An enjoyable article for your reading pleasure. The core work of Spinal Vitality is ROH and NSA The ARHP CONNECT Connect - September 9 2014 Dear Burton, Physical body awareness is a somewhat nebulous topic. People have bodies and yet their conscious awareness of what is occurring in their own bodies varies greatly. There is an whole range of factors that play into this including cultural predisposition to thinking, paucity of language describing internal sensation, and a lack of understanding of the value of somatic awareness. Pair with this the fact that the scientific understanding of the neurology of physical awareness and sensation is still developing and you start to notice a lot of holes in a picture many assumed was pretty clear. We live in these bodies all our lives, its important to have specific understanding of the messages we are getting. This topic is the subject of exploration in an opinion paper entitled “How do you feel? Interoception: the sense of the physiological condition of the body”, by A.D. Craig in the journal Nature Reviews. What is interoception you ask? It is one category of sensing initially classified by C.S. Sherrington in 1948. Interoception is the feeling of the internal viscera. He also described teloreception (vision and hearing), proprioception (limb position), exteroception (touch including pain and temperature) and chemoreception (smell and taste). This classification allows for a more specific description of what sense experience is occurring and yet there is still much more depth that can be understood. For instance what happens when you “feel hungry”. Most people have a sense that they feel hungry and its time to eat, but what is the feeling? Is it a slight chemical irritation? Physical tightness or some other sort of biochemical signaling. If this classification is accurate then how do we experience visceral (interoceptive) pain if pain is a function of exteroception. Obviously the categorization is limited. The level of disconnection from the body most people experience is concerning. They tend to be so preoccupied with their mental experience that their body is just treated as a vehicle that gets them from place to place while demonstrating the (hopefully not more than) occasional annoyance of pain, digestive upset or fear sensations. Having a clearer way to communicate about the subjective experiences of the body would be valuable noting that people have to notice the subjective experience first. Another fact for consideration is that a lack of experiencing or having a way to express the sensation of the internal physiologic experience can lead to more suffering. Because most people’s ability to specifically experience what is occurring and have an understanding of what is causing it they tend to ignore or suppress the awareness of the experience and their emotions about it. This generally means the reason for the insulting sensation increases until the person can no longer tolerate it which likely means it has become significantly more dangerous or entrenched. In Reorganizational Healing, Dr. Donald Epstein has created an integrated system that includes a tremendous amount of somatic awareness. Dr. Epstein has been known to say “you have to find it to fix it” and “you have to feel it to heal it”. Both of these axioms tells us that somatic awareness is necessary in order to allow suffering to be dissipated as the wisdom it is attempting to share is harvested. The author, Craig, shares an interesting perspective on the relationship between the body and emotion as well. He states that emotion is intended to create movement away from a painful stimulus and that “emotion = sensation + motivation”. This is interesting. Emotion certainly has a physical sensation that occurs with it as well as a postural shape that form the constellation of how we experience emotion. Emotion also creates an intrinsic motivation to do something. It may be something less (painful or harmful) or something more (pleasurable or rewarding). Craig states that “all of the feelings from the body are directly related to homeostatic needs and associated with behavioral motivations that are crucial for the maintenance of body integrity, and their neural representation reflects this homeostatic primacy”. What Craig is saying is that the body is constantly giving us messages on how to best stay in homeostasis. When the physical sensation is missed then the emotional sensation is triggered to produce a stronger impetus to change. From this perspective when a person ignores both the physical sensation and the emotion they are keeping themselves in harms way. Physiologically, its as if they are standing on the tracks of an approaching train with their fingers in their ears screaming “LA LA LA LA!” This sense of disconnection that so many people experience is not a new awareness to people practicing somatic based (or integrative) healing. But how do you create a change in both the form and physiology as well as the person’s perception of it? And then how do you allow for changes to occur beyond the body? Reorganizational Healing does this beautifully. In Network Spinal Analysis (NSA) the first level of care is designed to “Connect and Release”. That is allow the person to become aware of their body in a new and more profound way. This, in turn, allows them to release stored tension and allow the body to relax and move towards a more optimal state structurally and physiologically. This creates a sense of ease and safety in the body and reduces stored stress. This new baseline of ease and peace allows the practice member to now have an easier time accessing emotion. As Craig states emotion is sensation plus motivation. The physical sensation of an emotion can, in and of itself, be frightening to a person. This is especially true if they have been habitually suppressing that emotion. When a person has started to experience their body in a new way that sense of ease allows for the physical component of the emotion to be expressed more easily. This viewpoint is corroborated by Craig in the conclusions of his paper where he states Finally, this conceptual framework has strong implications for medicine. The integrated neural representation of all aspects of the condition of the body in a system responsible for homeostasis and associated with stress – including a direct cortical image of physical well-being - provides a sound epistemological foundation for treatment of pain, metabolic, eating and psychosomatic disorders. For example, this provides an easy formulation for somatization under emotional stress. Reorganizational Healing addresses this brilliantly and while addressing pain and illness are an important part of the discussion ROH takes it much further into the mind, spirit and community. Article nature/nrn/journal/v3/n8/abs/nrn894.html
Posted on: Fri, 12 Sep 2014 22:34:11 +0000
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