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.

Deepening core awareness: Maya healing

As I was preparing to finalize the previous three-part series on psoas trauma, I remembered a friend's recent experience with a prolapsed uterus.  Her doctors had suggested hysterectomy but she successfully and quickly treated her condition with Maya abdominal massage, a method that offers ongoing self-care.

I felt compelled to experience this during a visit to Chicago where I discovered Moira Scullion, a licenced massage therapist of over 10 years' experience who specializes in the Arvigo Techniques of Maya Abdominal MassageTM  (MAM) and in Maya Spiritual Healing. 

For more: Arvigo healing practices and Maya healing tradition.

My 2 h introductory session with Moira, has inspired this addendum to the psoas series.  Appropriately, the appointment was on a wild and wet Thursday which, along with Friday, is considered the best for spiritual bathing rituals (see book reference below).  As you will read I did have a sprinkling bath!

Moira's website indicated that she works with 'the core of the body to release old patterns of emotional and physical holding' which sounded very relevant to the exploratory healing journey I was writing about.  The experience turned out to be profound on all levels - physical, emotional and spiritual - for me.

The background of Moira's teacher added another point of interest since Dr. Rosita Arvigo is the co-author of a book I have long had in my aquatic library called Spiritual Bathing: Healing rituals and traditions from around the world.  The water connection felt auspicious.

Deepening core awareness and the implications for aquatic bodywork: Part 3

This post is the third and last in a series on working with psoas trauma.  Reading Part 1 and Part 2 first is essential.

Part 1: Personal experience of psoas trauma

Part 2:  How aquatic bodywork can help with psoas trauma recovery

Part 3: Some ways of working with the psoas on land and in water

Deepening our core awareness we enter the influence of water.  It is imprinted in all form and it is by exploring ourselves as fluid beings that we enter into a deeper level of movement awareness and life. Liz Koch, Core Awareness:  Enhancing Yoga, Pilates, Exercise and Dance, 2003, p. 74.

PART 3: Some ways of working with the psoas on land and in water

The ideas I have shared in Parts 1 and 2 of this series on psoas-related trauma, including those gleaned from the work of others, are presented in a context of inquiry based on my personal experience as someone troubled by psoas issues and likely underlying trauma, and also on my professional observations as a massage and movement therapist with a special interest in aquatic bodywork.  They are not  intended to suggest definitive methods for working with someone who has psoas-related trauma.  Please be very careful with such work. 

If you believe you have psoas-related problems, please check this out with your preferred health professional.  Treat yourself with as much care as I hope the previous posts (Parts 1 and 2) have indicated may be warranted.  Below I have summarized some of the practices that have been helpful to me in my ongoing explorations of this.  Though I cannot take responsibility for your use of these suggestions and their possible outcome, I sincerely hope that if you do try them you will find them beneficial.  Please comment or share your experience below or by email.

Deepening core awareness and the implications for aquatic bodywork: Part 2

This post is the second in a series of three on working with psoas trauma in the water.  Reading Part 1 first is essential (see link below).  You'll also find an ongoing link to Part 3 at the end of this post.

Part 1: Personal experience of psoas trauma

Part 2:  How aquatic bodywork can help with psoas trauma recovery

Part 3: Some ways of working with the psoas on land and in water

Deepening our core awareness we enter the influence of water.  It is imprinted in all form and it is by exploring ourselves as fluid beings that we enter into a deeper level of movement awareness and life. Liz Koch, Core Awareness:  Enhancing Yoga, Pilates, Exercise and Dance, 2003, p. 74.

PART 2:  How aquatic bodywork can help with psoas trauma recovery

The safety and sensitivity of water

In this Part, I describe some of the insights others have had into working with body-based trauma responses, and relate this to my personal and professional experience in the water.

Here is what Liz Koch has to say about safety when releasing psoas-affecting trauma, and the issue of repetitive behavior  (Psoas Health: Trauma Recovery Protocol, Massage and Bodywork Magazine):

Once instinctively safe, the body naturally begins to shake and discharge stored energy.  With deeper levels of safety, the body spontaneously releases deeper levels of holding.  Without the resolution, repetitive behavior is the only means for the encoding to attempt to release the trauma.

Palpating the psoas muscle of traumatized clients can immediately reevoke the trauma defense mechanism because the psoas muscle is still activated.  Instead of evoking relaxation, palpating the psoas due to its instinctive functioning results in a conflict of psychosomatic interests.  The client wants to relax into the healing massage of the psoas while simultaneously contracting against the invasive procedure.  This conflict causes a repetition of the somatic elements of the trauma experience.

