in a near future Letter, as it’s an aspect of life that is well worth investigating beyond the usual understandings of exercise.

Making Exercise Doable and Rewarding

Pre-Reading Task

1. What is exercise?

2. What regular exercise do you do? How does it make you feel?

3. Have you ever done yoga? Do you think it qualifies as exercise? Why, why not?

Reading Task

As you read through the passage from my book (available on Amazon if you are interested in getting a copy), make notes of insights or understandings or tips that you previously didn’t know about, or which you want to follow up on in your own life. Or, read through the whole passage first, and then re-read it making your notes.

E stands for exercise, and again I have found quite a lot of conflicting and potentially harmful information out there as to what exercise we should do and how much of it. I can only give my thoughts on the matter, based on my research, understanding and experiences.

We can think of three clearcut types of exercise to help us get a picture of things.

The typical western idea of exercise is to go in hard, and at its extreme we can picture the street jogger, flushed face contorted in agony, pounding the polluted urban tarmac for several kilometres every day in the belief that the harder we push ourselves the more we will benefit, and the more the weight will drop off. Perhaps the thought of almost being on the point of collapse, struggling to gulp in the air as one’s heart is racing faster than Lewis Hamilton’s car, means good health for the body. Unlikely, and according to Ayurveda certainly not good for people with a certain constitution type. Anything which gets the heart working harder and the breathing deeper is aerobic exercise, but moderation is the key. Many people working in the health industry have told me it’s a fallacy to overwork the body, and a fit person doesn’t mean necessarily a healthy person. Consider that burnout is not good. Some sportsmen, fit as a fiddle, die young before they’ve even retired from their sport, and I always assume they’ve overdone things.

The typical eastern or Indian idea of exercise is yoga, and this is not necessarly nice easy and gentle! Yet, undeniably, you don’t really have to go anywhere, which especially makes it useful if you live in an urban environment.

At the start of my mission to pursue wellness I signed up for two weeks of yoga lessons. I was astounded at how much my body was stretched, pulled, tested and given such a huge workout in just four square metres of space! I also recall after five days of this seriously strenuous exercise, going to my local pub for the Friday pool league night and not drinking any beer. The thought of it felt like an insult to my body which by now was flying with energy and vitality. I recall smiling inwardly to myself about being in a pub on a Friday night and not drinking beer, a previously unheard of phenomenon… how my life was transforming itself!

So while yoga is not so much an aerobic exercise (or maybe it is?), it is nevertheless a quite brilliant workout for the body. As somebody who hates running this is much more my cup of tea. And it really gets to all the muscles, which is in my view the primary purpose of excercise. A big thing in yoga too is breathwork and cultivating good breathing practices.

The third clearcut type of exercise, the preferred version for perhaps the bulk of the human popultation, east or west, is none of it. That was me for most of my life until I hit 44 and changed my whole lifestyle around. I had a year of playing weekly tennis with a mate and took up golf in my 30s, and at the outset of my new life teaching and living in Bangkok in my late 20s I did a year or so of weekly taekwondo which I loved, but then we lost our premises and it fizzled out. But other than that I never really did any exercise except for lots of walking which I now realise is a superb activity for keeping fit. Some cutting edge doctors who do health say walking is the best exercise we can do.

Doing no exercise clearly appeals to our lazy gene, but anybody pursuing wellness will of course need to overcome this. Consider this, ‘use it or lose it, abuse it and lose it’. Don’t do none, don’t do too much, find your balance. That applies to our body and our muscles. Now, should we pound the streets jogging and going through such pain, and is yoga, being a non-aerobic exercise, enough for us? Do we need aerobic exercise? What constitutes a useful level of exercise to support our endeavours to promote a healthy body for ourselves? As with diet, the answers are personal, hence you’ll need to become your own expert on this.

Remember: life is energy and energy is movement, and therefore to me the key factor when considering any exercise program for ourselves is simply to make sure we move our body. But what exactly is ‘movement’? Well, we can move our body, move our muscles, and we can move oxygen, blood and lymph. Therefore, as I do every morning, if we sit down and do deep breathing activities we are doing exercise by ensuring a good flow of oxygen and blood which moves around our body more effectively than most people’s rather shallow breathing default.

