Stretching Body, Mind, and Spirit | On Flexibility, Ego, and the Courage to Evolve
The Oak and the Reed by Achille Etna Michallon, 1816
One of the most important things we need to do as we age is nurture flexibility. Not just in our physical bodies, but in our minds, in our spirits, and in the stories we tell ourselves about who we are.
Last week, my seventy-eight-year-old widower father fell and had to be hospitalized. He was frustrated and embarrassed that after years of being a strong and capable father and husband, his body wasn’t matching his independent, Midwestern, farm-grown, career-Navy fighting spirit. He relies on his family and friends now more than ever to make sure he’s doing okay, and thankfully, he has kind and thoughtful neighbors who responded immediately and got him the help he needed. My brother and I took turns staying with him at the hospital, comforting him and joking with while we waited anxiously for the results. He had hit his head and suffered a brain hematoma, but fortunately it wasn’t serious, and he was discharged the next day after multiple scans. We got him home, and while changing into clean, comfortable clothing in his room, he lost his balance and fell again. It took myself, my husband, and my sixteen-year-old nephew to get him back on his feet. After making sure the only thing injured was his pride and getting the house cleaned up and ready for him to recover in the comfort of his own home, we headed out.
On the ride home, it really hit me, how important it is to stay fit and nimble in our lives as we age, and the deeper importance of flexibility. I hate that he fell, but it served as the kick in the pants I needed to recommit to my own physical health, strength, and agility. We all think we have more time. At forty-five, I feel that disconnect between what my mind believes I’m still capable of and what my body now tells me, in stiffness and strain. And that awareness led me, inevitably, to think about the ways I also want to remain flexible in my mind and spirit. Because when we stop being flexible, when we cling too tightly to what we know or think we know, we commit ourselves to a kind of slow erosion. We lose the capacity to grow, to open, to evolve.
One of the greatest dangers we face as we age isn’t fragility or illness; it’s rigidity of the mind, body, and spirit. Rigidity in our thinking, our beliefs, our identities. It’s subtle, but deeply corrosive. And it requires conscious, daily practice to stay supple. This isn’t just poetic metaphor. It’s a truth echoed in ancient wisdom, psychology, and neuroscience. Taoist philosophy speaks of water, the softest and most adaptable of substances, yet capable of wearing down even stone. Laozi wrote, “Nothing in the world is as soft and yielding as water. Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible, nothing can surpass it.” The message is simple: what bends, survives. What resists, breaks. This truth appears again in Aesop’s fable of The Oak and the Reed, where the proud oak mocks the slender reed, until the storm comes. The oak resists and breaks; the reed bends and lives. We are not meant to be unmovable. We are meant to evolve.
Have you ever held onto something so tightly that your hands ache once you finally let go? The same thing happens to the mind and spirit. We grip tightly to identities, stories, beliefs, until they calcify inside us, and the act of loosening our grip becomes painful, foreign, even frightening. But the cost of holding on is far greater than the discomfort of letting go. The tighter we cling, the more brittle we become. Our sense of self shrinks. We become reactive, defensive, unable to tolerate challenge or change.
We are living in a world that often rewards certainty, rigidity, and outrage. But as history has shown us, rigidity rarely leads to flourishing. It leads to division, to persecution, to the ossification of thought and culture. When we cling too tightly to what we believe is right, when we demonize anyone who thinks differently, we not only close ourselves off from others, we close ourselves off from our own potential. Flexibility does not ask us to abandon our values. It asks us to hold them gently enough that they can breathe, grow, evolve. It asks us to notice where we’ve become tight, where we’ve closed off instead of opened. It asks us to listen, not to convert, not to convince, but to understand. It asks us to make room inside ourselves for the complexity of being human.
