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How would you finish this sentence? ‘My Body is a…’

The season is changing along the Wasatch Front: leaves are falling and soon, snowflakes will fall too. It’s the perfect time of year for us to reflect on how our lifestyle choices affect our health.

The Leonardo Museum in Salt Lake City is hosting weekly events focusing on health and wellness all month long in celebration of their newest exhibit, BODY WORLDS & The Cycle of Life, presented by Arches Health Plan. The Cycle of Life is open until February and features real human specimens to illustrate how the body ages over the life-span. It teaches visitors to be more introspective about how they treat their bodies as they literally, “look inside” human anatomy.

Local wellness events include classes from Intermountain Healthcare with subjects that range from meditation to infant massage. Tonight’s featured event is an Evening with Experts at The University Neuropsychiatric Institute from 7:00-8:30 PM where the spotlight is on new research to treat mood disorders and anxiety. This Saturday, November 15th, from noon to 4 p.m., The Leonardo will host an interactive Yoga & Wellness Festival with classes on yoga, meditation, Ayurveda and more, taught by instructors from Centered City Yoga. Also at The Leonardo, on November 21^st, Utah researchers in the fields of bionic devices and adaptive technologies will speak at Bionic Night. For more information about upcoming wellness events at The Leonardo visit: http://www.theleonardo.org/none/col-programs

In celebration of this weekend’s event at The Leonardo, we interviewed one of the yoga instructors who will be teaching: James Hardy.

 

Photo Credit: Jennifer Angell

Meet James Hardy, Yoga instructor at Centered City Yoga

“My Body is…. a Vehicle”

Everybody drives his or her individual cars on the road, cruising through life. The body is this vehicle. Everyone has an experience of seeing out of eyes, or feeling through limbs. You get into your car and you have that first-person perspective of driving around negotiating life.

You’d go into debt to keep your car running, but we don’t do as much to keep ourselves healthy. There’s a lot of preventative maintenance you can do on your car so that it just keeps running well and it’s the same thing with your body, but so many people wait until something is broken or the check engine light goes on. It’s that whole concept of health care verses sick care.

With a car, you need to keep it maintained, get the oil changed and make sure you’re on top of it. Yoga is by no means the only way to maintain your body. I give myself treats: get body work once a month. Diet and nutrition is a big one: what are you putting into it and how does it make you feel? It’s a balance.

At least once a day I do my twisting, folding and if I can get the heart-rate up, that’s awesome. I love trail running and biking, skiing, boarding and going into the back country during the winter. It’s like going to the mechanic.

We are in a society where we’ve always been taught to take care of your car, but the body part is changing, we are getting a lot more from all around us that we do need to take care of our bodies from all those angles: What’s going into it… how you are treating it … how much sun you are exposing it?

Would I like to live till I’m 100? I would love to have white hair. Maybe I’m not still doing a handstand at the end of my days, but I’d like to do a forward fold and be able to move. Maybe not all the flare movements you can do when you’re younger, but I’d still like to be able to go on a hike.

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