Palpating this deep muscle is hard enough to do on land and perhaps impossible to achieve in aquatic bodywork since the body cannot be pinned against any surface or push against resistance itself (as in PNF - see Parts 1 and 3) and may easily escape from such an 'invasion'.  This suggests that working in water could be safer.  What can be done in water, is to enable follow-through (sometimes called unwinding) of the psoas's  influence on the body's structural integrity, and also to use energy-based touch to initiate and facilitate its releases.  I have found both approaches to be highly effective with psoas issues.

Deepening core awareness and the implications for aquatic bodywork: Part 1

 

This post is the first in a series about working with psoas-related trauma in the water and also on land.  Reading Parts 1, 2 and 3 in order is important. You'll find a link to Part 2 at the end of this one.

Part 1: Personal experience of psoas trauma

Part 2:  How aquatic bodywork can help with psoas trauma recovery

Part 3: Some ways of working with the psoas on land and in water

Deepening our core awareness we enter the influence of water.  It is imprinted in all form and it is by exploring ourselves as fluid beings that we enter into a deeper level of movement awareness and life. Liz Koch, Core Awareness:  Enhancing Yoga, Pilates, Exercise and Dance, 2003, p. 74.

PART 1: Personal experience of psoas trauma

Losing my ground

Core awareness is not only influenced by water, it is also a sense of self connected to the earth, writes psoas expert Liz Koch.  In late July, I fell down twice.  I lost my ground in a manner that I can no longer afford to explain away.  I could say it was because a few weeks back I lifted a very large log for stacking and strained my right-side quadratus lumborum muscle which in turn put stress on my right psoas muscle, strongly torqued my pelvis, and trapped a nerve.  But it reminded me of something that I've been slowly inching towards for at least a decade now.  In this series of posts, I will share parts of that exploration.

The 'core' of the body spans from the solar plexus to the upper thigh bone. Core muscles run along the spinal vertebrae and traverse this 'belly brain'. These are the psoas [pronounced so-as] muscles and they are key to the body's stuctural integrity and movement, as well as protecting its inner strength and  energy.  It is a place of power and wisdom according to many Eastern body systems, where it is referred to as hara, dantien, solar plexus chakra, and so on.

The psoas also functions like an hydraulic pump, enhancing circulation throughout the body.  As an internal shelf, it lends important diagonal muscular support to abdominal organs and nerve ganglia.  The kidneys lie on top of the psoas and the reproductive nerves are embedded within it.  I've demanded a lot of the psoas muscle complex in my life habits and perhaps also because I have an exceptionally long back relative to my limbs.  My lifestyle combines the sedentary (long hours of writing) with the very active (including yoga and dance), making me further vulnerable to psoas misuse.

Illustration: The psoas muscle attaches to the 12th thoracic vertebrae (approximately at the level of your solar plexus) and to each of the lumbar vertebrae. The muscle moves through the pelvis and inserts into the inner thighbone at the lesser trocanter.

This hidden muscle group appears to play a major role in trauma and trauma recovery. Its significance in good times and bad is often overlooked, perhaps because it lies so deep within us. Serving as a bridge, it connects the physical to the emotional and the spiritual to the ordinary according to those who, like Liz Koch, take an holistic view of the human being.  Working with it can bring a deluge of unresolved fear to the forefront of your consciousness.  In the long run it could provide an opening to instinctive wisdom too.  In my personal and professional experience, both are true.

Inspired by Liz Koch (though I have yet to study with her directly), I've been sharing my understanding of this keystone muscle in my movement classes for some years now.  Yet, its personal impact once again unnerves me.  Not only because my body structure is similar to that of my mother who had a hip replacement five years after experiencing falls like mine.   But also because I sense there is more to this recurring discomfort, and that more serious outcomes (see Box) could be preventable.  My core is calling me to give it greater attention and take far more care.

Water bridges a therapeutic gap

Back in 585 BC, the mathematician Thales predicted mathematically the precise time of an eclipse.  He concluded that all natural phenomena had rational causes that didn't depend on deities.  This event, wrote astrologer Joe Landwehr in The Seven Gates of Soul (p.95), marked the  beginning of the scientific revolution that would ultimately deny the existence of the soulful life. 

Thales still drew inspiration from the world view he was trying to escape. He believed that the principle substance that governed nature and composed it's essence was Water.  In his book on the 6000-year history of soul, Joe went on to point out that Thales is reputed to have said: 'All is water and the world is full of gods'  proclaiming the omnipresence of soul that he had tried to rationalize away. 

Joe, my partner, is a great sounding board for my thoughts and ideas, including those on aquatic bodywork and spa culture, though both fields are quite new to him.  Like me, he has followed a rather unconventional career path - beginning in science and then finding it could not provide the answers to some of his deeper questions about the meaning of life.

Recently, Joe commented on my last post How to investigate aquatic altered states of consciousness.  I have compiled his input below since I think it provides a valuable and interesting extension of the issues raised there. I encourage you to join in too by commenting below either post or Email me here. 

