Aquapoetics

The role of water in modern holistic medicine: Norman Shealy

The video below is presented by MD Norman Shealy (June 2009) whose association with alternative medicine, alternative health care, holistic medicine, energy medicine and medical intuition in the US might be said to be legendary. 

Although Norman is now retired from clinical practice, his research and teaching is ongoing.  You can read more about him and his pioneering involvement in many innovative organizations, such as the American Holistic Medical Association on his website here.

My own interests introduced me to Holos University and to the American Board of Scientific and Medical Intuition (both inspired by Dr Shealy).  (An interesting side discovery has been that Dr Shealy and Holos are based in Missouri where I currently reside.)

I'm attracted especially by a 'balanced approach of self-development, scholarly exploration and research, and service that substantiate and integrate all three aspects of the body/mind/spirit healing triad' (Holos Mission statement). 

I continue to take this approach in my own study of aquatic bodywork.

Ace of Water: Osho Zen Tarot Valentine

I love the water and I love the practice of aquatic bodywork.  So, I'm inspired that this card turned up in an online spread using my favorite Osho Zen Tarot deck today.  It is from the suit of Water (also Cups and Hearts in other decks).  You can experience this deck for yourself by going here.

I like to also look up drawn cards that especially call to me in other decks, like the Inner Child cards (by astrologer Isha Lerner).  This one speaks to my heart, which dreams of my own pool and practice again.  For the Ace of Hearts the commentary says:

This card affirms that a new opportunity in the realm of love is rising out of the depths of the past, symbolized by the ocean. This new love may be a person, an idea, the realization of a dream, or a new creative endeavor.

How about you?

Description of the card shown above from the guide accompanying the set ...

Osho Zen Tarot
58. Going With The Flow
Ace of Water

When I say "become water" I mean become a flow; don't remain stagnant. Move, and move like water. Lao Tzu says: The way of the Tao is a watercourse way. It moves like water. What is the movement of water? or of a river? The movement has a few beautiful things about it. One, it always moves towards the depth, it always searches for the lowest ground. It is non-ambitious; it never hankers to be the first, it wants to be the last. Remember, Jesus says: Those who are the last here will be the first in my kingdom of God. He is talking about the watercourse way of Tao--not mentioning it, but talking about it. Be the last, be non-ambitious. Ambition means going uphill. Water goes down, it searches for the lowest ground, it wants to be a nonentity. It does not want to declare itself unique, exceptional, extraordinary. It has no ego idea.

Osho Take it Easy, Volume 1 Chapter 14
Commentary:

The figure in this card is completely relaxed and at ease in the water, letting it take him where it will. He has mastered the art of being passive and receptive without being dull or sleepy. He is just available to the currents of life, with never a thought of saying "I don't like that," or "I prefer to go the other way." Every moment in life we have a choice whether to enter life's waters and float, or to try to swim upstream. When this card appears in a reading it is an indication that you are able to float now, trusting that life will support you in your relaxation and take you exactly where it wants you to go. Allow this feeling of trust and relaxation to grow more and more; everything is happening exactly as it should.

Relationships that Heal: book review

You know how it is when you try to back out of a relationship - it keeps coming at you until you make peace with it.  Diane Tegtmeier

Relationships that Heal: Skillful Practice within Nature's Web. Natural Ethics for Today's Health Practitioner. Diane Tegtmeier, October 2009.  See below for how to buy.

If I were the kind of person who underlined 'aha' moments in books, my copy of this one would be thoroughly marked up.  For Diane is taking me on a rewarding hike through a familiar and challenging terrain.  Every step - every word - has the weight of experience behind it.

Although she has made this book very accessible to someone new to what she inclusively calls the 'helping profession', I think it is likely to speak most to those who have bravely battled their way through some of the slings-and-arrows of a few years in healing practice and in life.

Since bringing all her many skills to the water in the practice of aquatic bodywork is a central passion for Diane, there are numerous references to this particular healing modality.  However, setting it in a wider context and collaboration as she does here, is especially effective.

Inspiration: Oceanic craniosacral arts

Craniosacral therapy works with the fluidic rhythms in the body (specifically the cerebrospinal fluid) and it can be a wonderful skill to apply to aquatic bodywork.  See more on this blog: 'Quotes: Craniosacral therapy in water' and 'An aquatic kriya: the bodywave' (towards the end).

The wonderfully watery extract below is best read aloud or even better read to you (try the 'Listen Now' button).  It comes from an article by Candice Marro which was published in the Cranial Wave Magazine (2003) and can be read in full on The Craniosacral Therapy Education Trust (UK) website. 

Thanks to craniosacral therapist and artist Ray Lacey  for introducing me to this beautiful article and also for his kind permission to share his gently pulsating image 'Blue'.  Ray is inspired by the way in which art informs therapy and vice versa.  To learn more about his work, please visit his website, Craniosacral-Art.