As we age, the invitation is not to become more fixed, but more free. To stay soft in a hardening world. To stretch our minds, open our hearts, and examine our beliefs with love instead of defensiveness. To release the need to be right, so we can become more whole. And while that may sound simple, we both know how hard it really is. Rigidity is easy to spot, at least in other people. But more often than not, the harder work is spotting it in ourselves. That’s where the practice begins. When we notice rigidity in others, maybe it can serve as a gentle mirror. A nudge to check where we might be tight, obstinate, or unwilling to budge. Projection is a clever little trick of the psyche. It protects us from discomfort by putting it out there, onto someone else. But the truth is, we all do it. The key is catching it when it creeps in. We can usually feel it in the places where we get defensive, closed off, or reactive. When a new idea makes us tighten instead of open. These are not failures, they’re invitations, showing us where there’s work to be done.
We often talk about flexibility in terms of the body, how we need to stretch, to move, to keep our joints fluid. But we rarely speak of the importance of staying supple in our perspectives. If we’re not careful, we harden in place, not just in our bodies, but in our minds. The tragedy isn’t just that we stop learning; it’s that we stop wanting to learn. We confuse aging with wisdom, forgetting that wisdom doesn’t come from time alone. It comes from humility, reflection, and the willingness to remain teachable. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.” Life is change. And to meet it with grace, we must stay flexible enough to respond to it without breaking.
Echo & Narcissus by John William Waterhouse
We see this pattern in mythology too. In the Greek myth of Narcissus, the namesake of our modern psychological phenomenon of Narcissism, is so enamored with his own reflection, wastes away at the edge of a pool, unable to look away. His identity is fixed, unquestioned, untouchable, and in that rigidity, he becomes hollow. He does not grow. He does not change. He vanishes into himself, consumed by the illusion of his own perfection. Narcissus is the archetype of ego without insight, of self-regard so absolute it becomes self-destruction. His story is a cautionary tale, not just of vanity, but of stagnation, of refusing to engage with anything beyond the curated image of self. We see a similar lesson in the biblical parable of Lot’s wife. As the city of Sodom is destroyed for its wickedness, Lot and his wife flee the city and despite being warned not to look back, she cannot resist looking at the only life she’d ever known, and is turned to a pillar of salt. Like Narcissus, she becomes a monument to fixation, to the inability to surrender the familiar for the unknown. Both myths warn us what happens when we become too attached to the past, to an identity, to a worldview that no longer serves us. We become stuck or calcify, forfeiting the possibility of becoming something more.
Inanna, by contrast, willingly descends into the underworld, a place not just of death, but of transformation. At each of the seven gates, she is stripped of her symbols of power and identity - her crown, her jewels, her robes, arriving naked, vulnerable, and powerless before Ereshkigal prepared for the ultimate sacrifice. And yet, it is through this descent that she is reborn, not as who she was, but as someone deeper, wiser, more whole. She doesn’t resist the process; she surrenders to it. Inanna’s myth is a blueprint for transformation: we must let go of who we think we are to become who we’re meant to be. And we can’t do that if we allow our minds to turn to stone. And while you know I’m all about the Goddesses and the Divine Feminine, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Odin, the all-father of the Norse pantheon, whose quest for wisdom is born from the same archetypal truth. He willingly sacrifices his right eye, the eye of rational sight, of ego, of outward perception, at Mímir’s well, the well of deep wisdom beneath the roots of the World Tree, which you might know as Yggdrasil. He gives up the clarity of surface seeing in order to gain the far more difficult gift of inner vision. Odin’s sacrifice isn’t just physical; it’s symbolic. It represents giving up the comfortable illusions of certainty and control to see what lies beneath, to enter the mystery. It’s the archetypal price of wisdom: the surrender of the known for the unknown, of comfort for truth. These stories aren’t just entertainment; they’re mirrors. They’re archetypes coded into our collective psyche, reminding us again and again that rigidity, whether of identity, belief, or perception, leads to collapse. It is only through surrender, through the willingness to be stripped bare, to lose the parts of ourselves we cling to most tightly, that we become more whole. We don’t get to hoard comfort and expect growth. We don’t get to skip the descent, but we do get to choose how we meet it and who we become.
