“….the amount of electricity going on within your cells is a thousand times greater than the electricity within your house. You are, in a very small way, exceedingly energetic.” (Bryson, 2019. Pg 190) Reading about the chemical called adenosine triphosphate (ATP) made me think of Charles Lev’s concept of the electromagnetic field surrounding our bodies. When thinking of energy, I think of vibration, and when I visualize vibration, I see waves. Each wave starts strong and vivid, but increasingly gets weaker as it expands. If our bodies follow that same wave concept, we would create a field of energy, and if we also absorb energy, we would inevitably suck the energy back into us. This would look a lot like the pictures Charles showed us. “People experience the healer within in a variety of ways: ‘tingling’, ‘warmth’, ‘flowing’, ‘humming’, ‘fluffy’, ‘light’.” (Jahnke, 1997. Pg 28) Energy is moving, warm, and is known to have humming sounds. If it is always surrounding us, when we tap into ourselves and unlock the healer within, experiencing these sensations would be sensing that electromagnetic field around us. “The third stream of awareness, listening between, is the way your nervous system communicates with other systems one-on-one or with a group of people.” (Dana, 2021. Pg 9) This is our minds picking up and interpreting the energy flows of the people around us. Getting a bad feeling about someone or feeling like you are being watched and turning around to see someone looking at you. These are unexplainable in modern medicine, but clearly explained in our reading. Most people do not pick up on these feelings but in the book “Anchored” by Deb Dana, we are able to learn how be consciously be aware of our neuroceptionand use it. “When we bring perception to neuroception, we bring an otherwise nonconscious experience into awareness.” (Dana, 2021. Pg 9)

To me, the Shake It Off Therapy was by far the coolest concept that Charles Lev talked about. He talked about therapists going to other countries where the people have suffered great traumas, and teaching them this fun, involved therapy of shaking your entire body. As a woman married to a man in the Army experiencing PTSD, this stood out to me, and I was able to share this with him. It is known that people suffering from PTSD can have neurological shutdowns in situations that may remind them of past traumas; or even when the situations are not fully taken in. “We get cues of safety from explicit communication of details surrounding an interaction. When contextual information is sent through implicit pathways and not explicitly shared, we often respond in the present moment based on our past experiences.” (Dana, 2021. Pg 11) When someone with PTSD that is triggered by loud sounds, they hear the loud sound and without the context of what it was or where it came from, they may have an PTSD attack. In theory, the shake it out method used regularly, will help a person pick up on context and have a more positive outlook on their situations. The shake it out method is similar to why mammals shake in uncomfortable situations. It mitigates excess stress. “The increase of movement in a positive direction suggests that these uncharacterized tremors might be a natural neurophysiological response to mitigate excess stress…As participants incorporated SUTT [self-induced therapeutic tremors] into their routines on a regular basis, they reported more frequent positive emotions toward themselves and greater confidence in their ability to deal with adversity.” (Glob Adv Health Med, 2014.) This study was a very interesting read. It talks about how beneficial regular self-induced tremors can be for those who struggle with stress and/or anxiety.

References

Bryson, B. (2019) The Body: A guide for Occupants. Anchor Books.

Dana, D. (2021) Anchored: How to Befriend Your Nervous System Using Polyvagal Theory. Sounds True.

Glob Adv Health Med. (September 3, 2014) Effects of Self-induced Unclassified Therapeutic Tremors on Quality of Life Among Non-professional Caregivers: A Pilot Study. Global Advances in Health and Medicine. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4268601/

Jahnke, R. (1997) The Healer Within: Using Traditional Chinese Techniques to Release Your Body’s Own Medicine. HarperCollins Publishers.

Charles Lev is a Chinese medicine practitioner at Oregon Health and Science University. He graciously came to our class to talk to us about how “The path is the return.” (Lev, C. 2022, Personal Communication). More specifically Mr. Lev talked about our compasses. He explained that we each have three compasses: Head, Gut, and Heart. Like conventional compasses, magnets interfere with a North reading, emotional magnets can do the same thing. This concept of, falling off true North (emotionally) corresponds to something that is covered in Anchored: How to Befriend Your Nervous System Using Polyvagal Theory (Dana, 2021). Starting on page 10, Dana talks about the Three Elements for Well-Being. These being Context: our ability to understand “how, what, and why in order to understand, and respond to, experiences.” (Dana, 2021, pg. 11). Dana tells a story about a friend ditching on lunch plans, and at first, she was anxious that her friend was mad at her, but once she had the context thather friend was sick, she shifted or returned to a balanced state and feels concerned for her friend.

