Eastern Healing

I’m writing this from the Palmetto Jujitsu Martial Arts & Healing Arts conference I go to every year. Well, almost every year. Last year I had to miss it for the first time in a long time, because of a schedule conflict. But this year I’m here, and the conference is having its tenth anniversary.

There are things you learn, but then you learn again, and you learn again, because each time you re-learn it, you learn it a different way. It’s one thing to know something intellectually, and another to have absorbed it at a deeper level. It’s as deep as the difference between knowing what to do and actually doing it. Today was full of things that I “know” but that I re-learned in ways that will affect my practice of healing arts (and martial arts) for years to come.

Or won’t, because I’ll forget, revert, or not be ready to feel them at the next level. But mostly today I think I learned things that I’ve known for a while, but now I AM finally ready to incorporate in my healing practice (and my worldview, perhaps).

One of the reasons I don’t blog here as often as I would like is that much of what I feel I’ve been learning the last five years has all been about internalization, and I haven’t always been ready to turn it around and express it through words. That and much of what is learned is at a non-verbal level. But we’re getting there.

More later as the conference progresses! Or maybe after it’s over…

I’m in my forties now. I feel I had the period of my life where I was a fighter. I did full-contact tae kwon do in the 1980s (and have the medals to prove it) and then TKD ho shin sool (self-defense) fighting in the ’90s, which is more of a “mixed-martial arts” style of tae kwon do, incorporating grappling, take-downs, etc. with the usual kicks and punches.

I was good at fighting. Being a somewhat small woman, surrounded much of the time by large men, I got very good at fighting large men. I never hesitated to use whatever advantage I could, whether that was physical (speed, agility) or mental (psyching them out, feigning reluctance, etc). The thing you quickly learn about sparring of any kind is that the one who just charges in, bull-headed, “guns” blazing, usually ends up beat. Oh sure, sometimes it works to just overpower an opponent, and maybe you beat them down and beat right through their defenses, but man, it takes a lot of energy, and all too often it simply doesn’t work.

What usually worked for me was to make my opponent show me their weak spot. (Or spots.) Read the rest of this entry →

So I told my “magic juice” story (see two posts ago) about healing the pressure point bruise on my student’s leg several times while at the healing arts conference in South Carolina, to get various people’s takes on what was going on. Somehow the story kept coming up from different angles. How much was intention? How much was her will to believe she would be healed?

How much was her belief that she was injured? One suggestion that Doug Musser, one of the terrific instructors there and one of the examiners who originally certified me in ORT, was that she was clinging to the injury herself. It had been built up in her mind that she had been struck on a “pressure point” and it had been painful at first… But the moment I put the dit da jiao on my finger and said “Oh, I can help with that,” she was willing to let go of it.

That wasn’t something she could do on her own, perhaps. It took another force or another person to create the opportunity to let go. I remember reading somewhere that smelling salts don’t actually work on people who are unconscious. That what actually wakes the person up is the suggestion that now something is being done externally that should wake you up, you can wake up.

One of the classes I took at the seminar was in resuscitation techniques for people who have been knocked out (typically from being clonked in the head in a martial arts situation). Some of them are the equivalent of hitting someone on the knee with a doctor’s reflex tester – when you hit it just right, their whole body jumps, whether they are awake or unconscious. (We of course practiced on each other while awake.)

But back to this idea of clinging to an injury. How much chronic pain is from an injury and how much is from what our bodies do to themselves in reaction to the injury? Once it becomes chronic, I’d say in most of the clients I see it is the latter. The original injury, whether it was a torn ligament, sprained joint, pinched nerve, etc… is often “healed.” But the way the body reacts to being injured, binding up all around the site, is what causes the pain and hurting. A lot of the bodywork I do is in getting the muscles, scar tissue, built up fluids, and all the other stuff the body piles on, to move, straighten out, clean up, and go away.

Some of it I do by specific physical techniques I’ve been taught, like “ironing” the muscles with my elbow. But some of what I do is stimulating the other person’s body to fix itself, and engaging their self-healing response in a more controlled way than when it gets spurred by an injury in the first place.

On some level, healing that bruise was the same exact thing, only it felt like it happened on a psychosomatic level before the physical part even came into play. (You can substitute the word “spiritual” for “psychosomatic” above, if it makes you feel more comfortable with that perspective.)

Just returned from the Palmetto annual Martial Arts and Healing Arts clinic in Columbia, South Carolina. corwin goes and does the Martial Arts classes, since he is in dan zan ryu jujitsu, while I do the healing arts classes.

What a great experience it is to share ideas and learn from a diverse group of healers! The instructors ranged from people who specialize in the same form of Okazaki Restorative Therapy that I practice, to acupuncturists, herbalists in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), and chi gong practitioners. I took about 25 classes while I was there and my brain is completely full. I’ll try to make some more posts about what I learned as things sink in.

