What I Wish I’d Known About My Knees – The New York Times
July 4, 2017Shift into Healing Mode
July 6, 2017The Missing Factor
Why do some patients get well sooner and are completely out of pain more easily that others?
What is the missing piece?
Some might say it’s Nutrition, others exercise, and still others account for mental and emotional attitude.
I think it’s something more basic: it is the resiliency of the Autonomic Nervous System—the ability for our bodies to return to an optimum level of health and well-being. This involuntary system is not under conscious control, yet it controls all the vital functions of the body including breathing, heart rate, digestion, sleep, sex hormones, etc.
When it is out of balance, we can’t slow down and fall asleep when it’s time to go to bed. Or conversely, we wake up sluggish when we should be feeling raring to go. This inner thermostat is what self-regulates us. It allows our organs and glands to function optimally, and allows for healing to occur following an injury or trauma.
Put a brake on this system and something inside us will become ‘stuck’ — the resiliency of the Nervous System will be gone. Healing will not go forward or do so in a haphazard, disorganized way. Instead of bouncing back right away, it may take much longer (if ever) to come back to normal.
Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais defined “Health as the degree of shock a system could absorb and recover it’s integrity.”
What gets our Nervous system un-stuck is returning this Involuntary Mechanism to function again, so that we don’t have to think about our vital functioning.
Old time Osteopaths referred to this involuntary mechanism as “Primary Respiration.” It’s what “breathes” the body and all the Systems of the body work off of it, i.e. the Immune, Endocrine, Musculoskeletal, Digestive, Respiratory, Urogenital Systems, etc. By bringing this mechanism back into play, healing can occur wherever necessary.
Sometimes the body is so overwhelmed by an outside stressor such as an immune challenge, chemical or metal toxicity, a food allergy or a scar from a previous injury or surgery; that such a stressor needs to be handled first before innate healing can return.
This allows the body’s own innate healing mechanism, or Primary Respiration, to begin once again to start working, allowing for healing to occur.