Ancient physio wisdom

It takes me a while for things to sink in.
I've never been much of an exerciser, but I am determined to not "go gently into that good night," words that  Dylan Thomas immortalized.
And I'll be 74 in a few days, get aches and pains like everyone else on this planet does at this age. Exercise is the preventive medicine. I believe that, after spending a lot of time learning about nerves and interoception.  

So I finally landed on something I did not hate doing, which I call "weight-walking," which involves holding weights overhead as high up as I can while walking around inside my condo. A usual trip is 48 steps. 

I started off with 10-lb weights,  just one or two trips a day. 
Then, yesterday I changed it up. I did a walk with 5-lb weights. So easy. But it woke up the pathways. 
A few hours later, another with 8-lb weights. Still easy, and, and, ooh, pathways opened a bit wider. 
Another later on, the usual 10-lb weights. Less easy but totally doable because more familiar.

Then, a tiny miracle, I felt enough dopamine in me that a few hours later I did a 4th (a 4th walk! Unheard of!) with (ta-dah, drum roll...) fifteen-pound weights! For the first time! 

I have relationships with my weights. 
First of all, they are my own private weights, not left over from my clinic. I've had them at home for a decade at least, have played with them various ways. Never very seriously.
The 5-lb weights have a blue non-slip coating which feels pleasant to my hands.
The 8-lb weights are a nice bright orange colour.
The 10-lb ones are black.
They all feel soothing smooth room-temperature to my hands. 
But the 15-lb weights are naked steel and bumpy and my hands never really liked them. So macho. What was I thinking when I bought those? Truth is, they were the only ones available at the time and I was in an optimistic mood that someday it wouldn't matter that they felt so unattractive to my hands in the brain space where I have spent most of my life, focused on what I feel through those hands, haptic cognition I call it, or the one for my eyes, eyes that have an unwaveringly friendly relationship with every colour on earth, probably a carry-over from art school days where I learned to draw and paint and see space as a shape, a deliberately awakened visual cognition.
But I do not want to digress too much. 
Those ugly weights had sat there inert for years.

This post is about a new (for me) kinesthetic cognition, neither visual or haptic. 
It's about graded exposure and how I finally after all this time can see how graded exposure is a sneaky way of making friends with the parts of one's own brain that hate exercise, and weights unless they feel comfy through glabrous palmar skin and look attractive to the eyeballs.
Not by being operative (power-over), which a lot of physio is, but by being interactive with those parts, encouraging them instead of overwhelming them. And in the end they become willing to do things all by themselves. And come on, that's the entire point of anything we do in rehab, isn't it? 

For me, it was a sense of triumph I had never really experienced for myself, or truly integrated, from exercise. I can see now how people can easily become addicted to it.
I mean, in spite of the noceboic aspect of these 15-lb weights, grey steel, bumpy, heavy, etc., and the nociceptive aspect, the heavy bumpy cold steel-ness of them against my palms, in spite of all that, I succeeded in carrying them overhead without too much trembling (my arms wondered at first, WTF is she doing to us? But only at first, because as soon as I was aware of trembles happening I also felt a surge of steadiness arise all by itself; I did not have to use any willpower, my critter brain just took over all by itself and enough strength ensued automatically. It was so pleasant to feel my physicality function well all by itself and require no push from the "me" space where I usually reside.  
I guess you could call that kinesthetic cognition. Deliberately induced kinesthetic cognition. Never too late! :)
Had I been able to experience this sense of power arriving in my body so effortlessly much earlier in life I might have been more attracted to the wealth of knowledge that exists about motor output side of the nervous system my profession is so heavily invested in, rather than the sensory input side of the nervous system, mostly ignored by my profession, but important for mental health of individuals, I would argue, based on just this one little experience, significant to absolutely nobody but myself. 

Anyway, yay physiotherapy, it taught me something way back in first year as mere protocol that I finally figured out the meaning of, all these decades later. So, thank you, former profession of mine. Thank you very much. Now I know, have experienced, have cognized how it actually works, in my own human anti-gravity suit.  



