Facing up to your emotions!

When it comes to facing up to your emotions what you see, is really what you get!

Every emotion leaves minute traces across our face, lines and creases that can mark us for life, both in good ways and in bad ways. Our Magical Ukrainian Aesthetic Therapist, Alla Kalinina explains why.

Nearly every day most of us get up and as part of our morning preparation ritual, we look in the mirror and see ourselves, sometimes we smile, sometimes we feel sad and sometimes we are unable to express the emotions we feel, so we just hold it together and bravely soldier on. The muscle patterns that form with these emotions cannot fail to have an impact on our facial muscles themselves, and over the years this changes the way our faces look. After years of difficult times many look in the mirror and do not recognise themselves, the shocks and stresses of life have taken their toll on their face and left them with deeply embedded lines and crevices that sit on dry hard blotchy and discoloured skin.

Each time you find yourself looking in the mirror to see the real you, are you satisfied with your appearance? Do you feel the need to improve what you see? Without using various kinds of chemical stripping, or radically changing your features with plastic surgery and cosmetic injections etc, what can you do? Do you really have to go for the 'nuclear' option by acid or laser burning yourself, surgically cutting or injecting poisons into your face, or are there softer ways to help yourself naturally?

As a woman I very perfectly understand this feeling of frustration with the natural process of ageing. So why did I decide to write about it? Primarily to help women find a simple natural way to preserve their decent facial features, and share my own experiences, skills, recipes, and life reflections that might help people to love their image in the mirror a bit more, and to be proud of who they are today! Most importantly to respect their reflections and themselves! It's worth doing this because, "what you see in the mirror reflects on your whole body and how well you age!"

My working life has been mainly as a professional instructor of health and dance. I actually have a diploma from Kyiv University in Sports rehabilitation and studied dance and aesthetic therapy. All my life I have sought to work in these fields. However as a single mother there were periods when I had to make money to support my family and I needed to change my profession. This took me into other difficult life experiences, some that required me learning new professions and behaving in other personalities to be able to fit in. The strength you need to do this forced me to learn how it is possible to survive in difficult moments.

For me if later you can look at yourself and think how cool it is that you still look excellent in spite of those difficulties, then this is a big plus for life. So, I felt compelled to share with those of you who may be interested my recommendations and a bit about my job today because this is how I turned those years of face tragedies into a my own well loved vision that I enjoy meeting every morning!

Life today offers us so many opportunities to realize our desires so we try to delay the ageing process with surgery and injections. We allow ourselves to listen to all kinds of proposals to achieve this and try to be happy with how we look. Personally for me I am against anything that relates to changing appearance with the use of surgery and injection. For others I'm not against this work, because many people are born with injuries and have tragedies in their life and there is a need for operations to help such people.

But to find a way to look younger with the use of cosmetic surgery and injections is not cheap fun. A lot of my friends are already in this regimen and every few months must undergo these expensive and invasive procedures to sustain themselves as a person on a magazine cover. It also can go wrong! One of my clients a very wealthy woman attended my classes in Pilates. At that time she was 48-49 years. I cannot say that she looked bad, I would say she looked good, but she wanted to be a bit better and looked for her answer with cosmetologists and surgery, she found the most expensive surgeon and yet it was a disaster! She went from a beautiful gently ageing natural woman into a different creature with a plastic pulled back face that couldn't smile naturally. This poor woman was desperately looking for someone who will help her fix her face.

We met by chance when she was on a regular visit to Ukraine. It had been about 4 years since I had seen her and it was a shock! She had a face she could not recognise in the mirror with lined creased hands that still displayed her normal age.

I was so frustrated, why are we doing this to ourselves? Many of these beautiful women after treatment become afraid to show their faces, and have to hide under the sunglasses. Are we are so subject to meeting the standards of advertising and magazine covers that we lose our own identity and its own character and soul!

As a fitness coach over the years I was always interested in how to behave to preserve health, body, face and joy to life. After working with many thousands of women I know some define it as having money. I know it is not! And because my age stamp is approaching 50 I can say with certainty that preserving health is easy, however there is one but! It is called laziness!

This word includes a lot of other excuses, apathy depression pessimism, etc. What do I need to do to get rid of laziness?

Just get up and do the work! Spend your days as you know you must, don't try to lie to yourself and not care about yourself! Somehow you must find a few minutes every day to look after you!

I read and reread many books on psychology realized one simple truth, to think well, to work well, to live well and love life. It all starts in the morning, when we come to the mirror and have that first encounter with ourselves. This is a very interesting meeting, because the person you see says quite a lot about what you ate yesterday, what you drank, how many hours sleep you had, what joys you experienced and how many tears you spilled. It also records how many times you felt angry and how much laughing you did and so on.

Over a lifetime these emotions impact on your body and face as wrinkles and lines but if you properly care support and help your body, and take care of your face by staying informed as it changes over the years. You can encounter your ageing with dignity and respect so you can admire its display in the mirror with pride.