One of the most interesting classes was taught by Philoberto Gutierrez, an ORT practitioner from the Chicago area, who stressed a simple principle in healing: “less is more.” Read the rest of this entry →

I healed a bruise on someone recently in a way that was somewhat startling to both of us. Grandmaster Kim comes from the Boston headquarters to the Cambridge branch, where I work and train, about twice a month. He taught a special class on one of these visits on pressure point striking.

During this class, one of the students got struck on a pressure point on her shin a bit harder than her partner intended to, and ended up with quite a painful bruise. At the time when I saw it, in the locker room, a month had gone by, and the bruise was still blackberry dark and about the size of a nickel.

“Ooh!” I said when I saw it. “I bet I can help with that.” I took out the bottle of dit da jao (“bruise wine”) liniment from my locker, and wetted my left index finger with it. Then I concentrated on the bruise and touched it with my wet finger, intending to rub the liniment in.

We both felt a kind of jolt, she jumped like I’d given her a shock or as if it were that tender or painful, but then realized in that instant, the pain was suddenly gone. I rubbed at the bruise in small circles, but the main healing had happened in that first instant. I lifted my finger a few seconds later and the bruise was already quite faded. I had never seen a bruise react that way.

“That feels so much better!” she said. I asked her what she had felt when I first touched it, and she said, “I felt your intention to heal it.”

This is, to put it mildly, pretty damn exciting. Because I think she’s exactly right, I healed her with intention, not with the liniment. It happened to be the kind of injury that would be particularly responsive to that kind of fix, and I was able to apply it. It’s not magic. Scientific studies have proved the effects of acupuncture over and over, so if a needle through your skin in a certain spot can have a healing effect, why not something touching your skin?

Western science is generally still skeptical about the idea of the “energetic system of the body” as we talk about it in Chinese medicine, but ultimately what matters to us is not what the scientific explanation is, but that the metaphor holds up as consistent. My explanation for what I did was I used my energy to heal hers, and I will leave the actual physiological explanation for future researchers. The effect was visible to both of us and witnesses in the change in the color of the bruise, and she reported a tremendous diminishing of the pain, which is what matters to me as a healer.

Last month, I attended the AJJF National Convention. In addition to some great jujitsu training, I had a revelation which has improved my massage practice greatly.

Kahuna Mark Saito, in addition to being a Hawaiian Kahuna is also an amazing martial artist. At the convention, he taught a class on how to strike in the manner of his own family’s art (Saito Ryu Ninjitsu). This style of hitting is about striking with the entire body using relaxed hands and arms. It involves generating power by moving the hips and using the arms (or whatever other striking surface) like a whip instead of like a club. Towards the end of the class, as Kahuna could see that we were all trying harder and harder to relax, he stopped us and imparted this simple idea. “Don’t try to relax your hand, or cup your hand or do anything with your hand. Just stand still for a minute and do nothing. Observe how your hand wants to be. When you strike, just leave it that way.” Suddenly, the clouds parted. I and my partner returned to beating each other and the hits immediately took on a different character, more solid and penetrating. Delivering the strikes began to feel really good, like doing Gi Gong or Tai Chi when it is really flowing.

About a week later, I was giving Cecilia a massage. Most of ORM is done with the elbow, often while pumping the arm for added stimulation. One of the things I’ve always struggled with is figuring out what to do with my hand while my elbow is pressing and my arm is pumping. A little way into the massage, I remembered Kahuna’s words. I stopped for a moment, let my hand settle itself, and then left it that way while I finished the massage. Cecilia said it was the best massage I’d ever given her. After I’d told her what I’d realized, she tried the same thing when she gave me a massage the next night, and sure enough, it was a markedly better massage than she’d given me previously.

It really is the simple things that make all the difference.

It’s ironic that as I type this, I’ve got my wrist in a brace from the repetitive strain injury that has dogged me for over ten years now. I’ve treated it over the years both the western way (with ultrasound and stretching) and the eastern way (with acupuncture and chi gong) and ultimately it’s been the eastern way that did the most to return me to function. I will now go months at a time without it being a problem. However I tweaked it last week somehow, so I must go back up the mountain again.

Lucky for me I did not have any massage clients booked this week! I expect that with treating it right, with traditional Chinese liniments, Salonpas, wearing my brace at night so I don’t sleep with my hand twisted under me (or under the cat…), and by next week I should be fine.

What you’ll be seeing here is bits and pieces of what I and my partner corwin learn about martial arts and healing arts as we go along our journeys. As we heal ourselves, and our clients and friends, and as we hurt ourselves with martial arts and have to put ourselves back together again. (You can see why I said there is a symbiosis between the martial arts and the healing arts…!)