Robert Donald Cooley - The Genius of Flexibility: The Smart Way to Stretch and Strengthen Your Body

This book is not intended as a substitute for medical recommendations by your health-care provider. Rather it is intended to offer information to help you cooperate with your choice of health-advancing experts, including alternative health-care providers, to gain optimum health. Please note that it is the expressed concern of the writer that each person take responsibility for his or her health and for any and all advice received when engaging a medical or health specialist.

Resistance Flexibility Training and The Meridian Flexibility System are registered service marks. Use of these is prohibited without expressed written permission from the author.

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Copyright 2005 by Robert Cooley

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Designed by Ruth Lee Mui

Photos by Michael Colarito and Bob Cooley

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2005040126

ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-7087-8

eISBN-13: 978-1-439-18879-8

ISBN-10: 0-7432-7087-8

To Pam Mitchell

Contents

Part One
The Genius Inside You

My Story and Your Genius

Catapulting everything forward

ONE SPRING NIGHT IN 1976, as my friend Pam and I were walking across Bostons Commonwealth Avenue, a drunk driver in his Lincoln Continental struck us at over forty miles per hour, braking from a estimated speed of over seventy. Knocked unconscious, I was thrown twenty-five feet through the air and deposited across the intersection. My left shoulder had dislocated when I hit the pavement, and my shoulder muscles contracted so intensely that they ripped apart my upper left arm bone. My head was badly bruised, and I slipped in and out of consciousness, aware that Pam was suffering but that I was unable to help her. As I listened to the ambulance siren outside myself, inside my mind I heard these words: I wish myself and all others to be in life. The next morning, I woke to the news that Pam had died within minutes after being struck.

Time stopped for me for the next two decades.

This near-death experience had a profound effect on my life. Most people whove undergone severe trauma realize afterward that something is definitely missing from their livessomething that they had always taken for granted up until that moment but could not identify or describe. Its as if you have been catapulted, in spite of yourself, into a spiritual existence but without your body. You are inexplicably stuck outside of yourself, viewing yourself and everything else from abovedepersonalized. You are unable to experience your life from within your own body. Because I had been so dramatically hurled out of what was habitual and normal for myself, I had emerged with a unique kind of drive, insight, and opportunity.

I was never comfortable. I couldnt find any position that was ever restful or relaxing. I was disconnected from my life, having lost my way. I was unable to attach to anything or anybody. Nothing belonged to me and Id gladly give away anything I owned. Many, many things just didnt make sense.

I spent the year and a half following my accident in the company of doctors. I had pulled most of the muscles in my legs, and I could not raise my left hand higher than my ear. I was deeply depressed. I went to some of the best physical therapists, orthopedic and neuromuscular specialists, sports medicine practitioners, and massage therapists in this country. Surprisingly, stretching was by far the only thing that seemed to offer help.

But I knew that the way everyone was thinking about and practicing stretching was incomplete. They had the right idea, but something really wasnt working yet. I stretched exactly as I had been instructed, but I still wasnt becoming much more flexible, and neither were the other people I observed in rehab. My expectations for recovery had not been met.

I learned from all of them, but I was not healed. I turned to myself to discover how to heal. I had an unquenchable passion and insight for movement. This, my friends told me, was my genius.

Convinced that stretching was the right idea to heal myself, I went looking for that secret something about stretching that I knew had yet to be discovered. I had experimented with stretching, but like most people, I never became nearly as flexible as I wanted to be. I knew there must be some inside secret to stretching and yoga that would allow me to be as flexible as those lucky few who seemed simply to be born that way.

I had been inspired by the story of a man who was fed up with being poor. He decided to sit in a chair and stay there until he came up with an idea that would make him a millionaire. So he sat, and he satfor days, then weeks. His unswerving determination led him to an unusual and ultimately lucrative discoveryhe invented the tennis ball canister that reconditions old and dead tennis balls and brings them back to life. Out of his single-minded resolve, he found a charmingly simple solution and created the life he desired. I decided to follow his lead to discover something about how muscles stretch that no one knew yet!

I sat on the floor with my legs scissored wide apart. I knew that if the muscles on the inside and back of my legs stretched, then my torso and head would fold down onto the floor in front of me. I decided to do this every day for an hour, feeling and paying attention to what was happening to the muscles on the back and inside of my legs until I could somehow discover just what my muscles do when they really stretch. Like most people, I had never been even close to getting my head to the floor in front of me. Instead I found myself actually leaning backward in the opposite direction from what I intended!

For years I had tried breathing into and relaxing the muscles I was stretching, as taught in traditional stretching, and still the increase in range of motion was negligible. What didnt I know? Each day I returned to this position, hoping that my close scrutiny would pay off, that I would be able to identify how muscles truly stretch. I cant remember just how many consecutive days I sat on the floor waiting for some divine intervention to enlighten me to this missing wisdom. Miraculously, after only a handful of days, I found the secret to stretching that I had been looking for.