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Many of my clients have joked over the years that they’re going to come in and tell me they have an ache in their shoulder, and I’ll rub their pinky toe or something to make it disappear.

It’s not untrue.

Our medical system perpetuates a separatist model of the body — one in which each part or piece is reduced to its smallest elements. Specialists study different systems within us: hearts and brains and ears and eyes.

One client recently went to a scapula specialist. I had no idea there was such a person.

I’m not as opposed to this taking apart the body as you might think. It serves its purpose. Like the periodic table of the elements, dissecting the body helps us map the constituents of ourselves.

But, similarly, the parts are not the whole. Hydrogen and oxygen are not water; they only form water in a precise combination.

Your bones and your muscles and your heart and your blood — these things are not you. They only form you when functioning synergistically.

And like a woven sweater with an unraveling thread, if you distort one part of you, interrupt one system, it can warp your whole being.

Your body is not a thing that is moving badly, but rather a movement that has become disrupted.

And that disruption might not be happening in the place where you feel stuck or restricted because your body is a system, an integrated organism.

Neck pain is probably the most common complaint among modern humans. Even those people who tell me their necks are pretty okay, when I put my hands on them and test passive range of motion, they’re pretty darn stuck.

And the majority of people know it.

I meet a lot of resistance working on people’s feet when they tell me the problem is in their neck. Because feet are so far away. They have no influence on a delicate structure so near to your precious brain.

Or so the common wisdom goes.

Personally, my neck always pops and releases when I open the bones and tissues in my feet, so I’ve experienced this connection first hand.

But why? How come feet — which merely carry your beautiful brain from place to place — influence your neck?

I could trace the anatomy for you, drawing a train track of fascia through your core, along the spine, demonstrating an irrefutable connection from the bottoms of your soles to the base of your skull.

But I think there’s a bigger question at play here, and that is:

What is a neck?

I suppose we could say that your neck consists of its seven cervical vertebra, the very top of your spine.

But those vertebra connect upwards into the cranium and down into your thoracic spine — your torso.

And your torso has ribs, and below that, the lumbar vertebra of your aching lower back, your sacrum wedged between the flaring bones of your pelvis, and, further down, branching into the two stems of your legs.

When you turn your head to the side, your neck vertebra rotate (or should), but that rotation continues on down into your thoracic spine, too.

And all this doesn’t take into account the tissues. If we look purely at musculature, we can see that the muscles of your neck are also the muscles of your jaw and face. Many of them connect to your skull, or down into ribs or along your clavicle.

Since your clavicle is part of your shoulder girdle, does this make them shoulder muscles or neck muscles?

One client asked me during a session if the structure I had my hands on was part of her ribs or part of her shoulder.

I could only answer, “Yes.”

We haven’t even talked about fascia, that filigree network that weaves together your body. It refuses to stay within the confines of the anatomy books, and when you trace its webbing, you find that it also won’t keep to compartments and body parts.

The fascia of your leg is also the fascia of your hip, and then it travels up to your torso. It snakes three-dimensionally through your body, shaping you.

So yes, your feet matter to your neck. Metatarsals that are bound tightly, making stiff feet like 2x4s that smack the ground with great impact at each step, an ankle joint so clenched that the bones can’t open and spread and allow the joint to crease, shins and calves on lockdown inhibiting the shock absorbing properties of the space between their bones, these qualities influence your whole physical structure with every step.

And let me just say as well that guarding — muscular armoring of the body — isn’t necessarily a localized phenomenon. A person who is guarded is often guarded all over, because the nervous system runs all over your body.

So yes, we can address that neck tension. But if you’ve had a hundred massages on your neck and it’s still tight, don’t you think it might not be (just) your neck that’s the problem?

Changing the way your feet connect with the ground changes more than just your stride. It shifts how you — literally — move through the world.

It lowers the threat level in your nervous system.

It allows more surface area of your foot to contact the ground, increasing the availability of sensory awareness.

And it starts to unwind fascia from the very bottom of your core.

Make no mistake: your feet are in the same body as your neck. And everything within you is connected.

Anti-aging is all the rage these days. Not that it hasn’t always been a thing. Nobody wants to look like a granny, really, even if you are one. And, frankly, 60 isn’t what it used to be. People are living longer and looking much younger into their older years.

Gone are those cohorts of curly-haired grandmothers wearing the plastic bonnets to keep the rain at bay and baking cookies; today’s “elderly” are climbing mountains, biking through national parks and building companies.

But in a youth-obsessed culture, there’s a lot of fear around looking older. Software engineers have confessed a common saying in their line of work about the worst thing you can do for your career: turn 30.

