Winning Hands Massage

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Language, Beliefs, and Mind-Sets

Psychic Connections and Connective Tissue

Since I seem to have kind of kicked the door open a bit yesterday it seems only fair that I elaborate on what I know, what I suspect and what I believe about all of this.

Let's start with a basic definition or two.

My American Heritage Dictionary defines "psychic" as "1. Of or pertaining to the human mind or psyche. 2. Of or pertaining to extraordinary, especially extrasensory and nonphysical, mental processes, such as extrasensory perception..."

My Thorndike Barnhart Dictionary says "1. Of the soul or mind; mental. 2. Outside the known laws of physics, supernatural."

So, if "psychic" refers to extra senses - what are the regular senses? There are five: Touch, Smell, Sight, Hearing and Taste. That's fine. We feel, see, hear, etc ... but HOW does the body register these senses to allow our "mind" to process the information?

It does it through a series of various electromagnetic and chemical reactions. This is not Woo-Woo - this is hard science.

Combining the above, we see that "psychic" then simply means the ability to receive or process "information" through something other than one of the standard five "senses."

The next thing that needs to be clearly understood is that the physical "body" is more than just flesh, blood and bone. The body also has a bioelectromagnetic component. Again, this is not Woo-Woo - it is hard science. If anyone wants to dispute this, just stop and think for a minute about some of the basic medical tests, such as electrocardiograms, electroencephalograms and magnetic resonance imaging. EKGs and EEGs measure the electrical fields of the heart and brain. According to my Mayo Clinic Family Health Book, MRI's are "based on magnetic properties in the interior (nucleus) of all atoms, including those in living tissue. When radio waves are directed to a specific part of your body, they cause the nuclei of atoms there to give off energy. This energy is detected, and a computer translates the EMERGING PATTERN OF MAGNETIC ENERGY into an image that your radiologist can interpret." (emphasis added) Just as a point of general info for the non-science minded on the list, you can not have either electricity or magnetism by itself - you always have both since one creates the other. Once again, this is hard science.

The body also has "rhythms." Everyone is familiar with the rhythms given off by the blood pulse and respiration. There are others, but before I get into them, a bit of additional information about the blood pulse. When you go to a Western trained doctor and get your blood pressure checked, they look at one "pulse" to measure your blood pressure, heart rate and any signs of irregular rhythms. In traditional Eastern medicine, there isn't just one pulse - there are twelve - six on each wrist, three superficial and three deep. They not only measure the rates but also the qualities of the various pulses. I won't go into a deeper discussion of Eastern Pulse Diagnostics here other than to say that Chinese and Ayuervedic practitioners can tell a whole lot more from pulse diagnostics than is even dreamed possible by Western Allopathic doctors.

OK - other rhythms. One is the lymphatic system. Lymph moves through the body in a series of waves. One of the reasons I push Lymphatic Drainage Therapy as developed and taught by Bruno Chikly through the Upledger Institute (as opposed to other manual lymphatic drainage methods) is that Chikly not only teaches that the system produces waves, he teaches how to feel it. The others don't. Another rhythm is the Craniosacral Rhythm produced by the movement of the cerebral spinal fluid through the spinal column between the cranium and the sacrum. This, too, can be felt.

Now I am going to go totally Eastern and talk about Prana, Ki and Chi. The first is Ayuervedic (Indian). The second is Japanese and the third is Chinese. Three different "traditions" and names but all referring to the same thing. All of them refer to it as the "life force" but they simply mean the "energetic" component of the body. It is the basis for acupuncture, acupressure, shiatsu, polarity, etc. etc. It is the energy that flows through the meridians (Japan/China) and chakras (India).

This whole concept is probably the single biggest stumbling block preventing integration of Western and Eastern medicine. Historically, western medical belief was that anything to do with acupuncture, etc, was nothing more than either superstition or the placebo effect. As the old Folk song goes, “the times, they are achanging.” Part of the problem in the past was the lack of scientific instruments sensitive enough to actually measure some of this. That is no longer true. Equipment does exist today and it is being used, including such things as the Squid Magnetometer (Superconducting Quantum Interference Device). Per “Energy Medicine – The Scientific Basis” by James Oschman, “SQUIDS and arrays of SQUIDS are now being used in medical research laboratories around the world to map the biomagnetic fields produced by physiological processes inside the human body. A global network of SQUIDS is also being used to monitor moment-to-moment fluctuations in the geomagnetic field of the earth.”

The point here is that the equipment is out there, it is being used, and “interesting things” are being measured. For those of us who “do the work,” no scientific validation is necessary. Our validation comes through what we feel with our hands and the results we see when we work on someone. For those with totally closed minds (and unfortunately they are legion), no amount of scientific validation seems to be possible.

Be that as it may, there has been some very fascinating research done over the last few years. Again quoting Oschman “One of the academic questions created by the discovery of the heart’s magnetic field is the location of the boundary between the organism and the environment. In the past, we could define an individual as that which lies within the skin; but it is a fact of physics that energy fields are unbounded. The biomagnetic field of the heart extends indefinitely into space. While its strength diminishes with distance, there is no point at which we can say that the field ends.” In this respect, additional research has been done where two individuals in a room have had their heart fields monitored. Within a matter of minutes, their heart rates will “synchronize.” For you musicians out there, it is similar to two or more metronomes in a room synchronizing. Biologically, it is called “entrainment,” about which, much more later.

