Open The Gate

This book is all about helping you to create a path to sustainable wellbeing in mind and body. I will walk with you and be your ally the whole way, but I can't do the work for you. That's as it should be, because while the results you'll be working towards will feel fantastic once you've achieved them, it's the effort you put in to achieving your goals that will open you up to the potential for personal growth that will support your physical and emotional wellbeing for the rest of your life.

In 2023 as I'm writing these words, being emotionally, physically, and spiritually well is even more important and even more challenging than it was when I published my first book called Yoga Pilates Fusion in 2019. I say that because of the competing agendas and fissures in our sense of community that I see as the legacy of a whole lot of tensions that were exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic. I've chosen not to go into those things here, except to note that we live in challenging times.

That said, we can equip ourselves to be well no matter what's going on around us. That's the theme you will find running through this book.

I come to you from a place of deep commitment to pro-ageing and personal empowerment. My approach is based on balancing the mind and body to increase your longevity. This perspective runs parallel to the anti-ageing industry. Mine is a deeper more positive approach that offers you the opportunity to have more fun and achieve sustainable success on the journey to changing your behaviours around the food you eat, the exercise you do, and the amount of love you give yourself on a daily basis.

The decades I've spent in the fitness, health and wellbeing industries have made two things very clear to me. The first one is that respecting the connection between the mind and body is integral to our ability to be well. The second one is that taking control of our future starts with firstly becoming aware of, and then adjusting any mindset patterns that are likely to sabotage our results.

I give you strategies to maintain a positive mindset in this book because one of the things that really worries me about the world we live in is that most people give their power away to a medical system that is based on the inevitability of declining health as we age. This runs counter to my approach which is to empower people like you to be positive and optimistic about the wonderful future they will have once they put the proper foundations in place. Those foundations are not only based on being positive and optimistic, they're also about acting on the advice I provide in this book. The bottom line is that having a healthy relationship with ourselves backed up by a robust mindset is integral to maintaining these foundations.