'From the sea of impermanence to the still heart of the ocean

How to give it a try? You are going to use your hands as the servants of your heart. Your hands will be the eyes, ears and medium of your heart; not your confused and emotional heart but the heart of your heart, your Still Heart, your all-knowing and all-encompassing Heart. What is the gateway to this place within yourself?

Find a neutral, a place within you where there is balance, calmness, availability. There is always such a place but not always the same one. Search for that place and settle into it. Let the neutral gradually spread to your whole system. Then open to your friend on this journey, this friend who is going to be both your client and your teacher.

This is it, you have found a sense of stability within yourself and you have established your fulcrum, casting the anchor that will provide a sense of safety on your journey. Now open your perceptual field to the third presence that will be with you both, that is generated by your coming together: the relationship. Then start your exploration.

Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. Leave your fears and uncertainty behind, focus on your breath until you meet or are being met by The Breath, a deeper and slower inhalation and exhalation. The Breath breaths through you - actually it is breathing you. Can you feel it?

Stay with it. You are now invited to follow the cycles of primary or universal respiration. You are invited to trust the Breath of Life. Yes, the Breath that carries Life expressed to you as motion. This primary respiration leads you into the realm of life forces and principles. Let yourself be rocked by the long immutable rhythm of primary respiration. It is your fundamental support, a living presence that has always been there and will never cease.

Can you feel a shift happening? Can you feel your confusion, your noise and your fears now floating into the distance? Can you feel the relationship is orienting you both towards a place of resource, a place where the different layers of function work as a unit and are interdependent? However, this is not yet the place where you are One. But here, at least, you are not fragmented anymore. You are still in contact with tissue memory, symptoms and shapes but something more is there: organising forces.

In this realm you have allies: fluids and the potency within fluids. Yes, you can start to sense potency within the fluids, the ocean. Fluids that pass everywhere, go around any obstacles and patiently try to erode the barriers. And there is the fluid at the core of all fluid: a golden, subtle, potentized fluid that will teach you to be an alchemist. Can you now feel that your hands have become like antennas, more receptive, more empowered and potentized? Do you notice that one part echoes the whole, that the smallest fragment in the system is vital to the whole and plays a key role in maintaining balance?

But beware for these fluids are being moved and crossed by deep forces at work that you now start to feel; deep forces of creation, forces of health and forces of inertia. The fluid may be your ally provided that you learn its language, know how to work with it and know the nature of these forces that move it.' Candice Marro 2003

This wonderful piece of writing also inspired another post on my weblog Diving Deeper: 'Do you have a quest?'.

Review: Bodyway as in Waterway

  

This extract from Mirka Knaster's valuable book on body-oriented practices, Discovering the Body's Wisdom, uses water as its metaphor for the constant change and movement (circulatory and interrelating) that characterizes the life of a human body.  Mirka writes:

There's a lot of name-calling in the field of body practices.  It's not mud-slinging, but a habit of differentiating and labeling.  Some practitioners are engaged in bodywork.  Others consider their approaches therapy.  Still others say they're neither, but rather somatic education, movement awareness, structural integration, or even emotional integration. ...

To get around the divisions in the field, I created the term bodyways.  It broadly incorporates therapy and education as well as relaxation, while still allowing for each separate category of  practice and its distinguishing characteristics.  I chose way (from the Old English wegan, "to move") because it suggests a pathway or process, as in waterway.

Think of the many different waterways through which water moves: creeks, streams, rivulets, rivers, channels, brooks, rills, seas, oceans, bays, sounds, and lakes.  All of the bodyways involve movement, and often the least effortful way can bring about the most ease.  Life is, after all, movement.  We are living bodies, always in process. As 70 percent water, we are in constant flux, just like a stream.  And just like a stream receives water from various sources, so too do we take in new information from a variety of bodyways.

From Discovering the Body's Wisdom: A Comprehensive Guide to More than Fifty Mind-Body Practices that can Relieve Pain, Reduce Stress, and Foster Health, Spiritual Growth, and Inner Peace by Mirka Knaster,   p. xv-xvi (Bantam Books, 1996).

Celebrating water at summer solstice

In the spirit of an extraordinary event Live Water all over the world this summer solstice weekend ...

Please enjoy these posts on my other blogs!

On the Aquatic Social Network:

Water and Creativity:  Solstice celebrations

On Diving Deeper:

The Water that I Carry (poem by Sulis)

On Vision Spa Retreat:

Summer solstice celebrating water worldwide

And, if aquatic therapy is your passion or your business, join me in the AquaticNet social network.

Inspiration: Take me to the water

Though I don't suggest you turn your aquatic bodywork sessions into baptisms, I've just enjoyed this fascinating recently released collection and thought I'd share a quote about the 'peak experience' that is water ...

