Puerto Vallarta, Mexico - Born in Puerto Vallarta in 2008, this year, Organic Stretching® steps onto a bigger stage with programs to train additional teachers and virtual courses delivering one-on-one coaching across the globe now, and group programs in March.

With a new tag line conveying the mission of this unique movement program: Finding the Body You Used to Live In, founder Pat Henry sets out to inspire people to become aware of the bodies they are living in and to take steps that will help them find the joy in fluid movement they once had.

Did you look forward to slowing down after retirement... taking it easy? Thomas Hanna, the founder of Somatics (a field of study relating to the body especially as distinguished from the germplasm or the psyche) says that taking it easy is a debilitating state or possibly deadly. Putting our feet up and not moving is the worst choice we could make. "But I can't move," you say. "It hurts," or "My body won't let me." How did that happen?

Once again, Hanna tells us that these symptoms of aging are not a natural process. Pat puts it this way: we did not come with an expiration date stamped on our heads. There is so much that we can do to change this outcome. The process is a product of what we eat, what we think, what we believe, and what we do... i.e. movement, or the lack of it.

We all have the same structural elements... bones, tendons, ligaments, connective tissue, and so on, but what is done to us and what we do to ourselves shapes each of these elements. Perhaps you had an accident when you were very young. The site of the accident was cared for carefully and healed. But in that accident many remote parts of the body may have shifted, and those most likely were not a focus.

Your body accommodated the perhaps tiny abnormality, and this put tension in the structural system. It might be in very small ways, but that tension could extend throughout a large part of the body. As we have learned from Buckminster Fuller, we are all tensegrity structures, even at the cellular level. Movement in one place creates movement everywhere. So the response can be global. These accommodations reach their limit, and your movements are restricted gradually more and more. You notice, but accept that is simply what happens when you age. Can you see this in your own life?

The good news is that often we can modify these conditions, even in our 70s, and maybe more. Our bodies still produce the building blocks to respond when the conditions are presented. If you start lifting weights, the extra stress you put on the tendons will stimulate the supporting bone to thicken in response to the demand. The body has everything it needs to heal and change, if we set up the right conditions.

Pat injured her right knee at ten and again at eleven and once more in her mid-thirties. Eight years ago, she could not manage the high curbs in Puerto Vallarta. She had to use her upper body to stabilize and push against her thigh to raise herself high enough to stand on the sidewalk. Going down stairs at a theater was equally challenging. Today at 73, she can move just like the kids. Her body gained confidence, her balance improved, and her knee supports her totally. She unlocked the restrictions in her hip that allowed her knee to move as it was supposed to.

Her work for the past six years has been inspiring people to move in new ways that help their bodies soften the restrictions in their connective tissue system. And help them find the body they used to live in. She will be teaching a beginning workshop at Centro Inkarri Vallarta, January 10 - 12. Full details are available HERE.

The second teacher training program, Help Your Clients Find the Body They Used to Live In, targeted for wellness practitioners, trainers, and fitness coaches, will run from January 13 - 17. The first training program in June 2013 brought students from California and Estonia, and became the first step in Pat's mission to take Organic Stretching out to the world. Details for this program are HERE.

We need to move to stay healthy. And it makes a difference what kind of movements we are doing. In Organic Stretching we move in gentle curving motions that follow the contours of the body. It is a slow, supported movement that makes deep, profound changes in the connective tissue and gradually opens the blocks and limiting patterns we have built into the structure repeating the same movements over and over. Countless clients have come to Pat's studio in La Cruz de Huanacaxtle to experience this program and their enthusiastic response can be found in the links above and on Pat's BLOG.