Neuroscience mirrors this wisdom. Studies on neuroplasticity show that the brain’s ability to form new pathways doesn’t disappear with age, it responds to challenge, to curiosity, to new experiences. Our brains remain capable of growth as long as we’re willing to stretch into the unfamiliar.Psychological flexibility is increasingly understood as essential to resilience and mental health. Studies like Ellen Langer’s famous Counterclockwise Study showed that when elderly men were immersed in an environment designed to mimic their youth, complete with magazines, music, and conversations from twenty years prior, not only did they report feeling younger, but their physical health improved. Vision sharpened, posture straightened, arthritis pain decreased. Their bodies responded to the mindset of youth, as if the brain’s belief created a ripple effect through the body. Carol Dweck’s research on Growth Mindset similarly revealed that people who believe they can develop new skills and perspectives are more adaptable, motivated, and able to navigate setbacks. And Richard Davidson’s work on contemplative practices like meditation showed that even in older adults, regular mental training can change brain structure, increasing emotional regulation, empathy, and resilience. The science, in many ways, is catching up to what ancient spiritual traditions have told us all along: that how we think, how we frame our experiences, how willing we are to soften and stay open, directly influences how we age—not just in mind, but in body. Flexibility of body, mind, and spirit is not weakness. It’s strength, discernment, curiosity, humility, and openness in action.
Flexibility isn’t a passive state, it’s a daily practice. And like any practice, it can be challenging and immensely humbling. It takes honesty to admit when we’ve tightened up, when our thinking, our bodies, our hearts have started to close. And it takes even more courage to do something about it. We may need to try new ways of thinking, open ourselves to unfamiliar perspectives, or stretch into new exercises for the mind, body, and soul that feel awkward at first. It means being willing to sit with discomfort. To hear dissenting voices. To try, at the very least, to understand why someone might think, feel, or act in ways we don’t condone or comprehend. That doesn’t mean we have to accept or excuse harmful behavior. But if we let the things we don’t like or agree with make us brittle, if we let them harden us into judgement, rigidity, or hate, we lose our balance just the same. When we’re willing to stay open, to stay curious, even in the face of discomfort, we’re practicing flexibility in action. And the more we do it, the kinder we become. The more fluid we become. Not because we’ve abandoned our values, but because we’ve given up the illusion that our way is the only way. Sometimes that means feeling foolish. Stumbling. Being a beginner again. That’s okay. Because what refuses to bend will eventually break. Flexibility, in the end, isn’t just a physical practice. It’s a spiritual one. It’s the art of expansion. And it calls us back, again and again, to humility, curiosity, and the quiet, brave work of evolution.
Maybe that’s the real work of growing older. Not to harden, but to soften. To let the world crack us open in the best possible way. To stay willing to be wrong, to be humbled, to be changed. That’s not weakness. That’s the kind of strength I want to carry into the next chapters of my life. A strength that bends without breaking. A strength that listens. That stays curious. That chooses to open rather than close. I want to carry a little bit of Inanna and Odin with me—the guts to descend into the unknown, to surrender what I thought made me powerful, to trade a little ego for a little wisdom. Though if it’s all the same, I’d prefer not to lose an eye, or end up strung naked on a hook in the underworld. I’ll leave the more dramatic rites of passage to the old gods and stick with my morning stretches and uncomfortable conversations, thank you very much.
I don’t ever want to be the oak that snaps when the storm comes. I’d rather be the reed that sways and survives. And if you’re like me, feeling the ache in your lower back, the stiffness in your calves first thing in the morning that makes you walk like Kramer in those too-tight jeans, the tightening in your beliefs, the little signs that tell you you might be getting stuck, I hope you’ll take it as a gentle nudge. Stretch your body. Stretch your mind. Stretch your spirit. Start where you are. None of us are too old, too wise, or too far gone to become a little more supple, a little more spacious, a little more whole.
We don’t have to do it perfectly.
We just have to keep moving.