'Without quantifiable measurement, science is lost', notes Joe but so much that is important in healing or therapy cannot be measured or quantified.

Pristine waters; murky depths

This post is the fourth in a series on exploring altered states through aquatic bodywork (reading the earlier ones is recommended, see below for links).

Healing at the level of soul, say Connie Zweig and Steve Wolf (Romancing the Shadow, Ballantine, 1997) is a natural, regenerative process.....It is not a cure, but a deep sense of acceptance and a reorientation toward life and toward the gods'(p.10).  They are writing about the value of shadow-work, an exploration below the surface and into the depths.  While Self denotes a connection to transcendent spirituality, soul implies relatedness, complexity, and vulnerability (p. 19).

Ideally we hold space for both aspects when working in water since aquatic bodywork seems to trigger both transcendent and descendant experiences in people.  The paradox I began this series of posts with requires us to be comfortable with this tension of opposites, with ambiguity and complexity.  We ought to be as willing and capable of guiding someone through the murky, monster-ridden deep as we are at playing in the pristine, glistening realm of spiritual waters.  And for that, it's best to be well-acquainted with both places ourselves.

Physician Larry Dossey, well-known for research into the healing power of prayer, says: All acts of health carry this greyish, dark side to them, because they remind us what we most wish to avoid: illness and death. ... our frenzy to be healthy only increases our sensitivity to the phenomena of illness and death, just as light, in a world of objects, always casts shadows.  The two go together, they draw each other onward, they cannot be teased apart (Ch. 18. The Light of Health, The Shadow of Illness, in Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature, ed. C. Zweig and J. Abrams, Tarchner, 1991, p. 92).

Each person (practitioner and client alike) brings with them to the water many hidden parts, some of which are in the form of frightening monsters.  Using watery terminology, Zweig and Wolf (Romancing the Shadow, Ballantine, 1997): The personal shadow .... is shaped by a confluence of forces: the collective or cultural shadow, which forms the sea of moral and social values in which we swim; the family shadow, which forms the vessel in which we grow; and the parents' shadow, which form a legacy of abuse and betrayal.

In the water things don't remain hidden for long. Poet Robert Bly: the Wild Man encourages a trust in what is below: the lower half of our body, our genitals, our legs and ankles, our inadequacies, the soles of our feet, the animal ancestors, the Earth itself, the treasures in the Earth, the dead long buried there, the stubborn richness to which we descend. "Water prefers low places," says the Tao Te Ching, which is a true Wild Man book. (Part 4: The Disowned Body: Illness, Health, and Sexuality in Meeting the Shadow, ibid., p. 82).

If the pool environment, the readiness of the receiver, and the ability of the practitioner are conducive, the poetry of healing begins to flow. Trainer in Bioenergetics John Conger: Most of us tend to think that the shadow is invisible, hidden way somewhere in the recesses of our minds.  But people who work regularly with the human body and can read its mute language are able to see in it the dark shape of the shadow. It etches itself into our muscles and tissues, our blood and bones.  Our full personal biography is recounted in our bodies, there to be read by those who know the language (Introduction to Part 4: The Disowned Body: Illness, Health, and Sexuality in Meeting the Shadow, ibid, p. 84).

In the water, it seems that mind-body-spirit express themselves in unison in a way that is not possible on land.  What can we learn from these other fields of investigation and how can we begin to apply these insights to aquatic bodywork? 

Aquatic bodywork as healing art

"The portal of healing and creativity always takes us into the realm of the spirit."
Angeles Arrien, author of The Nine Muses: A Mythological Path to Creativity

This statement has become true for me in my practice of aquatic bodywork, where creativity, healing, and spirituality merge as inseparably as three rivers meeting at a confluence. The three linked weblogs I created during the latter part of 2008 are no different. 

For this reason, it is not always easy to decide where a particular post fits best and there are many cross-links between the websites.  So, although the posts summarized below are about aquatic bodywork, I have placed them on Diving Deeper where more of my creative writings appear.

I have worked with artists and writers in the water, and many of them have found that the sessions provided both breathing space and renewed inspiration when the creative process felt blocked or just not as free-flowing as they'd have liked. 

This is an area that especially interests me and I'd be glad to hear from artists who have been inspired by Watsu-style aquatic bodywork sessions, or feel drawn to the descriptions here, or to water in general.  Meanwhile, please enjoy the full articles by clicking on the links below.

A creative journey in water

An account of the creative potential of aquatic bodywork for inspiring the artist in each of us.

As a practitioner of aquatic bodywork, I seek out the creative in myself and the responsive in others so as to participate in  natural or spontaneous form.  Describing my work as art rather  than therapy  reminds me that we are involved in a dance of life and can neither control nor anticipate outcome.  