I first tried a 'classical face massage' when I was 20 years old. My mother took me with her. At the time, she was a well regarded hairdresser in our city and her profession obliged her to look very good. She was about 45 and we went to see a classic massage therapist and I was very interested. At 20 years of age I wondered what it is and why woman need this type of treatment. Personally I was very tired after a workout and decided to try it myself. I admit I was very surprised and satisfied with the result. The difference was so great that I decided I would use this process for myself as long as possible. It was not that it reduced the tired lines on my face. It was that my face no longer felt tired. I felt refreshed and renewed. I'm sure this decision I made at 20 has played a large role how I look now!

For many today it is a very important to try and look 35 at age 50. Myself I think so too up to a certain point. I think this also applies to the soul and having self respect for every age we travel through. We need to love and respect ourselves and take advantage to learn from past events, emotions and ageing happily are part of this.

This is just my point of view and of course it may differ from others. Moving my life from Ukraine to New Zealand tells me my audience here will be people wanting to live in harmony with themselves and nature and I'm eager to help many women and not only gain a healthy, pretty face but a happier life outlook.

If this is you, I'll be glad to help and chat on topics of interest because in NZ there is a completely different climate with lots of skin damage possible from our outdoor lifestyle when enjoying with the wonderful but powerful NZ sunshine.

The question many of my friends and clients ask is that after a course of massage treatments will I look much younger? I answer of course not, but that your face, your opinion and attitude about yourself will be fresher and your skin will have a healthier look. This is what will make the big difference to how aged you will look, because most importantly this type of massage releases the years of tension formed from holding your tongue, and keeping your face in a neutral shape when you really would like to tell someone who is behaving badly what you really think. This release of old tension gives such comfort to your emotional wellbeing.

I have never had a client not enjoy seeing themselves in the mirror feeling happy and contented after this treatment. The wonderful thing is our eyes capture record and remember this contented state, then pass on to the brain and body the feelings of this contentment! So I want to return again and again to this picture, I want to emphasize it is yours and not someone else's, it is your collection of life's emotional journey that you see in the mirror and the person you are today may react quite differently to the one you see. So what does it mean if you could change this picture to one that reflects who you are today?

With our heavily advertised medicated instant answer world focus you may be surprised to find out it is very well known to scientists that you can change your cell's DNA with focussed meditation. Science has shown this very clearly in a number of studies. This is because as you reduce your stress you can increase the length of your cells 'telomeres' and extend the life of your chromosomes, the cellular building blocks of the body. Science also teaches us that the placebo effect can make great changes in the body as well.

The placebo effect shows that just believing in a treatment can change how you are and help you get well. I believe that by looking at the new you every day, you do both. You tell your cells that this is now me this is who I am today, and they listen, they believe what they see!

I believe the placebo effect is why a cosmetic, plastic, and fake version of a new you can help you feel better about yourself for a while, but in the end because this is not a real natural and permanent version of you, it is fake, you can't keep it up, so you don't get all the same outcomes or benefits of doing it naturally! There is nothing more saddening to me than seeing a woman who has had many years of these treatments and now is hiding under big sunglasses trapped in an unsmiling strange looking face. I believe it's better to go natural now!

I am convinced natural is better, and the science is clear that processing and releasing difficult emotional states is important for emotional and physical health. My belief is that this can be assisted with classical face massage and some simple self care techniques supported with mindfulness and true care for yourself.

In the same way that your body needs good quality exercise so does your face. What causes excessive aging in the skin is not enough relaxed and regular movement in all the facial muscles. This tension in the face muscles restricts blood supply and lymphatic cleaning, reducing the ability of the skin to be resilient to external factors.

Movement proper nutrition and hydration promotes better blood circulation and consequently better nutrition and oxygenation. For women as we begin to age it accelerates rapidly from our late twenties and thirties. The sooner we start to monitor our skin the sooner we can be more effective in slowing and controlling the aging process as I approach 50 I am so please my mother shared her facial secrets.

Engaging in sports all my life was a requirement of my work, I understood that at 42 wrinkles appear and going to cosmetologist once a month was not affordable on my budget. I got considerable satisfaction from knowing that as a coach hanging out in gyms every day with other women, I had a decent look, and that my face was not covered in layers of cosmetics. I know this looks very funny in a gym and I'm not the kind of person that you see in cosmetic advertising journals with pouting lips and painted cheeks I'm sorry, I do not like it and I'm not happy to look like that!

I will write more and share some secrets and recipes for skin and diet to sustain a healthy body and appearance. For me personally it is nice to see yourself as a pleasant, healthy charming person, and I think this pleasantness is passed around.

In conclusion I wish to say that there is no elixir of youth and each individual has to bring together all this desire to be happy, you must first love yourself but a little extra care from someone who knows how to help cannot fail to be good for you!



Kind regards,

Alla Kalinina

Alla Kalinina
Fitness Instructor & Facial Massage Specialist Wellness at Work Ltd.

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Our Team

Chris Toal

A passionate Forensic Bodyworker for two decades, Chris says that he's only a facilitator of communication between you and your body. He believes that many persistent unresolved injuries and conditions are only waiting for...

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Alla Kalinina

Alla has a deep base to draw on. A renowned dance choreographer and fitness instructor in her homeland, Ukraine, her Aerobic dance teams were European champions. Alla is also a qualified mobility therapist...

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