Corporalita:
Develop a Healthy Body and Get Fit for Life
In this lesson you’ll strengthen you mind/body connection and work on developing grace, fitness, and poise.
Heal Your Body, Mind, and Spirit
The book Meditation as Medicine, by Dharma Singh Khalsam, M.D., and Cameron Stauth is an inspirational treasure for anyone who’s interested in good mental, physical, and spiritual health. The exercises presented are physically challenging and help alleviate a vast range of conditions ranging from addiction and arthritis to insomnia and memory loss. On the other hand, if you’re in good health, the exercises will turbo-charge your usual exercise routine.
Want to Stay Home? Try:
- Yoga
- Tai Chi/Chi Kung
- Walking/cycling/rollerblading
- Choose from a multitude of aerobic exercise videos
You may want to do a class in exercise programs like yoga and Tai Chi before you continue with the program at home.
Develop Your Plan for Lifelong Fitness
Did you grow up with the idea that smart people don’t need to be fit: after all, we use our brains, rather than our brawn, right? Remember the ultra-clever nerd and brawny, dumb-guy stereotypes in movies? The stereotype of the brainy, but puny and uncoordinated genius is wrong. If you’re a 98-pound weakling (male or female) and you’re a genius, you’ll be a genius times a thousand when you develop muscle, physical endurance, and grace. As Dr Candace Pert writes in Molecules of Emotion: “Mind doesn’t dominate body, it becomes body — mind and body are one”.
Researchers are beginning to think that our mind isn’t simply in our brain. In Meditation as Medicine, Dharma Singh Khalsa, M.D., writes: “The brain is the focal point for thought and feeling, but . . . it’s not the single site of the psyche. There are so-called hot spots or nodal points, saturated with receptors, throughout the body, where huge amounts of information come together and are processed . . . These nodal points even have their own type of memory.” Your mind, therefore, exists right throughout your body.
In this lesson, you’ll work on developing a plan for lifelong fitness and health as you begin to understand the miracle of your mind-body connection. You’ll also discover what’s underneath the skin you’re in and why it’s important to become ambidextrous.
Corporalita Self-Assessment
Let’s start the lesson off by looking at how you regard your body. Answer each of the following questions honestly. Remember: this is all for you.
- I enjoy exercise and have established an exercise routine.
- I exercise moderately for at least 20 minutes every day.
- I have studied basic nutrition and feed myself at least as well as most people feed their dogs and horses.
- I have used Dimostrazione to discover things about my body: such as how it reacts to fat and sugar in my diet.
- I drink six to eight glasses of water a day.
- I eat at least four servings of fresh vegetables a day and at least two servings of fruit.
- I plan to have an active vacation (swimming, hiking, bicycling) this year.
- I have joined a gym, or have created an exercise area in my home.
- I incorporate mind/body meditative exercises (yoga, tai chi, chi kung) into my exercise routine because they balance both sides of my body, as well as my mind, and they lift my spirit.
The Genius Diet
Another day, another diet is the routine for far too many people. If you’re not sure which diet guru to follow, why not try Leonardo? Pages 200-201 of How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci offer an eating plan called The Da Vinci Diet. Leonardo was a vegetarian, but his views on food apply to meat-eaters as well. Leonardo’s eating plan is totally modern, and you’ll give up nothing except over-processed, sugary junk food.
Finding Your Body’s Balance, da Vinci’s Way
- If you need to lose weight, combine Leonardo’s simple fresh food eating plan with daily moderate exercise, and the weight will drop off.
- If you have more than 50 pounds to lose, take at least a year to lose the weight sensibly. Crash diets cause you to do exactly that: crash.
- Listen to your body. On some days you’ll be hungrier than on others, so eat a little more, but eat slowly. You should still be slightly hungry at the end of your meal. Wait 15 minutes for the satiety center in your brain to get the message from your tummy that it’s full.
- Get active, walking as much as possible for normal activities like shopping and doing errands around town. Do your own housework, gardening, and home repairs.
The Genius Exercise Plan
If your exercise program isn’t fun, you won’t do it. However, if you’ve never exercised, you probably have a horror of it, and your mental conditioning needs to be resolved first. Therefore, if you have no established exercise plan, pick an easy exercise, like walking, to start with. Grit your teeth and keep walking daily for three months before you decide that you don’t like it. The reason for doing it for three months is that by then it will have become a body-habit. Your body will now tell you that it wants to be active and moving. (Yes, it takes around three months for you to break the inertia-habit.)
The beauty of exercise programs is that no matter what your interests are, you can find something to do that you enjoy. If you’re up for the gym, you can do the rounds of the weight machines, exercise classes, spinning classes, and much more. Before signing on at the gym, visit several gyms, and be sure to take out a trial membership.
If the great outdoors appeals to you, you can tackle everything from team sports to marathons, orienteering, sailing, or golf. Exercise doesn’t ever have to be boring: if you’re bored, do something else.
In addition, make it a rule to learn a new activity a year. It can’t be overstated that variety is the spice of life.
Following Your Energy
In Chi Kung, energy follows attention, so direct the energy of your smile to your internal organs. Hold the energy there and thank them for their hard work. You’ll feel a warmth and tingling growing underneath your hands. Sit relaxed for a few moments, then slowly remove your hands, stretch, and yawn if you have to. Continue with your day.
