Genetic Personality Types - Part 1

Transcript

More than 30 years ago, I identified what I call Genetic Personality Types; 16 of them. I call them The 16 Geniuses. Let me tell you how that happened.

What happened for me was that I was spending time as a director of a nonprofit kinesiological institute in Boston, Massachusetts. I was trying to discover how to move better. I had been trained by some really incredibly talented people and they were amazing to be with. But I wasn't developing at the rate or even getting the results that I thought I should get from being with those amazing people. And I thought to myself, "I think I'm smart enough and I'm willing to work hard enough, I think. So why am I not getting better? They they must not know. I don't know for sure and they must not know otherwise they could get me to do that." So then I thought, "Well, where do you go?" Well you go to the medical library and you start reading about all the bones of the body and all the muscles in the body and the nervous system and you start finding out what everybody else knows about developing movement of the body. I'm an autodidact. I like studying things myself and then bridging into what the world knows about it. And so after four years of study I realized, Western medicine at this current time isn't particularly successful at rehabilitation or teaching people how to move well. I think a lot of people are talented and then they do well and they get a bunch of help, but I don't think people really know how to fix people if things are broken and stuff. And so I concluded that and I had was loving what I was learning about all that at the same time. And then I got hit by a car at 70 miles an hour as pedestrian and then I had to figure it out.

And so a friend of mine actually helped me out by getting me to swim. And I started swimming and jogging a lot and I did that for 12 years. I did an excessive amount of that to try to rehabilitate my body. And I did get super fit, but it didn't fix my body really. So then I decided I should figure this out. So I spent my life savings on going to the best orthopedic and people in the country, in the United States. And I kind of confirmed what I knew and what they knew and what they didn't know and what I knew they didn't know. And I was looking for the answers. And the conclusion was is that people really didn't know how muscles naturally stretched or how to really create flexibility. It seems like the people that were flexible were doing something I didn't know about and other people don't know about.

So at that time, I had read a story about a plumber who wanted to become a millionaire. So he told his wife, "I'm going to sit in this chair in the kitchen until I figure out how to come up with an idea to become a millionaire." And what he came up with was an idea to solve the problem of tennis balls losing air going going flat after a while. He figured out and created a canister that pushes air back into the tennis balls and brings them back to life. It made him a millionaire. I thought I could do the same thing with figuring out how to stretch. I'll just sit on the ground in a position that other people have good range of motion in and I don't and I'll wait and wait until it happens and my body shows me how to naturally stretch and become flexible. So that's what I did. And one day I was sitting on the ground with my legs wide and my head went all the way down to the ground in front of me. That had never happened in my entire life. And then I sat back up and I was like, "Okay, I'm ready for this to happen again." And it didn't happen because I didn't know how it happened. And then the next day, I sat there again and I was waiting. And it seemed like 100 years had passed and all of a sudden, I started going forward. And I knew exactly where the muscles on the inside of the back of my legs were stretching, in order to give me the range to go forward. But I could feel they were also contracting when they were stretching. I was like, "Well, that doesn't make any sense. Muscles don't contract when they stretch. They relax to stretch." But no, they were contracting. And the more they contracted, the more range of motion I got. So then I flipped up into a balancing position with my lower legs bent under me and I bent backwards. And when I bent backwards, I went all the way back to the ground. I'd never done that before. My quads got a great stretch and then I realized, I better push even harder or I'm gonna hurt my back. And so I sat up and I was like, "I figured out how muscles stretch. They have to contract." And that's in fact how all animals stretch too. You know how they do it. They reach for it and then they go like that. That's the contraction when they stretch. And you know, in the morning, you do that same reach up and then you go like that. You contract your muscles when you stretch.

So then because of the knowledge I had from studying, I created stretches first by just squirming around on the ground and figuring out how to get a natural position to stretch. And then it turned into a theory of eight muscle groups; how to stretch the 8 of them in the lower body and the 8 the upper body. Because you have to move in eight directions; forward and backward, inside and outside, and the two separate diagonals in both directions. So that's eight for your upper and lower body and that turned into a biomechanical model of how to rehabilitate my body and I started doing that. And I was getting great results. And when I would get into a stretch position, say to stretch my quad, after a while my lower leg would have to get involved and then my foot, my trunk, my shoulders, my neck, and my head and I would finish these stretch positions. And I found out they were all yoga poses. I had no idea. I had never stretch studied yoga before. So then I was like, "Okay." So then I started stretching more and looking for more muscle groups and they all turn into yoga poses actually. But I wasn't doing yoga the way people were doing it. Other people were just kind of getting into extreme ranges and what I was doing was contracting the muscles more and more the further I went into a stretch position. And then I was finally in what they call a yoga pose, but my body was generating significant tension to actually be in that range of motion. And so when I did that, that was really great.