Thus, think of movement and you are thinking exercise. Doesn’t have to be the painful jogging variety. If you’re thinking of losing weight, I’m pretty sure you don’t have to engage in aerobic activity per se, I think that’s just down to ensuring you eat only whole foods in your diet, minimising animal food consumption, and avoiding all the refined and processed ‘foods’ which are what cause so much weight gain.

Another key factor is the ability of the emind* to choose the third type of exercise, that is, not doing any. For many people their emind* will come up with any number of excuses to avoid doing exercise. This is why I always say that developing good habits is so useful because then we have the habit and the momentum to tell the lazy emind* to take a hike or a running jump.

[*emind stands for ego-mind, and in my book I speak about us having two minds, the ego-mind and the intelligence-mind, or emind and imind; this is my way of understanding our own mind, which for me is the most important understanding you can have in life. We will most certainly be focussing on the mind in the near future as this is the key to everything in our journey of life.]

Now, factors like time and space come into matters, for many will say they are too busy. What, too busy for health?! So let me say that if you do just 15 minutes of whatever you choose to do each day you are providing your body with so much more than if you do nothing. And even a lazy emind will struggle to convince you that 15 minutes is too long. Half an hour even better. Of course, if you can do an hour or more then that’s fine, but so long as you don’t overdo it. You need to find the right balance for you. Again, use OAR* to monitor things as you take up new fitness programs and then adjust them as you see fit.

[*This stands for observation, awareness and reflection, which I promote as the number one tool for guiding us in our life.]

My personal approach is this. I like to walk as much as I can, which unfortunately in Thailand is not so easy considering street dogs, pollution and heat in urban places, and snakes in the forests. I usually play golf each week which does give me several kilometres of walking. But my mainstay is about 20 minutes each morning of various stretches that I do to work out all the different muscles in my body, like a sort of bespoke version of yoga. I recall some official yoga asanas, but forget so many others, so I just focus on my muscles, contracting and expanding them. Being a teacher, researcher and writer I do lots of work sitting down which only contracts muscles, so expanding them is really important. I do lots of bending, stretching up and sideways, twisting and the like. I can also do more aerobic kind of stuff with rapid movement of the arms and by doing lots of sitting squats. You easily find after not much time that your body is so much more flexible and this keeps me committed to my morning program. I may miss the odd day here and there, no harm done.

After my stretches which I do in our garden I come back in and sit down in the half lotus position (which I’m proud that I can do, when I first tried it my knees and thighs were nowhere near the floor, now they sit flush to it) for maybe another 20 minutes or half an hour. I do a mix of meditation and deep breathing exercises to really get the oxygen and blood flowing all around my body.

I also do more stretching here, including swivelling my head to the left and right everso slowly, and then as I look ahead I lift it up towards the ceiling and then down towards the floor, as far as I can and as slowly as I can. I learned this from tai chi I think. I do several rounds of this. I also bend my upper half of the body forwards so that my head can just about touch the floor. I pull my earlobes around this way and that, tap the top of my head and all around my face and neck and shoulders region with my fingertips for a few minutes, and then massage the top of my head vigorously. I do various other kinds of things whenever I think of them. Movement means exercise, so whatever you are moving is exercise.

My point here in describing my own routine, my friend, is that all this exercise I do, roughly 40 minutes or so each morning is all done in a tiny bit of space, so anybody can do this and if you do nothing else I think this is an excellent support for your health and wellbeing. It’a an anti-lazy emind fitness regimen!

But in addition to this regular stuff, whenever I have the time and money I sign up to a gym for a month and go there every day, but I barely use it. Instead I use their swimming pool and get daily swimming in which deals with most muscles, and after that I use the sauna for about 20 minutes or so. Sitting down in the sauna constitutes exercise? Yes, assuredly so! Just think movement, and I can tell you there’s plenty of movement going on with all your sweating, which is also getting toxins in your body hastened out of it. If I do the sauna first, I notice that I can easily do so much more swimming without getting tired, the heat no doubt has really helped my muscles be flexible and loose.

I also have some one kilogram weights at home which I can use to give my arms a workout. No need for heavy weights, although if that’s your preference, fine. 15 minutes of one kilogram weights is quite a burden to handle!

