Wisdom in the Body

by Michael Kern

  Checks and balances

  The manifestation of disease symptoms is part of this intelligent response of the body. If there is some imbalance in our lifestyle, such as too much stress, or a poor diet, the body lets us know by producing certain symptoms. These are like the red light flashing on a car dashboard, indicating that there is something going on that needs attention. If we are then able to deal with the origin of the problem, improved health will follow. If not, and we just continue driving, the body’s resources will be further taxed. Symptoms can thus provide checks and balances to our excesses and deficiencies, pointing the way to more harmonious modes of living. In many ways symptoms are our friends; by dealing with the circumstances that created them, we have an opportunity to find deeper levels of integration.

  Intelligent responses

  If we become sick, the body tries either to dissipate the illness or, if this is not possible, to contain it as best it can. The development of a fever to eliminate an accumulation of toxins, a protective tissue contraction in response to a trauma, or the containment of a malignant tumor to a particular location are all expressions of this intrinsic health. They are examples of the balancing power of nature in action. According to pioneering Naturopath Dr. Henry Lindlahr, “The science of natural living and healing shows clearly that what we call disease is primarily nature’s effort to … restore the normal functions of the body.”19 Sickness can be seen as the best possible solution in the circumstances, and therefore an elementary expression of our wellness.

  Working with the wisdom

  Modern medicine’s obsession to fight disease and eliminate its symptoms, without considering its underlying origins, reveals a basic mistrust of the deep intelligence of the body. Rather than fighting disease, the emphasis of the craniosacral approach is to support health. Our fundamental resource of health is the potency of the Breath of Life that carries our essential ordering force or original matrix. It is this potency that intelligently centers a disturbance to a particular location and contains any damage (see Chapter 5). If this intrinsic resource can be accessed and supported, then even more efficient expressions of wellness can emerge.

  Craniosacral treatment works with the physiology of the body, not against it. The intelligence of symptoms is acknowledged, as well as the intelligence of the body’s attempts to deal with them. However, in order to appreciate this, first we have to be prepared to listen to what the body is saying. Instead of fighting the body’s wisdom, we may need to sit around a table and hold some peace talks. Furthermore, this gentle and respectful approach obviates the risk of unwanted side-effects. Negative reactions to treatment are unlikely when the treatment simply supports the wisdom in the body.

  Creating the conditions

  The movement towards integration and health is a natural tendency, an ever-present and gentle force. A cut finger doesn’t have to be told how to heal, but it does need to be kept clean and protected. This at least is the responsibility of the patient.

  On some level everything we do, all so-called “positive” or “negative” actions, is in the pursuit of feeling well. One thing all human beings share is the pursuit of happiness. Dr. Becker once observed that, “We fight—we live—in order to express health within ourselves.”20 However, unfortunately some of our attempts do not actually support the reemergence of health. In fact, they often make matters worse. An asthmatic smoker whose immediate craving may be satisfied by another cigarette is not necessarily going to get better. Still, this may be the best that he or she can do at that time. However, the path to deeper health necessitates developing the right conditions for the emergence of our intrinsic healing resources.

  Health never stops

  Life springs up wherever it has the opportunity; between the cracks of paving stones, in forests ravaged by fire or in crippled bodies and troubled minds. Health is an irresistible force. There is never a time when our health-giving mechanisms are not working, for they are an intrinsic part of our lives. Even in more chronic or advanced cases of illness, the Breath of Life and our original intention of health are always present. By comparison, a log that has become jammed in a river may create turbulence in the water, but the river still flows. Likewise, the Breath of Life still provides the organizing blueprint in an ailing body. The seeking of health is innate, intelligent and never ceases. In the words of Dr. Becker,

  The seeking of health from within is a continuous time, tissue, and tidal effort from conception to the final moments of physiological life. Within every trauma and/or disease entity, there is an effort on the part of body physiology to deliver health mechanisms through the local area of stress to full functioning health capacities.21

  Moving on?

  Chronic states of illness result when the resources that help us to dissipate or adapt to stressful forces become overwhelmed.22 If we cannot mount an effective response of adaptation, there is a tendency towards degeneration and death. However, this is still part of the natural intelligence of life. Recurrent cycles of birth, growth, decay and death can be seen everywhere in nature. Sooner or later the time will come for all of us to move on, and the river of life to take another course. Perhaps this is the ultimate adaptation.

  Healing is not just about getting rid of symptoms, but about supporting and integrating individual wholeness.23 Our wholeness is always available, whatever the circumstances. Someone who has cancer or AIDS can still be healthy. It is also possible to die healthily. As Dr. James Jealous asserts,

  Health … is at the core of our being and cannot be increased or decreased to a greater or lesser degree. In other words, the health in our body cannot become diseased … the health in the body actually transcends death. The health in our body is 100 percent available twenty-four hours a day from conception until death, then it transpires. It does not expire.24

  Margaret’s story

  Margaret was an eighty-two-year-old neighbor whom I had treated on and off over many years for recurrent back pain. She had been ill with cancer for some time and was growing considerably weaker. She telephoned me because she was feeling very anxious about what was happening to her and wanted someone she could talk to. When I went to her house the next evening, Margaret immediately started to express her fear of death and what might follow. Would it be painful? What’s on the other side? Every time she had tried to talk to her family about these things, they’d wanted to change the subject. Personally, I found her very refreshing in her honesty and need for answers.