 

 

Our sovereign real estate

 By that, I mean our body. Our physicality. The only thing we are born with and will die with. 

OK.
It's been a few years since I last posted here. I've been enjoying retirement and not thinking much about treating people anymore, since I don't anymore, or teaching anymore, since others do that now under a DNM banner, which I left trademark (and responsibility) -free. 
I still look after my almost 2-decade old Facebook group though, which still pops up some interesting stuff from time to time.  
What prompts this post is a reflection I had there in response to someone who posted a question about "extended mind," by which he meant, using one's mental faculties to travel through the body of someone on the treatment table. So I wrote a fairly lengthy reply to him, and for whatever reason (maybe he was embarrassed) he deleted his post (and my reply along with it in the subthread), which is irritating, but hey, Facebook, right? 

I wanted to find out if he thought mental meanderings through somebody else's body while treating them was appropriate.  If it was a "good" thing to do, philosophically speaking, to penetrate even just mentally their sovereign real estate, their physical body. 
For sure, a lot of instructors in manual therapy give students all sorts of conceptual hallucinations to ponder as they treat. I remember a class in cranial treatment in which I was instructed to learn to feel the "energy" from my hands flow down through the spine of the lab partner all the way to the end and then back up. I'm pretty sure people teaching these approaches mean no harm, and generally, no harm is done. I'm sure they want people to slow down, so they give them all sorts of anatomical minutia to ponder in hopes they won't be abrupt with their handling.  In another class, however, I was the person on the table and we were learning a move that involved sliding the skin over the sternum down toward the feet. It was framed as a fascia release maneuver. My lab partner was a very nice young man who diligently applied his whole attention to learning the specific conceptual hallucination. I was just lying there, zoning out while he worked on me. But I started to feel like he was falling asleep maybe, or losing track of me, because I realized he was using way too much downward pressure and it was uncomfortable. I asked him to stop, and he did. Maybe it was my imagination connecting this to heart palpitations I felt from time to time for a few years after, and luckily they resolved by themselves, but it made me think that if we lose track of what we are doing with our handling, we could hurt people. Especially if we are large, strong, have big hands, and our focus is on our fantasy, our conceptual hallucination, and not on the person we are treating.
These examples are from my own experience going to classes in the early 1990's, always trying to improve. 
After that I decided most of these approaches were delusional perceptual fantasy. Yes, interesting to learn all about the insides of people, but if that's what you're supposed to think about when treating people, it's a huge distraction. It ends up being operative, and therefore, irrelevant in our line of work as human primate social groomers. I put all notions about fascia, muscles, joints and viscera into the "delete" bin when I pondered treatment ethics. I called them "mesodermal," and denounced them. Later on I called them "operative" and denounced them even more.  

So, back to the reply I made on Facebook. 
I said I thought such mental notions were a distraction, and that as soon as I realized that, I had reshaped my treatment so that it disincluded ideas like that, "extending" the "mind" into someone else's body.
That I had stripped off any thoughts about anything deeper than the skin surface itself, and cutaneous nerves, because I was unable to disinclude those, as they are attached from below the surface directly into skin. (And conveniently as it turned out, there was a whole reality-based mechanism I could adopt instead, neurodynamics.)
That the whole trick was to be interactive with the person, and have neurodynamics to back up one's approach, so, interactive with the nervous system as well. To put the person in charge of their own comfort. To check in with them frequently. To give them explicit permission to choose their preference of handling and tell them I would shift my hands to something most comfortable with their guidance. That they were in there with their own nervous system and could feel it way better than I ever would be able to, so I wanted them to stay aware of how my handling was making them feel.
I pointed out, in my reply, that in reality every person on the table is an unknowable entity full of mystery, and every treatment encounter is like a walk across a narrow footbridge through fog over a chasm of unknown depth. I even posted this picture, which has been my treatment inspiration ever since I first saw it and used it in my teaching many times. And then the guy on Facebook deleted the entire thing. Dang. C'est la vie I guess.  

EDIT: I'm back in here to apologize to the person I thought had deleted his post. Turns out he didn't. Turns out it was a goof on either Fbook's part or my own.