Often the experiences a person has during water sessions are preverbal and  must be elaborated in much the same manner as dreams.  The best way to reflect such images and fantasies  is through artistic expression and my hope is that this work will be recognized as a valuable tool for creativity.

Experiencing aquatic bodywork

 In the early days of my training in aquatic bodywork (Watsu and more), much of my learning came from receiving.  Since I find writing a valuable way of uncovering and expressing experiences, I often recorded those sessions.  Later, I encouraged clients to do this, whether in writing or artwork (whatever right-brain method was best for them).

Here are two accounts illustrating contrasting experiences for the same receiver, in this case myself.  I hope they will provide insight into the power of this work and into the creative potential there is in recording the process and following up in whatever ways seem appropriate and helpful.

The shadow side of aquatic bodywork (Watsu-based)

I wonder what most of us would say when asked what our responsibilities are to our clients and to ourselves as aquatic bodyworkers? 

One of the questions I pose in the aquatic healer profiles on this site is: What were your most challenging lessons in training and practice. 

It's a question that requires a great deal of self-honesty.  It is also one that if asked of ourselves on an ongoing basis is very valuable.

When I first started training in massage, I had the fortune to come across a book called The Way of the Physician (or wounded healer) by Jacob Needleman.  I read it on the train as I traveled to my training. and I believe it kept me humble. Perhaps many people who choose to study the healing arts do so because they are in need of healing themselves.  It's a good choice but only if conducted with consciousness.

As experienced practitioners, we do well always to evaluate our own wounds and how they might interface with those of our clients in ways that interfere with, or even harm, the therapeutic relationships we are engaged in.  For this reason, it is helpful to continue to be a receiver of the work you are offering and to put yourself in the role of client on a regular basis.  Whether giver or receiver, we are in the same river of life.

A journey into the unconscious

In my experience, aquatic bodywork enables a journey into the unconscious.  It has a risk attached to it that very few seem to acknowledge.  I've noticed that when people struggling with our modern society first experience this therapeutic modality, some wonder if they have touched a forgotten paradise.  They may have a deep recollection of that paradise, but they also access the common grief of humanity. 

For some the experience is too disturbing to handle and they never again risk surrendering to the water.   Others set out to share the work as practitioners but do not dare dive into their own woundedness (also called shadow).  Either way, something that temporarily surfaced is submerged again in our everyday efforts to live and prosper in consensual reality.

Trance, dreaming and aquatic bodywork

I am being drawn by a series of occurrences in my life to attempt an integration of the concept of retreats that bear some resemblance to Asclepian sanctuaries, with the power of dreams, especially in association with aquatic bodywork which can provide a portal to a depth of experience that enables what I'll call soul healing.

Deep trance

Robert E. L. Masters, who died in July of this year (1927-2008), was a brilliant explorer of human consciousness and the mind/ body realm. He wrote many books on human behavior including one with the wonderful and watery title Swimming where Madmen Drown: Travellers' Tales from Inner Space.

It was in this book that I found the following intriguing speculation about what went on in the Asclepian sanctuaries. Masters' text preceding this extract describes the work of a late nineteenth century physician named Otto Wetterstrand who experimented with 'prolonged sleep' or deep trance of days or weeks.

Wetterstrand reported successful treatment of physical and nervous disorders where all previous treatments had failed, including epilepsy, hysteria, insomnia, severe headaches, and other pain. From the quote below, I have made some connections regards my own thoughts on dreaming in water and the aquatic bodywave.

In order to follow this discussion more closely, you may want to review my blog posts an An aquatic Kriya: the bodywave, Dreaming in Water, and Asclepius: the god of spas. I hope you will feel encouraged to contribute your own thoughts on what you read here by commenting below or emailing me directly.

From 'Far Out Healings' in Swimming Where Madmen Drown by Robert Masters, 2002, pp. 70-71. [My italics.]

In the ancient world, there was the practice of temple sleep. The patient, in trance, or possibly drugged, might while sleeping have been visited by the Gods who did the healing. There were variations, but a long sleep in a powerful place where the cure was strongly expected to happen: those were the essentials. Temple sleep might also have included something like mesmerism, teams of healers passing their hands directly over the surface of the body of the afflicted one, or a little above the surface of the body, stroking for many hours or even days a presumed aura or energy field extending beyond the person's body. This would induce a state of trance or serve to deepen the already altered state. When such methods were used, the cure was likely a 'crisis,' a kind of profound and dramatic seizure, after which the symptoms were gone and the person declared cured. The person would have journeyed far into Inner Space where, at some point, the body discharged the illness and, when the mind returned to it's normal reality, the illness no longer existed. There is no doubt that such healings did and do occur, presently in New Age variants, with about as many explanations to account of the results as there are varieties of healers.