And the other semi-regular exercise I do is cycling, but only around the local roads so as to keep away from the street pollution.

We also have a rebounder to jump up and down on which is a tremendous form of exercise, and again takes up no space. 15 minutes at a time is fine. This is perfect for moving your lymph around your body, thereby helping your body’s elimination systems and stopping the lymph backing up. Static lymph means your bodily wastes don’t get eliminated and are instead stored up in parts of your body which, in time, will lead to ailments, not to mention weight gain. If you have constipation issues I’m sure you could buy a rebounder and this will really help you.

Now, to finish up on this section, aside from all the usual games and sports and gym stuff, what else can we do to maintain the shape and wellbeing of our body? I’m just going to list a few ideas and leave it with you as to what you choose to do. But build in exercise regularly, whatever you do, and you can see that time and space are no excuses!

Walking is excellent, walking meditation even better, so be aware of your posture and walk upright. I spent the first half of my life with a sort of slumping posture, head down, but no more, now I’m upright and psychologically facing up to the world of challenges. Ensure your sitting posture has a straight back too, and retrain yourself if you need to like I did. Other ideas to add to the already disussed ones include qi gong, tai chi, taekwondo, other martial arts, gardening, trekking, climbing and descending, running, earthing on grass, bare earth or a sandy beach, giving or receiving massage, self-massage, pilates, dancing, zumba, aerobics, gymnastics, on-the-spot walking or jogging, acupressure, and simply go online for more options. Oh, and all the sports of course.

Your joints, muscles, tendons, ligaments, blood, lymph, breathing, brain, lungs, heart all need regular movement to keep them in good shape.

Do think about your hips which are the central pivot to your body, your lymph which needs body movement to carry wastes out of your body because it has no pump of its own, your blood which wants plenty of oxgyen coming into it, a straight back which links your cranium with your sacrum and carries your nervous sytem’s ability to work properly, and ensure that your major muscles get plenty of expansion as well as the more usual contraction.

Think of these different body parts as you devise a program which will boost your bodily wellbeing which in turn will make your mind feel happier and therefore your soul. Your 3DH* will be flying!

[*3DH stands for Three dimensions of health in my book, which are your physical health, mental health and spiritual health.]

~~~~~

So, how did that all resonate with you?!

Since I published my book I have since started talking about doing exercise in 4 square meters. Nearly everything I’ve described above can be done in this small space, meaning there is no excuse for anybody to not do exercise! It can be done at home, indoors or outdoors by anybody, regardless of the kind of accommodation you live in.

Weekly Health Tip

Build breathing exercises into your daily life. Wim Hoff is a huge name in breathing, and a good place to start any research you may wish to do. But I’ll just share the main one that I do, which comes from Wim himself.

1. Sit down comfortably, and make sure your back is nice and straight. Inhale through the nose deeply and quickly, and then exhale through the nose or mouth deeply and quickly. Do this 30 times.

2. On the 30th round of inhales and exhales, finish by exhaling, and then hold your breath for as long as you comfortably can. Don’t push yourself, but I personally do like to hold it in for as long as I can to the point of really needing some more air! When I’m in form, I go over two minutes of holding my breath.

3. When you can’t hold any more (however short or long you manage), inhale deeply and hold for 15 seconds and then exhale fully. This is one complete round.

4. Wim then says do three rounds. I usually do two, and I keep promising myself to do three rounds. Coming soon!

I think if you make this a regular feature in your life you will find that you can hold your breath in for longer and longer as you get practiced and as your lungs increase their capacity.

This really is top quality exercise, and you are doing it sitting down!

Weekly Task

Do the Wim Hoff breathing exercise every day! If you want to monitor how long you are holding your breath after each 30 inhales and exhales, then I use the timer on my mobile phone to do this. In this way you can see what progress you are making.

Please forgive the absence of the word and sentence of the week, and a reflection on last week’s Letter, Monday’s nearly over here in Thailand and I’m determined to never miss a Monday!

I’ve not loaded the photos I’ve taken in Samui island yet, so I’ll share a couple with you next week. I will still be here!

All the best

Philip

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