Understand the Marvel of Your Mind-Body Interconnection
You are your body, so get to know it. Your body does its work silently and efficiently most of the time; thank it for the hard work it does for you.
The Mirror Observation: Exercise and Drawing
This exercise, which Michael Gelb presents on pages 202-203 of How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci, may seem like your worst nightmare. Do it anyway. It’s important that you begin to understand where your body is out of balance and where you hold tension. The lack of balance in your body is much more important than a pudgy belly or flabby thighs. Don’t avoid this exercise — do it, please.
What’s In the Skin You’re In?
The first discovery you’ll make when you do The Mirror Observation Exercise and the drawing is that you don’t know much about your body, except for the perceived negatives as described by our bizarre advertising-saturated modern culture. One of the best investments you can make in your long-term health is to buy one of the numerous anatomical guides available from large bookstores. Buy a book that has diagrams of:
- The musculo-skeletal structure
- The endocrine system
- The nervous system
- The major organs
These books are often presented as coloring books. Although coloring sounds juvenile for an adult, it’s not. Remember the power of images (mind maps) to affect your thinking? Get a color-it-yourself anatomical guide, and do the coloring yourself. Coloring your liver and spleen and discovering how your digestive system works might not seem like great entertainment, but it’s an investment in the good health of you and your family. The next time you visit the doctor, you can be precise as to the location of that twinge in your back.
Visit the Virtual Museum
Floor 5 of our Virtual Museum gives you a good view of Leonardo’s famous Human Figure in a Circle.
[Flash Animation: Think Like Leonardo DaVinci Museum, 5th Floor Window]
The Smile Exercise
This is a basic Chi Kung (Chinese energy cultivation) exercise. It helps you to begin to form a compassionate and tender relationship to your body. You can do the exercise at any time of day as part of your normal exercise routine, or when you first get up in the morning. You can do this exercise standing, sitting, or lying down. Keep your spine straight and hold your head up.
Relax and place your hands over your navel. Recall a happy memory, and smile as you remember the details. Relive the memory as your smile broadens.
The Alexander Technique
Read pages 207-214 of How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci to find out more about the Alexander technique, a set of exercises developed by F. Mattias Alexander in the early 20th century. Learning: An Introduction to the Alexander Technique by Michael J. Gelb explains how the Alexander Technique can help you develop the Da Vincian qualities of poise, presence, and grace.
Leonardo on Lethargy
“Iron rusts from disuse, stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigors of the mind.” – Leonardo da Vinci
Poise and Ambidexterity: Use Your Body, Develop Your Mind
Did you know that finger exercises, called “mudras” in yoga, can stimulate your brain and not only improve your motor skills, but also your mood and alertness? In Medical Meditation, Dr Khalsa says that “the power of finger movements to improve the brain may stem from the anatomical fact that control of the hands and fingers requires the use of large areas of the brain.”
Therefore, when you improve your drawing skills (you’re still working on The Beginner’s Da Vinci Drawing Course, aren’t you?) you may also be making yourself smarter. If you’ve stopped the drawing course, or haven’t started, you’ve now got additional reasons to persevere.
As Michael Gelb suggests on page 215 of How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci, if you want to think like Leonardo, you need to become ambidextrous like Leonardo. When you start using your non-dominant hand for writing and drawing, even if only for brief periods each day, it can activate whole new areas of your brain.
Some of Gelb’s suggested methods for cultivating ambidexterity are listed below. Try them out and report on your experiences on the Message Baord.
- Using your non-dominant hand for a day or part of your day:
Try turning on the lights, brushing your teeth, or eating your breakfast with your other hand. - Writing with your other hand:
Try signing your name with your non-dominant hand, or writing the alphabet. Then do some stream-of-consciousness writing on a topic of your choice; notice whether using your other hand affects your flow of thoughts and ideas. - Writing and drawing with both hands at once:
This is easier on a chalkboard. Draw circles, squares, and other simple shapes with both hands at once. Then try signing your name with both hands at the same time. - Mirror writing:
See page 216 of How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci for examples of Leonardo’s mirror writing, then try it yourself. The How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci workbook has more examples and blank pages for practice.
Moving Forward
In our next lesson, we’ll be dealing with Connessione: your connection to everything that is. You’ll discover that you’re an inextricable part of the universe and that you matter. You’ll also create a Master Mind Map of your life to take you wherever you want to go. Join us!
Remember to check in on the assignment and take some time to do the quiz for this lesson. Check in on the Message Board and let us know how your progress is going with your Corporalita. Tell us if this lesson involves a big change in your life or a subtle one. Are these concepts totally foreign to you, or have you accepted them intellectually but never acted upon them?
Assignment : Corporalita: Learn to Juggle
Read and practise the juggling exercise on pages 217 and 218 of How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci. Do the exercise daily for 10 minutes, for at least a week. This exercise helps your ambidexterity skills. Don’t give up if you juggle badly. The point is not how well you juggle, but the workout you’re giving your body and your brain. Report your experiences on the Message Board.
To prepare for the final lesson, read pages 221-228 in How to Think like Leonardo da Vinci and do the Connessione Self-Assessment on page 229
