New Wine in Old Skins: Poor Idea, Plus an Amazing Book

NEW WINE IN OLD BOTTLES




How to be kind to yourself after a “big shift”

Sometimes Life throws us what could be called a “big shift.” In the Bible Jesus talks about this “big shift” as the creation of ourselves as a new person, as New Wine. And He says, Why put the New Wine in Old Bottles, it will just go to waste that way. Put the New Wine in New Bottles.

The quote from my version of the New Testament, a highly recommended, The Restored New Testament: A New Translation with Commentary, Including the Gnostic Gospels Thomas, Mary, and Judas by Willis Barnstone, goes like this:

“No one pours new wine in old skins,
Since the wine splits the skins,
And both wine and skins are lost.
No, put the new wine in new skins.”

This is hugely applicable today, in the era of so many hip, shoulder, knee replacements. This is the New Wine. Because without a New Bottle, we really are not getting any where near all the benefits and improvements we could.

We had the shoulder or hip or knee surgery because we weren’t using ourselves in an ease-ful and pleasurable and efficiently masterful way. Basically, we were using our body as a neglected step-child, not really paying attention to our dis-ease and pain until they became intolerable. And truth be told, for people who don’t know about, or know and haven’t tried yet the two methods recommended here, there is often little effective that can be done.

Come to think of it, a chiropractic “adjustment” could be another way to set us up as New Wine.

And after our chiropractic help, we still haven’t addressed the underlying need to organize and sense and move in easy and efficient and pleasurable ways.

So here’s where the Feldenkrais Method, or the Anat Baniel Method come are crucial.

They are the most powerful, and most gentle ways on this planet to create inside of ourselves a new organization, a New Bottle for the New Wine of post operation, or post chiropractic. (Post alcohol, and post dis-ease, too, and during cancer and depression, and that’s a longer story, but thing of this: if we improve ease and comfort and breathing and pleasure in life, how much will that help our Whole Life.)

Almost invariably, people who have had one knee or hip replacement, need the next, and it is almost always from not having created a new organization from the one that created the stress and dis-ease and harm that necessitated the first operation.

Does that mean after two knee operations, or the second hip operation you should do FM or ABM? Only if you want to have a low level of ease, comfort, awareness and functioning for the rest of your life.

Don't worry, also from the Bible, but that doesn't mean "do nothing," it means: put your energy into love and improvement and into making the world a better place, and stop fretting. See, if you'd please, yesterday's posting: Don't Worry, Be Happy

Good.