Learning To Heal Ourselves

Learning to heal yourself is a long game. Even normal healing of simple wounds involves some training; a toddler falls and grazes her knee, mum or dad applies cleansing water, and special salves to protect from infection, and loving hugs to soothe away her sense that the world has become a dangerous place, all of which means that our body’s natural ability to heal itself can proceed with maximum efficiency. As we grow we learn to take care of these little injuries for ourselves, and all the other natural afflictions of our lives; viruses, food poisoning, burns, sprained ankles, wounded hearts, injured pride – the list is too long to complete here.

Healing processes are going on within us all the time. Our immune system is constantly busy; cleaning up our cells, identifying toxic substances and neutralising or expelling them where possible, continuously tackling the task of reinstating and maintaining our wellbeing, whether we support our own health with good sleep, good food, and good relationships, or drain ourselves, with late nights, poor nutrition, suppressed emotions etc. etc. 

As we mature we learn how to heal ourselves from these self-inflicted injuries too – extra water after too much alcohol; an early night after a late one; a day of light eating after a night of indulgence. We learn to moderate our drinking and our sugar intake. As we get older we naturally notice a shift in our ability to recover from these sorts of insults to our health and we strive to achieve a balance between self-indulgence and good sense, with varying success. We do not usually have much trouble accepting responsibility for managing ourselves in this way; most of us recognise that we have a duty of self-care, and are able to postpone some of our gratifications accordingly.

As we age we begin to experience changes in our health that have developed slowly over time. We are encouraged to hand over responsibility for our recovery from these stealthier conditions to our medical professionals, and the enormous pharmacological industry that has built up around them. Life-threatening conditions such as cancer involve complex interventions with toxic components, which means that a cancer survivor will also need to heal from the treatment they have undergone, once the immediate threat to life has receded. Most cancer patients are prepared to take those odds – certainly the first time round… 

Much of what changes within us as we age has become medicable; we are prescribed a drug designed to counter some specific internal imbalance, however each drug comes with its own imbalance-triggering properties – popularly referred to as ‘side effects’ – and over time many people find themselves on a selection of medications, without anyone knowing for sure how a particular individual’s system is handling the cocktail of substances they are ingesting every day.

Many doctors are in revolt – particularly in America where the pressure to medicate even very young children for an escalating number of “conditions” and “syndromes” is truly shocking – but anyone who attempts to challenge the narrative of ‘illness = medication’ comes under heavy fire from both well-meaning sceptics and the many vested interests – often referred to as “Big Pharma” – who are by no means so well-intentioned. If you think I am exaggerating you might like to look into the relationship between medical research, media manipulation, and the might of the sugar production industries, or the history of nicotine marketing.

As Gabor Maté put it early in 2019, healing the self has become a subversive act. He is one of the most vocal in the campaign to open the eyes of the medical profession to the significance of stress as the major underlying factor in a wide range of conditions.

Here’s a quote from the article I mentioned:

“A study done two years ago showed the more episodes of racism an African American woman experiences, the greater her risk for asthma. You can’t explain that only in individual biological terms

…And we’ve known for a long time that the more stressed parents are, the more likely their children are to have asthma. Interestingly, the common treatment for asthma is to give people stress hormones, to open up the airways and reduce inflammation in the lungs. Stress hormones happen to be the most common prescription across all medicine.

Whether you have an inflammation of your nervous system, or connective tissue, or skin, or lungs, or joints, or intestines, you are prescribed cortisol, which is [the] stress hormone. And yet we never ask ourselves in medicine, “Gee, we give you stress hormones for everything. Is it possible that stress may have something to do with this illness?”

Healing As A Subversive Act – Gabor Maté, 2019

Obviously I have a personal angle, because in my Feldenkrais practice I am rather boldly offering to teach processes that I have found to be healing for myself. Most people naturally associate chronic ill health with old age, however, for a large and growing number of us, health issues begin much earlier in life.

We are the allergy-sufferers, the food sensitivity types, the chronic infection / chronic pain / chronic anxiety / chronic fatigue people. Some of us injure ourselves easily and heal slowly; some of us experience the abrupt onset of random pains in our joints or muscles for no apparent reason; some of us have migraines; some of us had “growing pains” in our early years, or regular bouts of tonsillitis, or stomach upsets, or just cold, after cold, after cold. Some of us had asthma very early, some of us developed it in adulthood.

The majority of those of us who experience chronic symptoms have problems that can be termed “auto-immune”, i.e. the self is under attack from the self, and very few of us experience effective long-term relief from drugs alone, although mostly that is all we are offered by our doctors. For this reason we are often also the medically ‘adventurous’, ready to try new behaviours and new diets, and to explore the many alternative or complementary approaches available, because we know that the medications we are on will not be good for our health in the long term.

The problem with these medications is easy to explain. How do you stop your immune system from attacking you? Easy, switch your immune system off! Please understand me, I am not against taking the right medication at the right time. Steroids are hugely valuable, steroids save lives – they have certainly saved mine, probably more than once – but the long term effects of switching off the system that usually takes care of all those little, regular, ongoing healing processes are multiple, including high blood pressure, high blood sugar, and thinning bones, to mention just a few. There’s a full description of how cortico-steroids work and their effects on our health long term in this article on the Mayo Clinic website.

So people with my sort of health are the people who begin learning to heal themselves earlier in life that most. And, just to be clear, we have usually looked up ‘hypochondria’ and realised that it does not in any way explain what we are dealing with. 

