We talk a lot about adventure in this space, obviously. We discuss the health and aging benefits of remaining active, venturing outdoors, taking on physical challenges and responsibly pushing our limits.
But there’s a kind of adventure that we haven’t yet discussed. This kind of adventure is equally important to the many types of outdoor endeavors that we pursue. It contributes enormously to successful aging, adds years to our lives and enhances the quality of the time we are here on earth.
I’m talking about adventure within. That is, ways, practices and methods for exploring our interiors, digging deep into our minds, journeying within our emotions, and ideally addressing our souls. Wellness. Mindfulness.
Fortunately for us, the Pioneer Valley is rich with opportunities to help and teach us how to adventure within. Many of these methods are ancient practices that originated in the Far East, in China, Japan and Southeast Asia, millennia ago.
Yoga is one. Formalized meditation is another. Tai Chi and Qigong are also popular options. There are numerous martial arts dojos here that include interior focus in their teaching. There are options for breathing therapy, hypnosis, conventional psychotherapy, Reiki and other therapies.
Of course, one doesn’t have to formally study any method in order to access one’s interior. There are many avenues into our innermost depths. Just the simple practice of closing our eyes, breathing deeply and relaxing for a minute can yield enormous benefit.
But I point here to formalized disciplines including yoga, meditation and Qigong because these are sophisticated methods for inner exploration that have been practiced and refined over thousands of years. They have been studied and analyzed the world over and been scientifically proven to deliver life-extending and -enhancing results.
Discovering within“Most of what we think of as adventure is outside,” acknowledges Paul Menard, director of the Karuna Center for Yoga and Healing Arts in Northampton. Karuna, located on Main Street downtown, offers classes in several styles of yoga, meditation and other healing arts. “These practices bring us into a more subtle understanding of ourselves. There’s so much to see, to learn, to discover within ourselves,” Menard says.
Fundamental in the practice of yoga and other body-centered arts is a holistic approach to internal and external health. Yin and yang. A mindful acknowledgement that strong health is a balance of mind and body, a symbiotic partnership among our brains, internal organs, ligaments and blood flow, and external forces and realities.
That balance is an applicable concept no matter what we happen to believe spiritually. Yoga, meditation and Qigong, at their most basic, offer practical health benefits and have been shown to lower stress, fortify physical balance, build muscle and lung capacity, increase reaction time and ability to focus, to name just a few.
“Meditation creates space,” says Menard, who practices and teaches yoga and meditation, and is a shiatsu massage therapist. “It quiets us down, it relaxes us so that all the external chatter is out of the way. So that when it’s time for the external adventure, we are open, we are ready to discover and experience it fully.”
But most Eastern practices take it even further, seeking to expand our awareness, align and connect us with the universe and everything around us, and strengthen and broaden our life force — our Qi, in Chinese.
“Meditation is a very simple idea,” notes Peggy Gillespie, a meditation teacher at Insight Meditation in Easthampton. “It’s about learning being in the present moment and not getting lost in or worrying about the future, or ruminating obsessively about the past.”
For those open to these ethereal concepts, “there’s a whole landscape in there, the inner journey,” describes Dan Winter, a teacher and practitioner of Tai Chi at Toward Harmony Tai Chi and Qigong in Northampton. “The ‘internal arts’ are about going inside and exploring yourself.”
Reducing stress, finding balanceThese are essential concepts for adventure. Expanding our horizons, opening ourselves up to new experience, learning new ways of thinking, speaking and acting.
These internal arts also happen to be vitally important contributors to healthy aging. Stress, as most of us know by now, is a killer, figuratively and literally. There is no shortage of studies showing that heightened stress abbreviates our lives by ushering in high blood pressure, curtailing sleep, correlating with obesity and Type II diabetes, and other harms.
One of the foremost advantages of these internal arts are their proven efficacy in reducing our stress.
Just the practice of sitting in silence, with eyes closed, focusing on your breathing — i.e., meditating — opens blood vessels wider and reduces the manufacture of cortisol, the stress hormone.
A main objective of Tai Chi is to improve physical balance, which reduces the danger of falls and bone breaks as we age. But Tai Chi has also been shown to improve cognitive capacity and reduce the progress of Parkinson’s disease.
“Tai Chi is very adaptable to many different levels of ability,” Winter notes. “It’s meditative, it challenges the mind, it’s a form of exercise, it engages you in so many ways, and you can do that in one chunk of your day.”
“We try to stage and set up the body in a way that it performs optimally,” Menard says about yoga teaching at Karuna. “We focus a lot on alignment. We do little things that improve posture. Simple things that increase blood flow to the brain — it takes a lot of blood — things that seem simple but have very positive effects.”
Mind and body as onePersonally, I love being outdoors, in nature, and the countless benefits of physically generated adventure. It’s where life is, as far as I’m concerned. But as a lifetime adventurer and adventurist, I have always been equally curious about the mental, interior component of all that we experience.
In my quest to live fully and to optimally experience whatever I am engaged in, I’ve practiced meditation for years, starting with creative visualization exercises when I was a young performing musician.
I’ve also practiced yoga, in classes and on my own, for years off and on, for its balance of strengthening the core and expanding the breath. And having been curious about Tai Chi for many years, since living in Japan and witnessing early morning throngs engaging in a unison choreography of Tai Chi poses in the park, I recently began studying the art.
I’m a fan of these disciplines for their wise acknowledgement that life, aging and adventure happen within us and around us, and that how we experience it all is a union of physical, mental, emotional and spiritual perspective.
As Menard and I agreed in our conversation, one needs to optimize both mental and physical abilities to derive the richest rewards from all that we experience. Being in our best physical shape delivers massive benefits, but it’s only half or less than half of the equation. Building and maintaining our mental and emotional vitality are equally essential.
“These practices help us to check in mentally and emotionally,” Menard says, “to take the eyes back inside our body instead of focusing on the external.”
Meditation, yoga, Tai Chi, breathing therapy, Reiki: They are all about assisting our ability to live and experience our lives to the maximum.
As Gillespie simplifies it, these meditative practices are about “living more fully, whatever it is you are doing and thinking.”
Who doesn’t want that?
Eric Weld, a former Gazette reporter, is the founder of agingadventurist.com. He writes a monthly column for the Gazette.