Thirty, you guys!!! That’s insane.

What it means is that there is a constant pressure to present yourself in a youthful manner lest you be shoved out of the way by a starry-eyed kid with forward thinking ideas (read: total naivety).

With the weight of an entire younger generation pressing against you, what to do? Run out and buy the most expensive anti-aging serum you can find? Get laser treatments on your skin? Collagen injections for your lips?

Listen, getting older isn’t the worst thing that can happen to you. In fact, it distinctly beats the alternative. And there are myriad benefits that ride alongside age, like knowing you’re never gonna do that stupid thing you did when you were 22 again (don’t worry, we won’t divulge the details here).

But getting older and looking like you’re getting older are two very different things. One you have no control over (probably). The other can be somewhat molded and influenced by you.

And certainly, feeling old is something you have a lot of control over, which is really the most important thing, right? Because I don’t think it’s so much getting older that bothers us as the idea that we might somehow be limited or restricted by our aging bodies.

With that in mind, allow me to present to you my definitive guide to not looking (or feeling) old, no matter what calendar age you actually are.

1. Wiggle your spine. Children’s spines are bouncy and springy, but as we get older our backs get stiffer. It’s the accumulation of time, sure, but it’s also the effects of us shoring up, closing down, stifling expression.

Any time you feel stressed or overwhelmed, it’s natural to physically contract, clamp down on your breathing, truncate your movements. Over time, the tension accumulates, resulting in a spine that is more like a Greek column than a bouncy Slinky.

From a physical standpoint, it ages you. It makes your movements stiff and stilted. And mentally, a lack of innovative movement fails to stimulate your brain.

2. Speaking of creative movement, get your dance on. Studies have shown that frequent dancing can reduce your risk of dementia by up to 76%. Not too shabby, especially when you consider that regular physical activity showed absolutely zero correlation to lowering incidences of dementia.

3. Give freely of your hugs. Hugs release oxytocin in the brain which lowers the stress hormone cortisol and reduces blood pressure. They also stimulate the production of dopamine, the happy hormone.

Drugs like methamphetamine and cocaine target your brain’s dopamine receptors, which is what makes them so addictive – you feel good on them. Fortunately, hugs are a safe alternative that won’t land you in jail, unless you live in Tennessee, apparently.

4. Take magnesium (or rub it on your skin). This falls under the “check with your doctor first” category of course because minerals do affect your bio-chemistry, but many people could benefit from a little extra magnesium, a.k.a. the chill-the-eff-out mineral. Tense people don’t really have that youthful, devil-may-care joi de vivre, if you know what I mean.

For the scientifically inclined: magnesium is an essential nutrient required to regulate muscle and nerve function and is involved in over 300 chemical reactions within the body. It’s kind of a big deal.

5. Get curious. Ask people questions about themselves. Wonder how they got to be where they are and what their lives are like. Curiosity is a child-like quality that we tend to lose as we get older and bogged down by things like taxes.

6. Get a massage. It’s a well-known fact that babies who aren’t held much fail to thrive. Touch is an essential nutrient, and aside from the many physical and psychological benefits, refining your touch receptors could boost your emotional IQ.

7. Paint your walls a vibrant color. Bright colors not only boost your mood, they’ve also been shown to increase mental acuity.

8. Listen to stories. Stories are how we connect as people. They make us laugh, they evoke tears and they teach us powerful lessons. Stories put the spark back in your eye.

9. Engage in work that serves a purpose bigger than yourself. It doesn’t have to be glamorous and you don’t have to quit your job. In fact, it can be distinctly unglamorous, even dirty or exhausting, and you may already be doing it but not connecting to its greater effect on the world.

The trick is to find the element in your work that gives you true fulfillment because work that is only about creating a livelihood, just money to pay the bills? Ultimately robs you of your motivation to get out of bed in the morning.

10. Shake up your style. Back in the day, 13-year-old me used to perch on my mother’s bed and critique her clothes, complete with snide teenage remarks about mom jeans and shoulder pads. Gratefully, technology has moved on and the kind folks over at Stitch Fix have your modern wardrobe needs covered.

I can’t tell you what a delight it is to have someone far more fashionably inclined than myself carefully curate a customized box of clothing each month, package it up and ship it right to my door, completely free of all teenage eye rolls.

11. Pick up heavy stuff.  Put it down.  Repeat. Building muscle not only supports healthy posture that keeps you standing straight, but it also bolsters your metabolism (pound for pound, muscle burns more calories than fat) and shapes your body with those juicy curves that tend to diminish as we age. Plus, it makes you feel like a total badass. Win-win!

