Article for Weekly Magazine for Monterey County by Rick Cannon

Carmel Valley is home to a pioneer in the health and fitness world.  Health and fitness pioneer Elisa Lodge exclaims, “The future belongs to those who can remain on the ball!” We’re in a dance studio in Monterey, California,  a mix of men and women, artists and business people sitting or bobbing  on large brightly colored balls. We are gathered around our teacher and at the same time being videotaped for the live-motion portion of her soon-to-be-released e-book, “Wowzacise, Growing Young on the Ball”.

Lodge, also affectionately known as “Wowza”, is 73 years old, and looks half that. She is a petite figure with a large presence, garbed in a colorful skin-tight body suit. She moves around the room with energy and grace, passionately and articulately imparting to the students her secrets of attaining the secrets of ageless vitality. After the combined workout and video session on the balls, I feel a unique sense of calm grounding which is complemented by a feeling of having tremendous energy.

In her humble and inimitable way, Wowza, the mother of twin sons, actress, expressive arts therapist, corporate consultant. and fitness dynamo, is pushing the boundaries of the health and fitness industry. She has created a new fitness system that exercises the emotions as well as the body and promotes health and ageless vitality in her thousands of students.

After winning the Miss Florida beauty pageant in 1957, Lodge narrowly missed the title of Miss America because she was true to her beliefs that a woman should have a strong voice of her own. Later, this modern day Renaissance woman became an actress (where she hung out with stars like Marilyn Monroe, was in a film with Jerry Lewis, then a body worker, then an expressive arts therapist, and then a fitness and health expert. She is one of the first people to teach yoga in an American University back in the ‘60’s. A unique approach to human wellness is detailed in her book Primal Energetics, Emotional Intelligence in Action, which Lodge teaches around the world.

From her years of studies with masters of modern bodywork forms (for example she studied with Ida Rolf and Moshe Feldenkrais), pioneers of dance movement (Anna Halprin, Gabrielle Roth) and acting trainers (Lee Strasberg) of Actors Studio and her decades of acting, bodywork and teaching experience, Lodge has synthesized a unique and powerfully transformational fitness system. Lodge habitually devours any book or article or website she can find on human health and potential, keeping her teaching on the cutting edge of current research.

In using the balls, which is just one of a large palate of techniques she teaches, Lodge states “What is now being discovered is the motion of bobbing stimulates the chemical endorphin that ignites sensations of pure joy.” She explains how are cells are affected by the variations of the earth’s gravitational pull as the body moves up, down and around the ball. “In the upward thrust of the bounce, the cells are aerated with heightened oxygen; in the downward movement, toxic waste is flushed out of the cells and circulation flows with increased vigor.”

Besides giving the body an aerobic workout, Lodge’s fitness system also involves what she calls “emotional intelligence”. She has learned that moving emotions, which can be stuck in the body, can be just as or more important than moving the body itself. Elisa demonstrates a myriad of ways to be aware of emotions, to let them go their course and watch them naturally change without resistance. The importance of expressing emotions is a crucial aspect of health, Lodge states, which most other fitness systems don’t address.

Another distinguishing and effective aspect of her fitness system is the use of vocalization to disperse energy and express emotion. “Discovering the imaginative, feeling rhythms in the word can perhaps heal the adversarial drama that has existed between the mental mind and the feeling heart”, she writes.

Besides giving her students more energy and vitality, this unique energy-building program can help prevent many diseases such as cancer and heart conditions, which can be partially caused by repressed or misplaced emotions. Her system also empowers those who practice it, providing a natural beauty and vitality, instead of searching for beauty with a facelift, botox injection or breast implant. Her system works from inside the person, making the outside beautiful and healthy in turn.

In an age of increasing awareness of the importance of ecology, Lodge’s work takes on a deeper meaning. She states, “Perceiving the inner ecology of our being interconnected to the larger ecology of the biosphere is essential to our very survival. To breathe, sound, and move with the elemental rhythms of nature, coming into kinship with the energies of the earth, water, fire, air and ether is to align with the vast energizing powers of the biosphere as your extended body.”

