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My face looked and felt flat.
Fast forward now to September 2012 and I was approaching my 50 th birthday. I looked at
myself in the mirror and for a moment I thought, OMG what has happened. My face seemed
to have dropped over night. I wondered for a short time if I had had a mini stroke because
the change, I saw seemed very drastic and quite sudden. But in truth my face had been
dropping for some time and I was just ignoring that fact. I had had many trips to beauty
salons for every kind of facial treatment. They all worked for a few days or so and my skin
would appear firmer and my muscles more lifted, but the positive effects didn’t last, and I
found I needed more and more visits to improve and maintain a lifted and firmer facial
contour. The drooping and sagging had happened in little stages that it was easy to ignore
what was happening and put it out of my mind. But yes, I had noticed small changes in the
tone and quality not just of my skin but in the muscle tone in my face. My jaw line had been
dropping southwards, but I think what I noticed most that evening was an overall sad
dropping face, dropping eyelids and most of all cheeks that where no longer full. My face
looked and felt flat. Now not being one to shy away from a challenge I stripped off all make
up and had my better half take two photos of my face. One photo was a side profile and the
other a front photo. I looked at the images and I was shocked and sad. There was no
denying it I was getting old. I was fifty after all, what had I expected! The truth was I wasn’t
afraid of getting older, in fact I loved being older. Older gave me more freedom in myself. I
was more relaxed, better fun to be around (I hoped) but most of all the years had thought
me to be a better person. So, I wasn’t afraid of being older and playing the role of an older
woman, but this sad and droopy face was not what I had expected. I had expected to grow
older elegantly and more beautiful. After all older faces are and can be very beautiful. I felt
elegant and beautiful on the inside, so I wondered why it not transferred to the outside. A
wise teacher once said that the inside and the outside are the same, well that wasn’t what I
was experiencing. My spirit and my body seemed at that point to be poles apart. So there
and then I decided that I was going to do something about this.
Friends said to me ‘Well if you feel fine on the inside it shouldn’t matter what you look like
on the outside’. But it did matter. I wanted to look as I felt. Which was happy and relaxed
with life. I was getting very tired of people saying to me, gosh you look ‘jaded’ where you up
half the night? No sorry I’ve had ten hours sleep. Oh ‘Maybe you slept too much’ they would
retort kindly. All of this was just another way of saying, you look like shit! That was the end
of that. My body had been here for fifty years, and it had been healthy and strong and
beautiful and hopefully it will be here for another fifty. I want the next fifty to be healthy
and strong and beautiful and I want to look that way to. Age was not going to be a barrier.
I had signed up to train as a Pilate’s teacher earlier that year because I had become very
weak in my body, and I wanted my body to be strong again. I didn’t want my muscles to
continue dropping, saggy and weak as they had become, but I will tell you more about that
later. I never for a minute thought I wanted to train in Pilates to be young again. Yes, I was
very clear about my motivation for training in Pilates and if I could train my body to be
strong again then I reasoned that I could do the same with my facial muscles. So, I decided
that I would find out about facial fitness. I had picked up a book some year’s earlier on facial
fitness, so I used that as my starting point, and I went on the google search engine to find
out more. Lots of names came up but two interested me more than others. One of these
was Eva Fraser, an English lady in her ‘eighties’ and the other was an American lady. As I was
looking at the Eva Fraser web site, I was amazed at how well this lady looked for her eighty
years. It wasn’t the absence of lines or sagging skin that intrigued me about her, but it was
the happiness and ease she radiated that attracted me. I ordered her DVD on facial fitness
and set about to work.
I practiced like mad at first, but I soon lost interest. I couldn’t tell if I was doing the exercises
correctly and it all seemed like hard work. I also wasn’t keen to stay at the basic exercises
and learn them well preferring instead to jump straight into the advanced lessons thinking
that it might bring about a more positive result quicker. But now I know my technique was
poor and I couldn’t tell if I was doing the exercises correctly and my motivation began to
slowly dwindle.
So, I took my self-back to the google search engine and I then looked at the American lady
and ordered her DVD. Again, I began practicing and I developed the most dreadful pain in
my face and jaw. This pain kept me awake at night. I thought it was my teeth and gums that
was the source of my discomfort. I took myself off to the dentist. As it was Christmas, and I
was an urgent case I didn’t get an appointment with my normal dentist but instead I got to
see a female dentist who took one look at my face and stated ‘there is nothing wrong with
your teeth¸ you have TMJ. What said I, is that? Its pain in the face and jaw. Well, that took
me back a few years as my older brother had always said that I was a ‘pain in the face’ and
here I was with this lovely dentist telling me what my brother had told me many years
earlier. This would have pleased him no end. What can I do about it I asked her? Go home
she said and take some strong pain killers and get a hot water bottle up to that face and do
this every day until the pain is gone. With my tail between my legs and feeling very sorry for
myself, I went home and did what I was told for once and the pain slowly eased. I also
stopped doing my facial exercises. Christmas had come and gone by now and I had quietly
slipped into my 51 st year. There was still no improvement in my sad and dropping flat face.
With the pain now gone I took a deep breath and took out Eva Fraser’s DVD. I played it
through a couple of times and then I had a breakthrough and took up the courage and
wrote to EVA asking her if I could train as one of her practitioners. I had always believed that
the best way to learn something was to teach it and if I was going to teach it then I thought
it best to learn from the best in the business. EVA was after all in her eighties and those
years more than qualified her as the best and she also looked amazing. I filled in an
application form and wrote a short piece on why I wanted to train as a facial fitness
practitioner. When that was done and sent to Eva, she invited me over to her UK studio for
an interview and a lesson.
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