12. Eat cake. Cake makes you happy. Happy people look younger. Or at the very least, they don’t care about looking old because they’re too busy eating cake.

13. Take a vacation. Travel opens your mind, inspires new ideas and connects you to the world. But don’t huddle in five star resorts, well insulated from the colorful culture of your exotic destination. Get out in the streets and see how the real people live.

14. Breathe deeply. It’s not an accident that the act of inhaling is also called inspiration.

15. Watch an inspiring/adventurous/uplifting film (and then go make your own).

16. Drink wine. Wine (the red kind) has an antioxidant called resveratrol in it that has been shown in mouse studies to, among other things, protect against obesity resulting from a high calorie diet.

In short? You can have your cake and your waistline, too.

17. Put the phone down, turn off the television, disconnect the internet and get some friggin’ sleep. Seriously. I don’t know what our culture’s addiction to poor, interrupted, shortened sleep is, but it’s gotta stop.

Getting through an eighty-hour work week on four hours of tossing and turning every night does not somehow grant you badass bragging rights (see #11 for those).

You might have noticed a trend here. We’ve gone a bit rogue, eschewing the usual skin treatments, tummy flattening foods and anti-wrinkle secrets in favor of things that uplift you, sharpen your mind and generally put the spark back in your eye.

Because if you’re an effervescent blend of enthusiasm, vivacity and an unquenchable thirst for life? No one’s going to care about your age.

When I was younger and felt trapped in a stiff, tight body, I’d spend hours sitting in front of the television, yanking on my muscles and trying to manually pull them longer.  I admired the grace of gymnasts and dancers.  It looked so pleasurable to have those long, lean muscles, to be able to move with such freedom.

But stretching really didn’t get me anywhere.  There are a lot of reasons for this.  I could go into long winded explanations of neurology, reference the need for balancing strength with length and compare and contrast the benefits of dynamic joint mobility over static stretching.

All of these highly technical issues are valid.  But there is really only one thing that was keeping my hips locked up – I was holding onto tension.

And so are you.

Tension resides in your brain but manifests in your muscles.  The mind is a powerful thing; the placebo effect – which accounts for the spontaneous healing of bodies when a person believes that he or she is being treated for a given condition when no real treatment is administered – is strong evidence of this.

Tension is who you think you should be.  Relaxation is who you are.

– Chinese Proverb

Every thought that you have has a corresponding physical reaction.  You might not get up and jump around the room when you’re happy or pound the walls when you’re angry; we’ve learned to control ourselves for the sake of a (relatively) civilized society.

But just think about something that’s been stressing you out, pissing you off or terrifying you in your sleep.  It might be an impending move, a job termination, a person in your life who’s less than supportive.  The actual stimulus doesn’t matter.  All that matters is the emotion you feel when you focus your attention on it.

Notice how your body responds.  Your shoulders tighten up, your jaw starts clenching.  You might hunch down, curl slightly into a ball.  Your leg muscles might twitch, invoking the ancient survival technique of cutting and running.  Your body responds.

Now consider that 90% of the thoughts you are going to have today are the same thoughts you had yesterday.  This will happen again tomorrow, the day after that, and so on and so forth for the rest of your life.

If you are having stressful thoughts today, you will have stressful thoughts tomorrow.  Your shoulders will be tight today, and they will be tight tomorrow.  The mind directs the body.  Your body is the physical manifestation of your inner self, the medium through which you both experience and express yourself to the world.

The only way to step outside of this feedback loop of stress and tension is to start asking yourself Why am I holding onto this?  How is it serving me?  Is it okay to let it go?

This isn’t something you “do,” as in a separate exercise.  This is something you “become.”  You have to start noticing tension in everything that you do – when you’re in a meeting, when you’re working out, when you’re lying on the couch watching television.  Your inner tension meter will alert you to unnecessary tightness and you can mentally dissolve it.

{Being} Precedes Doing

Your state of mind and body prior to starting any conscious activity are more important than the activity itself.  If you start from a clean, relaxed state, you’ll get more benefit (and be more flexible).  Plus, when you start to peel back the layers of tension you’ve used to armor your body, you’re also dumping a load of mental baggage that you probably don’t need to be hauling around with you anymore.

Tension restricts your physical body and exhausts you.  It’s like trying to function with Ace bandages wrapped around all your joints.  You’re literally pulling against yourself.  When you let go of the tension – which is as simple as breathing deeply and relaxing into your body – you’ll feel lighter, breathe more fully and experience mental clarity.

And you don’t have to do anything, just breathe and release.