The second element of well-being is Choice. The choice to seek a balance is to find that spot where we have enough choices to manage without falling into the void of unedited options. Professor Lev also touched on Chinese Qi and how deficits and excess of certain elements affect us on an emotional level. The wood element in deficit inspires feelings of “Hopeless, Ambivalent, Indecisive, and Unfocused energies.” (Lev, C. 2022, Personal Communication). This illustrates the false North that emotional magnets can lead us to.

The third element of well-being is the connection: to your family, friends, pets, and nature. This element is pivotal to our sense of “home and safety. This is what links us to ourselves and our community. This can be shown in a deficit in the Qi element of fire: “Joyless, Flat, and shut down” (Lev, C. 2022, Personal Communication).

The ability to steady the course and stay on track is incredibly hard, especially in the global setting we find ourselves in currently. In a world where more and more people are living sedimentary lifestyles, we are experiencing, especially in Western culture, a decline in our natural ability to heal. “When our natural healing ability does not function automatically, something is terribly wrong. Our spontaneous self-healing resources have become damaged or disordered.” (Jahnke, 1999, pg. 5). The exercise that Professor. Lev showed us that jumping around, and breathing is a great way of sending positive energy through our body and just getting some exercise. Something that people, especially in Western countries could use more of because “Only about 20 percent of people manage to get even a moderate level of activity. Many get almost none at all.” (Bryson, 2019, pg. 179). While it may be comfy to sit still and do nothing, we are mobile creatures and genuinely feel better when we move and breathe deeply and feel it move through our bodies.

References

Bryson, B. (2019). Chapter 10: On the Move: Bipedalism and Exercise. In The Body: A Guide for Occupants (p. 179). essay, Doubleday.

Brink, A., Cutler, E., & Duffy, K. (2019). Chapter 9: Mini Flows, Quickies, and Ascending and Descending Flows. In The art of Jin Shin: The Japanese practice of healing with your fingertips (pp. 99–101). essay, Tiller Press.

Dana, D. (2021). Chapter 1: A Quick Look at the Principles and Elements of Polyvagal Theory. In Anchored: How to befriend your nervous system using polyvagal theory (pp. 10–12). essay, SOUNDS TRUE.

Jahnke, R. (1999). Chapter One: Our Power of Self-Healing. In The Healer Within (p. 5). essay, HarperSanFrancisco.

Lev, C. (n.d.). OHSU. Retrieved October 14, 2022, from https://www.ohsu.edu/providers/charles-rothschild-lev-lac

            My ideas about the body and what I tried to convey in my mandala, is that our bodies are perfectly designed to exist in harmony with each other and with the world around us. In her book Anchored, author Deb Dana speaks on the necessity of interpersonal connection to our well-being. She states, “With connection we feel safely embodied, accompanied by others, at home in the environment, and in harmony with spirit” (Dana, 2022, p.12). This was the main point of my design, to take the colors of each chakra and surround them with the “colors” of the universe and convey that there is no separation between the body and the spirit. The energy, so to speak, that powers the universe is the same energy that moves us every day. In his book The Healer Within, Roger Jahnke says, “The naturally occurring self-healing ability of your own body, mind, and spirit is the world’s greatest healer (Jahnke, 1999, p.7). I think this does a great job of expressing how powerfully connected we truly are. Ultimately though, I believe our bodies are beautiful enigmas and are capable of more than we know. As Bill Bryson so perfectly wrote, “Your body is a universe of mystery” (Bryson, 2022, p.35) and I could not agree more.

References

Bryson, B. (2022). The body: A guide for occupants. Doubleday.

Dana, D. (2021). Anchored: How to befriend your nervous system using polyvagal theory. Sounds True.