Thursday: April 27: How we heal

WHAT HEALS US?
My step daughter is into some back issues, and doesn’t particularly want to take advantage of the miracles that Feldenkrais® can provide. So be it. This is good for the part of me that thinks that everyone should be as excited as I am about this amazing system. Other people are what they are.

But it got me to thinking about what are her alternatives, which got me to thinking about a core issue: how do we go about healing? Or, asked another way: what is gong to heal us.

Time might heal, in the sense that if we leave something alone, the body will have the wisdom to get better.

Doctors might heal with various drugs that either kill off various pesky intruders, or create conditions for the body, once again, to heal itself. Trouble with most of these drugs, is that they stress the body also, and provide one more foreign agent against which the body needs to defend itself.

Physical therapist and Pilates folks might heal, by giving ways to get stronger, which is to say, exercise might heal.

And then there is this illusive core to ourselves, awareness. Awareness is so subtle , just knowing how we are sitting right now, how we are breathing right now, how we are walking as we walk. How can that possibly heal?

I’d say, how can it not heal? If we can feel exactly what is going on, we can create slight shifts that show us easier and more pleasant pathways and patterns of movement. We can treat ourselves as a living set of amazing possibilities, rather than some sort of machine that needs to be fixed. The healing then becomes almost a game: let’s try this and see what happens. Let’s try this and see if I can make things a little worse. Let’s try this and that and see how the results alternate. Awareness leads to learning and that is the way of all real healing.