EVERYTHING’S RELATED

"....we're not smart, and we have bodies, we're smart because we have bodies..."

"Not long after celebrities starting showing up at events with implausibly blank expressions, researchers started to notice that Botox was not only altering how people looked, but how they felt too.    Studies on depressed subjects who received Botox injections into their frown lines, reported significant (often instant) relief from depression".

- Stealing Fire, Kotler & Wheal

That is crazy enough on it's own, but this research also happened to discover that subjects lost the ability to empathise.  When asked to feel the joy or sorrow that other people were going through, they simply couldn't.... and the reason for it appears to be that our facial expressions are hard-wired to our emotions, ie. you can't have one without the other.

Thus with a face that doesn't move, neither does your heart (so to speak).

The implications of this are massive (besides confirming that most Hollywood superstars truly are heartless bitches...  It also means that our entire body plays a role in thinking, not just our brains....

So, if freezing some tiny facial muscles can have such massive impact, what do you think might happen if the rest of the body doesn't move much?

What happens if we slouch instead of stand proudly?

If we sit for hours instead of squatting, standing, standing on one leg, or pacing up and down?

What might it do for our brain activity, our emotions, if we dance, skip, hop from fence post to fence post, balance on our hands, jump over a railing, crawl around with a puppy, do forward rolls down a sand dune??

What if we try a movement in the gym, that we know we'll likely fail, but in doing so, will stretch our reserves of strength, balance and confidence to their limits?

Can you get smarter, or more empathetic by climbing a rope???

Who knows for sure, but it sounds like more fun than a text book......

And we've got one more week of March Movement to find out!!