“Hypochondriasis or hypochondria is a condition in which a person is excessively and unduly worried about having a serious illness. An old concept, its meaning has repeatedly changed due to redefinitions in its source metaphors.”

…from Wikipedia

We have usually tried a few new ways of eating and discovered how useful for boosting health a change of diet can be.

We are the people who drink plenty of water.

We may take a few supplements – we have often had very positive experiences with Vitamin D, or Magnesium in liquid form, or B12 injections.

We cut down our alcohol intake in our twenties – much sooner that our peers.

We gave up smoking – some of us more than once!

Many of us feel better when we don’t eat gluten.

We do our best to get enough sleep, and, when we feel up to it, enough exercise (although many of us cannot cope with the exercise regimes that are most often recommended, and find ourselves more drawn to gentle, flowing movement – to dance, Tai Chi, the milder forms of Yoga, and Feldenkrais, my own particular path towards Ikigai).

Read the article here.

…and slowly we recognise that none of that is quite enough. We are not a ‘body’ alone, a biological machine that just needs the right kind of maintenance. We are a complex system, with emergent properties, including really mysterious ones such as consciousness, and the ability to create something brand new entirely within our own imagination, astonishing capabilities that are usually referred to simply as ‘mind’.

While the recognition of our inherent “oneness” is not new or controversial for any but the most committed Cartesian Dualists, the language that dominates our scientific culture has serious limitations when it comes to discussing this complex self. We can only express our single indivisible nature with awkward combinations such as ‘body-mind’ – or ‘mind-body-spirit’ for the bravest souls, those most oblivious to scorn. Even with years of medical training and experience, using these terms can get you labelled a ‘quack’ in the blink of an eye. Much of the knee-jerk dismissiveness that abounded in any public discussion of alternative health a few years back only began to make sense to me once I realised that for many commentators the term ‘holistic’ was inextricably conflated with ‘pseudoscience’. I am pleased to say that looking up holistic medicine on Google today is a much more encouraging experience.

We heal ourselves all the time, even from very severe conditions, with or without medical intervention. There’s a lot of evidence out there, the vast majority of it anecdotal and totally impossible to prove. Many of us have personal experience of an unusual or unexpected “spontaneous remission” whether our own, or someone else’s, but the most regularly researched experiences of healing through a change in thinking are almost always ascribed to the ever-present and highly consistent Placebo Effect. This is an enormous subject so I won’t attempt to cover it in one post. The article attached to the link is pretty comprehensive, but if you don’t have time to read it you might like to know that placebo responses are not simply “all in the mind” and have been demonstrated even with interventions as sophisticated as knee surgery.

I will simply say this, that there is clearly a great deal of benefit to be had in believing that you are going to get well. It therefore makes sense to look for ways to encourage your positive expectation of healing, and if you are wary of generating false hope you might like to do more research into both the Placebo and the Nocebo effect, and to consider how much evidence there is for avoiding the negative effects on our health of false despair.

I am now teaching a regular class on “sensory self-awareness for self-healing” online so you can build an archive of recordings to practise with between lessons. this process live online as well as in my classes. All my online course and class details are on this page.

Your Potent Inner Voice

Self-Hypnosis for Self-Healing

Wednesday evenings  7 – 8.30 pm GMT 

Online + Recording
£15* (suggested fee or donation)

These extended evening classes focus on my Feldenkrais-based self-healing strategies, and the recordings are intended to make it very easy for you to develop these skills for yourself. I am exploring the evening format with the intention of supporting better sleep as well as pain relief and self-calming.

One seldom-discussed aspect of the potency of the voice is the influential presence of an internal voice, constantly commentating on our lives. The voice inside our own heads can be an ally or an enemy; for a while now I have been discovering how to train my inner voice to be a better ally in my on-going project of self-healing. Here is an introduction to the process, from an article on my website:

“Self-Hypnosis – also known as Autogenic Training – has been around for a long time. I first came across it back in the Eighties, in a book called Superlearning. This was at right at the beginning of my interest in meditation, and practising the autogenic sequences from the book were the closest I came to achieving the deeper states of inner calm that are reportedly the most effective brain wave frequencies for healing chronic conditions.

Thus, when a bout of chronic fatigue left me with fibromyalgic pain that did not easily respond to the mindful movements that had helped me free myself of sciatica in the past, my investigations brought me full circle, and this time I made a connection I had somehow failed to make before. I remembered that Moshe Feldenkrais was also interested in self-hypnosis at a similar age, except that – being the over-achiever he was – he translated a significant book on the subject into Hebrew, and boldly added his own thoughts in a 26 page commentary.

The book was The Practice Of Autosuggestion by the Method of Émile Coué (1929), and Moshe’s original contribution has recently been published as Thinking and Doing, A monograph by Moshe Feldenkrais. He retained his enthusiasm for these concepts throughout his life, attempting to republish his translation in 1977, and using the techniques he still valued to speed his recovery after his stroke.

Article continues here…

Do use my contact form if you would like more information.

I am going to leave the subject for now with “How Stress Is Damaging You”. This is one of the many talks Gabor Maté has posted on YouTube that I cannot recommend highly enough.

None of what Gabor has to say surprises me, but I love how clearly he explains the connections between our attitudes to ourselves in relation to those around us, and our health – hopefully in a way that even the most self-sacrificing among us may be able to hear…

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