Whether you have ever actually experienced a baptism or not, whether you are a believer or not, these pictures and the music that accompanies them transmit all the emotional information: the excitement and the serenity, the fellowship and the warmth, the wind and the water.  They are about theatre, pageantry, holiday; inclusion, transformation, enveloping love and transporting joy.  They show a great many people in the midst of one of the peak experiences of their lives.  Even the calmest scenes are electrified by the ecstacy of the actors.  You would have to have  heart of tin not to recognize this as one of the happiest collections of archival photographs ever assembled.

From an Essay by Luc Sante in Take Me To the Water:  Immersion Baptism in Vintage Music and Photography 1890-1950, Dust-to-Digital, Atlanta, Georgia 2009

A friend who is also a field music recordist recently lent me his copy.  The quote really does capture the essence of this wonderful presentation of photography along with a CD containing songs and sermons.  It reminds me that our relationship with water is a deeply emotional and spiritual one, and is expressed in many different contexts. 

The significance of water manifests itself differently in different religions and beliefs but it is perhaps the following two qualities of water that underlie its place in our cultures and faiths.

• water cleanses. It not only purifies objects for ritual use, but can make a person clean, externally or spiritually, ready to come into the presence of his/her focus of worship.

• without water there is no life, yet water has the power to destroy as well as to create. We are at the mercy of water just as we are at the mercy of our God or gods.

Quote: Water is the most soul-like

Water is the most soul-like in its association with the vast underground of the unconscious; the realm of emotions, imagination and fantasy; sexuality; and creative and procreative fertility; the mystical web of interconnection which ties us to this earth and to each other; and a distinctly feminine worldview rooted in an attitude of surrender to mysterious forces beyond the reach of will or reason.

Joe Landwehr, The Seven Gates of Soul: Reclaiming the poetry of everyday life (p.95)

Read Joe's commentary on science and soul in relation to therapy and aquatic bodywork.

Inspiration: Conscious fluidity

In recent posts, I have been exploring how aquatic bodywork might affect state of consciousness.  This extract from Ken Keyes book The Handbook of Higher Consciousness which has been a bible of sorts for some people offers some interesting watery metaphors.

When you are heavily addicted, your experience of 'self' is solid like a block of ice.  When you have succeeded in reprogramming almost all of your addictions into preferences, your 'self' loses it rockness and begins to have the adaptability and clarity of water.  When one is operating primarily on preferences, the hardness melts and instead there is a conscious fluidity.  In this state, like water, your sense of 'self' is infinitely flexible to accommodate itself to your here-and-now surroundings... For the few intrepid explorers of the mountain of consciousness who wish to go to the top, even preferences must be reprogrammed. [At this level] even the fluid self boundaries disappear.  As water evaporates, it becomes a transparent vapor.  Similarly, at the highest level of consciousness, the experience of 'self' or 'somebody' disappears, we become 'nobody' - which then lets us be in unitive space with everybody. Ken Keyes, The Handbook of Higher Consciousness, p. 128-129

Health and fluid movement: insights from biodynamic massage

From an article originally published in The Journal of the Association of Holistic Biodynamic Massage Therapists Vol.7 Issue No.1 Winter 2003/2004 ISBN 146-3743) Gill Westland, posted on the website for the Cambridge Body Psychotherapy Centre.

Biodynamic Massage:  Theory

[Gerda Boyesen who developed this method] has uniquely described tissue armouring within the body psychotherapy field. She recog­nised that ill health seemed to be consistent with lack of fluid movement and stagnation in the body, and health with fluid movement. She observed that 'dry' tissues (i.e. skin, connective tissue, muscle) seemed to lack fluid. She also noticed that sometimes parts of the body have swollen, warmer, red tissues. This is in the absence of any infection. It is as if there is an excess of fluid and the fluid creates internal pressure. Individuals with this symptomology often describe themselves as feeling under pressure and jittery. This situation is known as distension pressure.

Sometimes tissues can be swollen, but the skin colour ranges from brown to grey or white and it is cold to the touch. This is called transudation pressure and is tissue armouring. It is a more chronic patterning. People with depressive illness, for example have a preponderance of transudation pressure.

Reich saw that fluid draws energy; and energy draws fluid. If there is stagnant fluid there is impeded flow of energy and conversely, if energy flows, so does fluid. Boyesen recognised that the 'solution' was to invite the emptying off of excess fluids and to draw fluid into drier areas of the body. The fluids are central to self regulation and are fundamentally involved with the inherent wisdom to heal and connect with essential health.

Apart from tissue armouring, Gerda Boyesen's other unique contribution is the theory of psychoperistalsis. She noticed that when clients had tummy rumblings during sessions that there seemed to be therapeutic benefits. She began to work with an extended stethoscope to listen more intently to the sounds and gradually developed her theory that the guts not only digest food, but also regulate affect. Again she speculated that excessive fluid in the intestinal walls, the distention pressure, stimulated the peristaltic activity. So biodynamic massage therapists often work with an electronic stethoscope. This gives the therapist feedback and guides the therapeutic process.