aikido: safe falling for seniors

In the summer of 2017, Bill Doi, a fifth-degree black belt in aikido, taught a group of about 10 senior citizens how to fall. The class emphasized balance and awareness to avoid falls, but since falling is an ever-present threat as people age, and since falling can be so devastating to seniors, the idea was to use aikido techniques to mitigate the damage of falling should it happen.

“In aikido, 50 percent of the time is spent falling,” Doi said, and those falls are taught so they’re executed without injury. If the techniques are practiced enough, they become second nature if a fall should occur.

Word got out about the Safe Falling class, and the instructors were overwhelmed when a hundred new students showed up. There was clearly a desire for this training in the community.

mindful eating

We often talk about the power of mindful meditation to ease stress, improve sleep and reduce emotional issues like depression, anxiety and anger — and to help preserve cognitive function as you age. But an amazing, untapped power of mindfulness is its ability to transform your eating habits.

You can use mindfulness to increase your sensory enjoyment of food’s smell, taste, texture and umami (that elusive quality that provides pleasure when eating).

When you do, you will automatically upgrade your nutrition by exploring the flavors of more fruits, vegetables and whole grains while dumping the artificial, toxin-laden ingredients that are shoved into fast and processed foods.

Like mindful meditation and using deep breathing to help you focus and relax, mindful eating calls for a calm, focused, respectful relationship to food. This focus lets the food talk to you and tell you about its qualities and benefits to body and mind.

As Dr. Mike Roizen and Dr. Michael Crupain say in their book, “What to Eat When,” eating has unfortunately become a vacuum-like process. The sensory experience that should accompany eating is generally lost on 99 percent of you in 99 percent of your meals. We can help you change that.

A lot of mindless eating happens because we eat on the run. No time to savor anything. And that doesn’t just mean you miss out on the sensory pleasures of food, but you also cause yourself health problems. One 2017 study found that those who eat quickly (and quickly pretty much equals mindlessness, not mindfulness) were two to five times as likely to develop metabolic syndrome, a precursor to heart disease and diabetes, over a five-year span than folks who eat more slowly.