  At the end of our conversation I put my hands on Margaret’s head to give her a craniosacral treatment. Within a short time her body started to relax, and she was able to let go of her worries. A beautiful experience of the long tide permeated through her body and a feeling of deep calmness entered the room. Two days later, I received a telephone call from Margaret’s daughter to tell me that Margaret had died in her sleep that same night. When I look back, I consider that craniosacral treatment as one of the most profound I have ever experienced.

  Solution in the problem

  In any diseased state there is potential for transformation. This potential is intrinsically and holographically contained within the disease itself. As acupuncturist Dianne Connelly says, “Our struggle and our strength emerge from the same source, and [if] … we were to follow either to the ends of being we would find ourselves at home.”25 The same intelligent process that centers the disease can also be used in its cure. All that is required is a reorganization of the forces that underlie it.

  As a parallel, this same principle is found in certain Buddhist meditation practices. In these meditations there is no attempt to get rid of negative tendencies, but to work with them in a gradual process of realization and transformation. By accessing the true nature of our problems they then become transformed into their fundamental, underlying qualities. For instance, hatred is seen as an unenlightened form of love. By realizing the essential love contained within the hatred, it is transformed. Hugh Milne points out, “The chief characteristic of
monsters in myths is that once they are faced, they wilt away, or even become allies (the forbidding wolf becomes the protective watchdog).”26 Thus allegorical frogs can be transformed into princes, Sleeping Beauty into wakefulness and Clark Kent into Superman!

  Personal responsibility

  Whatever therapeutic approaches we use, health cannot be imposed from the outside. Ultimately, there is no wonder drug or wonder cure other than the intrinsic forces of nature. Healing is thus the prerogative of each individual. Therapies themselves cannot cure, but they can trigger and support a process of inner change. I firmly believe that I have never cured anybody in my life (apart from perhaps myself). My work as a therapist is simply to help create the conditions for the inherent potency of the patient to get to work; the rest is up to nature.

  Each of us should feel encouraged to take responsibility for our own health. However, from an early age we are taught that our bodies are like specialized pieces of machinery that we are not qualified to deal with.27 In many ways we have become disempowered, giving all our responsibility to the doctor or therapist to make us better. Consequently we may have forgotten how to listen to our bodies and follow its intrinsic wisdom. The process of taking responsibility may involve some re-education, in its literal sense, for both patients and practitioners. After all, the word education is derived from the Latin educare, which means to lead out or to encourage that which is already inside.

  Illustrating the need for personal responsibility in an old Tibetan Buddhist wisdom tale, a woman asked her spiritual teacher, “If these grand old living Buddha-teachers are as perfectly enlightened, awakened, omniscient, skilful, powerful, and compassionate as we think they are, why don’t they just wake us up from the sleep of delusion?”

  “Who’s asleep?” the master replied.28

  Dealing with origins

  While symptomatic relief is naturally a valuable goal of treatment, this should never be the sole focus. Any treatment that does not acknowledge the origins of health and disease risks the danger of suppressing symptoms, or of merely swapping one problem for another. This is akin to moving furniture around in a room. Things seem to have changed, but the basic living space hasn’t—you’re still living in the same room. Rearranging the furniture will have little impact on the fundamental issues that underlie ill-health. However, according to the old adage, “You pays your money and you takes your choice!”

  Treatment from the inside

  Dr. Sutherland realized that the intrinsic potency within the patient’s own body can be utilized for treatment, rather than having to apply any external forces.29 In fact, external forces are frequently experienced as just another form of stress that the body has to also deal with. Essentially, the craniosacral practitioner assists the body to make its own adjustments by encouraging a reorganization of its intrinsic healing forces. According to Franklyn Sills, “This is an art of intelligent and intuitive listening.”30 The therapist listens to the body’s subtle physiological motions and to its natural priorities for re-organization. Using the hands to gently guide and support the expression of health, the therapist can facilitate the body’s self-healing. The success of treatment is marked by a fuller re-emergence of the Breath of Life in areas of disorder. In Chapter 7 we will look at some particular skills that are used to achieve this.

  A living process

  Everyone has an individual pattern of health, and so listening to the intelligence of the body requires individual attention. This also needs to be an open, fluid and dynamic process, because it works with the way in which the Breath of Life unfolds as a living expression. This is not a technique but a skill that involves the constant evaluation of primary respiration with each patient and with each new moment in order to follow how it wants to work. Just when you might think you understand the wisdom in the body, it can teach you more. Things are always changing, nothing stays the same—this is a feature of the rhythmic and dynamic nature of life.

