Multi-Dimensional Mastery - February 2017 - Santa Fe

Living to 100 – A Fabulous Dream or a Nightmare?

By Dr. Judy Scher

Living to 100. Who wouldn’t want that? It seems like a no-brainer. Wouldn’t you want to live the longest life possible? Surprisingly, when I ask people about living to 100, I usually get a very different response. Most assume the quality of their life is going to decline so markedly in old age, spending those final years with most of their vital functions impaired, confined to a bed, that they say no, I don’t want that. The expectation in our culture is that getting older is always equivalent with breakdown. Who wants to hang around if all we can look forward to is breakdown?

 

Here’s an interesting fact – centenarians are the largest growing new population. People are living longer, yes, but they are not getting healthier. We have the means to keep people alive with drugs and surgery but we have not improved the quality of their lives.

 

How can we become more proactive in claiming a life of vitality, joy and fulfillment? We must start by asking ourselves, "How can I do things differently to get a different result?" If we want to change the outcome, if we want to live to 100 with vitality, energy, engaging in creative endeavors, and contributing meaningfully to the world, we need to change the rules of how we live our lives.

 

What will it take to have a greater quality of life as we age? Many people start working out, walking, or eating more healthily when they are told by their doctor that they have high blood pressure or could possibly develop diabetes. Or perhaps someone just wants to lose weight, drop a few pounds. All good. But we have to look at the intention here. Intention carries with it a particular energy state. If the intention is related to avoidance, fear of acquiring a disease, the energy of that intention is at a low state. Because it is about survival and maintaining the status quo, this low state will pull energy from you. Though you feel you are doing something good for yourself, if the intention comes from a ‘should’ or a ‘fear’, or to avoid something bad, you may be harming your life more than supporting it. 

 

On the other hand, if your intention is to ‘gain’ something - perhaps gain more vitality - then you are adding life energy into your biological system. In this case your ‘lifestyle’ enhances your wellbeing. What you are doing is not just about lifestyle, but about your relationship to that lifestyle as expressed through your intention.

 

What other factors can help create new outcomes? When you repeat actions, the habit creates fixed neural feedback loops in your brain and nervous system. These feedback loops help influence your entire spinal cord, which impacts the entire body - your posture, the way you breathe, and the way your muscles hold tension. Habits are unconscious. Have you driven yourself to work only to realize you didn’t remember most of the roads you passed? Habits don’t require the higher organizing parts of our brain to be involved. However, we do need the higher organizing part of the brain, the frontal lobe, the neocortex, to be involved if we want to make new choices and optimize our life.

 

The best way to break a habit is by giving the brain and nervous system a connection that is more rewarding. You can do that by providing new information - an ‘aha’ - to the brain. The brain notices something is different and connects with it, starting a new neural feedback loop. This novelty also wakes up the frontal lobe.

 

If you continue to support your life more optimally by providing new feedback for the brain to work with (such as reading inspiring work, taking walks in nature to bring more harmony to your day, trying out a new dance routine, participating in transformational healing body work - even driving a new way to the grocery store), the older neural pathways that were part of the old habit will eventually wither away. You will be left with a new YOU, expressing new habits, new thoughts, new feelings and new choices.

 

Something novel and life energizing is available beyond repeating the same old routines. Instead of resigning yourself to the belief that our energy naturally deteriorates as we get older, you can claim an empowered intention and say: How do I want my life to look as I get older? Why follow a direction that is not working? What am I willing to claim for myself? What new intentions must I have and act on to get that outcome? 

 

Since the choices you make around your health and quality of life today will create your future, the future is, indeed, in your own hands. You are that powerful. Manifest a fabulous dream for yourself starting today.

Santa Fe

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