Lodge has developed a slant on yoga that she has named “Primal Yoga” in which strictly delineated yoga poses, or asanas, are given the freedom to be modified into organic, natural movements. She believes that even the system of modern yoga, which was originally based on movements and aspects of animals and nature’s elements, has lost much of its originality and purpose. She feels she is helping yoga return to its true roots.

At the age of 72, people often ask Wowza for the secret to her ageless vitality. After spending four decades exploring and teaching expressive arts therapies, movement/dance education, sound healing, innovative bodywork and natural fitness practices, she confided that there is one activity that continuously rejuvenates the source of her boundless aliveness. Rolling and bobbling on different sized balls with a dynamic vocabulary of energizing breath, sound and movement never fails to unleash a virtual ‘fountain of youth’ of perpetual renewal that supports her to grow more vital and ageless with each passing year.

Lodge shares that she discovered the Ball over twenty-five years ago when witnessing a group of children rolling and bouncing on them with adventurous abandon. In the midst of this joyful scene, a teacher walked in the room with explicit instructions to quiet down. With ironclad discipline, she directed the children through mechanical exercises that were repeated until everyone got it right. With the blink of an eye, all the excitement of innovative discovery had completely disappeared.

Wowza is quick to interject that “unleashing the vast expressive capacities of creative play is a lost art among grownups. Losing control of the adult role and the fear of looking foolish looms large in most people’s minds. Lets face it, the habit of sameness is the major contributor of the debilitating effects of aging. The spirit being forever young, the vital expression of our spontaneous feeling nature that is forever growing and changing in new ways needs to be exercised as the guiding source of pure love in action.”

Emerging from the trauma of physical/emotional abuse, a disfiguring skin disease, cross-eyes, and crippling inhibition, Lodge created Wowzacise, Growing Young on the Ball – a radically different form of fitness designed to recapture a youthfulness of spirit – the playful creativity, spontaneity, fluid flexibility, emotional authenticity, and natural genius we all had so naturally as children.

She proposes, “The outworn need to act our age needs revamping. If I identified with my chronological age, which reflects the conditioning of stereotyped behavior, I would consider myself too old to create a revolutionary new body of work and feel to inertia-ridden to birth it into the world

Healing Muscle Mania

Lodge acknowledges that an assumption arises when people first start this program, which is playful expression is fun but it has nothing to do with keeping fit. This fanatical obsession with hardening the body with muscular density rather than loosening the body into its natural fluid flow has taken its toll. Research indicates that the hard body fitness that is almost impossible to achieve, forces over 85% of people who start exercise programs to drop out and return to sedentary habits.

Lodge acknowledges that an assumption arises when people first start this program, which is playful expression is fun but it has nothing to do with keeping fit. This fanatical obsession with hardening the body with muscular density rather than loosening the body into its natural fluid flow has taken its toll. Research indicates that the hard body fitness that is almost impossible to achieve, forces over 85% of people who start exercise programs to drop out and return to sedentary habits.

Premium Benefit- Cellular Renewal

The sport of trampolining, which epitomizes bobbling, has the highest list of benefits of any sport or fitness regime. Rolling and bobbling on different sized balls, provides similar benefits. How does it work? Our body is a profound miracle of molecular energy that contains an apothecary of chemical frequencies designed to sustain the health of over 60 trillion cells. On the upward thrust of the bounce, the entire cellular loosens up and is aerated with heightened oxygen. In the downward pressure of the bounce, toxic waste is flushed out of the cells and circulation flows with increased vigor.

Ten minutes of vigorous bouncing while breathing and sounding with emotional energy on the ball, stress and tension, aches and pains circulation and the production of endorphins; the chemical of pure joy is increased – the safest cost-effective painkiller yet developed.

In a world that’s becoming increasingly more fast-paced and stressful, Wowzacise offers unlimited permission to shake out the crazies, roar like a Lion, wail out the sorrow, laugh without reason, and relax into the deepest peace. Regaining total freedom of expression as our sacred birthright, the original gifts and talents buried within us can at last be ignited with grace, boldness and daring.