The world shapes itself around your beliefs. Positive beliefs empower you, negative beliefs, on the other hand, hold you back. Whether you believe you are starting to “become old” when you notice a little ailment here or there, or whether you consider it simply a passing appearance that will self-regulate back to perfect health, is based in no small part on your beliefs. Whether you are an old 30 or a young 30, an old 90 or a young 90, has so much to do with your beliefs about life, the body, aging, sickness and health, and your attitude in general. Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer staged the famous experiment with the nursing home residents who were brought to live for a few weeks in an environment that emulated a period several decades earlier. Well lo and behold, their minds literally turned their bodies’ physical clock backward in small but significant ways (read more about this amazing study in her book Counter Clockwise).
Some beautiful examples of older inspired and inspiring people have come across my Facebook page. They remind me that your attitude and beliefs can keep you forever young until the day you die. One of them is the 94-year old yoga master Tao Porchon-Lynch, another one that brings a smile on my face every time is the older piano playing couple, and the last one is the former Rockette Louise Neistat who tap danced until her recent death at 92.
Two more well-known examples of the power of the mind are world records - it is not unusual for several more people to break a world record as soon as someone has broken one – and the supposed difficulty in conceiving children – couples who have resigned themselves to adopting a child oftentimes conceive as soon as they have actually adopted.