  5

  PATTERNS OF EXPERIENCE

  In order to cure the human body, it is necessary

  to have a knowledge of the whole of things.

  HIPPOCRATES

  FULCRA IN HEALTH AND DISEASE

  Since the goal of every patient is to return to normal, it is important that the physician knows what is health functioning from within the patient seeking his service.1

  DR. ROLLIN BECKER

  In this chapter we will look at the specific ways in which motion is organized, and what happens when we encounter stresses that impact on the functioning of the primary respiratory system. An emphasis will be placed on the underlying forces that determine how primary respiration is expressed. Some of the effects of inertia will also be considered.

  Natural fulcra

  Any kind of motion is organized around a fulcrum, the still point around which things move. Levers get their power to produce motion from their fulcrum points. In the body, primary respiration occurs around specific fulcra which act as leverage points for the rhythmic movements expressed by different tissues. The potency that provides the power for primary respiration is found at these fulcrum points, so they are always significant places for the functioning of the body.2

  Each part of the body has a natural fulcrum of motion. These are the places around which primary respiration is expressed in optimum health. If there are no modifying or influencing forces present, primary respiration is expressed with balance and symmetry around these natural fulcra. Therefore, the practitioner needs to be familiar with these natural patterns of motion in order to discern normal from abnormal functioning.

  Embryology and the midline

  The midline of the body has great significance for the establishment of our growth, development and maintenance of health. According to Dr. Mae Wan Ho, all organisms are organized within “quantum fields of light” along an orienting midline.3 Correspondingly, the spiral motions and subtle radiances of the long tide become organized around the body’s midline. In fact, the midline acts as the natural fulcrum around which all aspects of primary respiratory motion are expressed. From the subtle permeations of the long tide to the specific patterns of craniosacral motion, the midline acts as an important orientating factor.

  The organization of life and motion around the midline can be seen in operation as far back as the time of our early embryological development. About fifteen days after conception a line of cells called the notochord is formed along the midline of the developing embryo. The notochord grows upwards from the tail end to the cranial end of the embryo. This pattern of growth along the midline is thought to be determined by ordering forces expressed within the fluids of the rapidly dividing cells.4

  This midline along which the notochord forms is called the primal midline.5 The primal midline provides orientation and direction for cellular development. Once formed, all the body systems grow and develop in relationship to it. Without this midline axis, there would be no sense of back and front, top and bottom, or left and right.6

  At an early stage, the primal midline and notochord provide the axis of development for the central nervous system and vertebral column (see Figure 3.3). Once the growth of these tissues has been established, the notochord disintegrates and disappears as a defined physical structure, although remnants remain as the nucleus pulposus within spinal intervertebral disks.7 Nevertheless, as more and more cells divide and other body systems are formed, the primal midline continues as the cardinal axis of embryological development.

  The primal midline, in fact, remains as the main energetic and structural organizing axis throughout our lives. The different tidal unfoldments of the Breath of Life are generated as radiances that are continually expressed along this midline (see Figure 5.1). It is the forces carried within these rhythmic motions that primarily organize our form and function. This axis can be palpated as a subtle airy arising force moving through the bodies and disks at the front aspect of each spinal vertebrae. Franklyn Sills observes, “In yoga theory it is the sushumna of the caduceu
s … It is the reference beam of the hologram.”8

  Natural balance

  As our body systems develop, all the different organs and tissues grow according to a remarkably ordered design along particular pathways. The specific pattern of how these tissues are embryologically formed also determines the natural fulcra of their primary respiration. As an example, the central nervous system grows around a midline point located at the front wall of the third ventricle of the brain (see Chapter 3). This fulcrum remains as the point around which the central nervous system naturally expresses its primary inhalation and exhalation throughout life.

  Figure 5.1: The three tides generated as radiances around the primal midline (illustration credit 5.1)

  The cranial bones have their natural fulcrum at the joint between the sphenoid bone and occiput, the spheno-basilar junction (see Figure 3.16). This place is at the heart of the development of the cartilaginous floor of the cranium. The natural fulcrum of the reciprocal tension membrane system (Sutherland’s fulcrum) is located along the midline at the front part of the straight sinus (see Figure 3.11). This is the place where forces converge to form the dural membranes during their embryological development.

  In an ideal state the body is able to express its primary respiration around these natural fulcra. These natural fulcra are also free to move back and forth slightly (i.e., automatically shift) with the cycles of primary respiration. When this occurs, it indicates that there is no resistance or inertia held in the tissues and the ordering principle of the Breath of Life can be optimally distributed. However, stressful experiences can shift this balance and so affect the way our inherent health is able to manifest. In this case, instead of primary respiration being organized around its natural automatically shifting fulcra, other superimposed patterns develop.