And then one day, I was stretching my lateral hamstring and my bladder contracted. Well, that didn't make any sense to me at all. It's like, why would my bladder be associated with my lateral hamstring? And so I called my friend on the phone that was from California and she knew about Traditional Chinese Medicine. And she said to me, "That's the Bladder energy channel in Chinese medicine." I was like, "I don't really want to know that." And so I got off the phone and I stretched my lateral quad. And when I stretched my lateral quad, my stomach contracted. And I called her up and I said, "Hey Evelyn, do they have a Stomach Meridian?" And she said, "They do." And I said, "Is it on the back of my shoulders?" And she said, "No, it's in your quad." And I said, "Yeah, that's where I found it too. I'll call you back." And then I stretched another muscle group on the back inside of my leg and my pancreas area contracted. And lo and behold, that's the Pancreas Meridian in Traditional Chinese Medicine. So I don't know how the ancient Chinese figured that out, but I knew that when I stretched certain muscles that it was affecting my organs. Now that might sound weird to people, but if you're hit by a car at 70 miles per hour, you've got a lot of organ problems and not just biomechanical issues. So you're more organ sensitive than most people. And it wasn't subtle these feelings that I was having. So I was even happier than the biomechanical changes. I was now getting physiological changes.

I think you can tell by looking at me that I don't look like Mel Gibson. And people in Boston are really attracted to that look in a male. And one morning, I was stretching and I walked outside and every single man and woman hit on me. That had never happened in my whole life. And I ran back home and I thought to myself, "These stretches are not just biomechanically upgrading me, these stretches are not just physiologically upgrading me, but they're developing parts of my personality. Well, I needed that because I was very psychologically disturbed (understatement of the century) from the tragic automobile accident my friend and I were in. So I started staying in stretch positions all day (except when I was eating and doing other things people do) and I would write down like a scientist what happened to me when I was doing those stretches. So I would get into a particular stretch position and I did it every day, sometimes for a month. And I would be like, "Every time I get in the stretch, I start looking at red and I'm not normally looking at red." And then I'd be like, "Every time I do this stretch, I feel my tendons more than my muscles. Normally, I'm feeling my muscles." And so I started mapping out how this stretches affected my perception of the world outside, my perspective, my insights into myself and physiological stuff that was happening. And it turned into a huge database of how different stretches started developing me and my personality traits. And that turned into a theory of 16 personality types (each associated with a particular muscle group) because I have eight muscle groups in my lower body and eight in my upper body. That's wild because psychology, at the present time, doesn't think there's personality types. They think there's trait development. Well, types are different.

I knew based on what I was doing that these were kind of an organic phenomena that were coming out of the physical body. And I knew that I was a particular type after doing all those stretches because I wasn't really like the other personalities I was morphing into when I did these different stretches. And so there was a way to test whether types were genetic: you need to test identical twins that have been separated from birth for a number of years. So that's what I did. I found a couple pairs of identical twins and I lied to them. I told them that I was testing them for flexibility, which I was, but really I was trying to see if they were the same personality type. And they were. And then years later, we went to the Twins Conference in Twinsburg, Ohio in August, where thousands of fraternal and identical twins show up and we interviewed identical twins. And if they're in fact truly identical twins, they're the same genetic personality type.

So who would've ever guessed that in the process of rehabilitating my body physically (and besides my body being healed by me stretching and other people assisting me), that I would also facilitate healing my body physiologically and start developing my personality in very specific ways? It turned into four groups of types: thinking types, physical types, emotional types, and spiritual types. And four different kinds in each one of those and each one being associated with a particular muscle group and a certain organ function. I didn't think that up. That's what happened to me by physically stretching. So that's how personality types developed initially and then after that I started interviewing lots of people to learn more about each type because I would know what type that person was from morphing into that type myself when I did a particular stretch. And I would start asking them about the traits I had discovered in myself when I did that particular stretch and I started collecting that information. And now years later, more than 30 years later, that database is gigantic in terms of the information on types. There's high traits. There's low traits. There's defense mechanisms. There's particular stretches for that type. There's how that type integrates through the four parts of themselves. There's how they balance. There's the nature of their relationship with all the other types. It's now a huge database with layers and layers and layers of information. And in this fall in 2020, the book comes out "The 16 Geniuses: Sixteen Genetic Personality Types" and the web page The Body Is Medicine. And I think what's about to happen at the same time is that you'll be able to use your phone and take a photo of yourself and we'll send you 40 pages of information on your genetic personality type. That's not the individual, that's their type. It takes a long time to know a person, but it takes a moment to type them. And when you do, you can find out that different types are great at different things. So now you know much better about who to get to do what with when you want to do things. And even more importantly, it explains why you feel and think the way you do when you're around different people. And that's a whole other story.

So I just wanted to introduce you to the concept of that, "The 16 Geniuses: The Sixteen Genetic Personality Types" was developed from my physical body through from stretching myself. It wasn't from me taking these different, concomitant databases and putting them together. It was experienced through my own body, and by working with other people. That's how it works. There's now centers in Boston, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara where trainers are really developed and know about personality types and know how to work on people. And the web page, The Genius of Flexibility, you can learn all kinds of stretches and develop these different personalities in yourself and know other people. Welcome to The 16 Geniuses.