SQUIDS have also been used to measure the electromagnetic fields emanating from the hands of energetic body-workers. Again from Oschman “The therapeutic touch signal pulsed at a variable frequency, ranging from 0.3 to 30.0 Hz, with most of the activity in the range of 7-8 Hz. In other words, the signal emitted by the practitioner is not steady or constant, it ‘sweeps’ or ‘scans’ through a range of frequencies. … The pulsations are interesting in relation to the experiences of energy practitioners, who often report a sensation of vibration or tingling during the period when the technique seems to be particularly effective.”

At any rate, call it what you will, the energy that flows through the meridians and charkas can also be sensed or felt by practitioners. More importantly, this is something that everyone can be taught to feel. There are a number of you on the board who have experimented around with some of my acupressure and polarity suggestions and can readily attest to this.

So far, I have basically been talking about hard, Western based science as general background. Some of it might be considered “cutting edge” but it is still with a scientific bent. So where does the “psychic” aspect come in and how might it relate to connective tissue?

Speaking as a practitioner, I discussed or referred to five body rhythms: pulse, lymph, respiration, cranial and chi. There are others but these are the ones I deal/work with. My ability to physically feel or sense these rhythms is largely just a matter of training and practice – up to a point. As long as I have my hands “on-body” I consider it to be just a heightened extension of my physical sense of touch, developed by training and practice. There are, however, times when my hands just go someplace, seemingly on their own. This is a product of intuition. From the very beginning of my training, we were taught to trust our intuition, to trust our hands, to “listen” to the body we are working on. This starts to bring in an awareness beyond the standard five senses. In addition, there are times when I will work “off-body” – where I am not even touching the person. The five rhythms? I can not only sense every one of them off-body, I can influence them off-body. And I am by no means unique in this regard. Anyone trained beyond the beginning levels of cranialsacral, myofascial release, lymphatic drainage, or pure energy modalities can do the same.

How does all of this relate to connective tissue? Like I said yesterday when I kicked over the can of worms, fascia IS the connective tissue of the body. It can be almost watery and transparent like the covering over the eyes to thick, hard and gristly like the fascial tendons of the lower back, and every degree in between. But whatever the consistency, it is one continuous sheet throughout the entire body. It literally wraps every muscle, organ, bone, vessel and cell. It is not your skeleton that allows you to stand upright – it is your fascial structure. If the meridians and charkas in fact (a) do exist and (b) are embedded in the fascia, then the fascia (the connective tissue) becomes the carrier for the body’s energetic information system. Also as I mentioned yesterday, there is a growing scientific based belief that the “mind” (whatever the mind actually is) is not in fact located in the brain after all. There has been some recent hard science research that seems to bear this out. The belief/position/whatever held by many energetic body-workers is that the mind is in fact a function of the connective tissue. Everything I have read and been taught says that both (a) and (b) are true – and everything I have experienced with my hands and mind the last few months not only supports that belief to my personal satisfaction, it makes me also personally lean very heavily toward a mind-fascia connection.

I mentioned “entrainment” earlier. For those of you experienced in receiving massage or bodywork, you may have noticed a common starting practice. The practitioner will begin by gently placing their hands under the base of the skull or back of the neck if the client is face up or one hand at the sacrum and the other at the base of the skull if the client is face down, or something similar. When we are first learning, we are taught to do something like this to get our client “used to our touch.” The reality is far deeper. The reality is that the practitioner is “entraining” or synchronizing their bioenergetic field with the client’s in the same way that metronomes synchronize. This entraining of fields is absolutely essential to get “healing” results.

On the issue of psychic subjects in general, I have lost count over the last two years of the number of instructors who have commented about the enormous increase they are seeing in their practices the last couple of years in particular of “expanding consciousness” or “awareness” in their clients. I also mentioned earlier about an array of SQUIDS that are being used to monitor the earth’s geomagnetic field. For those of you who might have missed it in the news, the earth’s magnetic field has been dropping dramatically for at least the last 100 years. Geologically, the earth’s magnetic polarity field reverses periodically. According to the geologic record, we are past due. Once again, this is hard science. During this same period of time, we have been bombarded with a plethora of man-made fields – microwave, radio, television, computers, etc. There is growing suspicion that these two things (decreasing earth field and increasing man-made wave pollution) are influencing the human fields in as yet unknown ways. I have been involved in more than one classroom discussion about the implications.

I have also been absolutely amazed by the general acceptance of the “reality” of all this by a very high percentage of the body-workers that I run into in various classes. Again, I have personally seen and experienced far too much the last two years to keep on denying the reality. I started as a total skeptic and have been dragged, kicking and screaming all the way, down the path to the point of acceptance that I am at today. And when I say screaming, I mean that in a very literal sense.

I have walked a very fine line with the Board/List since I became actively involved on it. As any of you who have followed my posts can tell, I very passionately believe in the value and validity of some of the alternative, energetic modalities. They are real and they work. The line I have walked was how to present this information without losing everybody along the way from people throwing up their Woo-Woo Blinders. That was the reason I wrote my “Testamonical” post a couple of months ago. I still stand behind that post, but will here and now acknowledge that I left a few things out. What I left out was that there definitely is a psychic, as in extrasensory, element involved with a lot of this.

That does not, however, mean that it is supernatural in some weird-ass sense. It just means that not all of the mechanisms by which it works are fully understood yet by western-based science. Research is being done and answers are coming. I believe that enormous gains are going to occur in this area over the next 5-10 years.

Since I firmly believe that it is all related in some way, I finally decided (as Cindylouwho – or should I say Cindylouwoowoo? ) put it last night – to come out of the closet myself about it. Given all of the above, do I have any idea why the EDS population has a higher than statistical average of mental weirdoes and freaks? Other than that our psyches are as messed up as our bodies? Haven’t got a clue.

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