My Feldenkrais healing

Sunday afternoon on the drive home from Ann Arbor, where we had been to visit the little family--Vic went to fix things in the house and I went to get my monthly Hazel fix--I realized that on the previous evening, Saturday, I had experienced a healing. Not a mental or spiritual healing—though that came with it—but an actual physical healing. My body was suddenly in a much better state than it had been before.

I didn’t know that I needed more healing. I thought I was fine. The treatment I had received in the hospital last month had worked. I was fully functional. But my daughter, who is a Feldenkrais practitioner, asked Saturday whether I wanted her to work on me.

I never refuse Joanna’s Functional Integration (FI) treatments. Sometimes, when I have musculoskeletal pain or just feel a little cramped up, I ask Joanna for an FI if we’re together. I was not aware of discomfort on Saturday. Maybe a little pain in my right hip. But a Feldenkrais session is one of those things that can do you good whether you think you need it or not. I always rise from Joanna’s table put together in a different way, body parts more mobile and properly stacked and coordinated. I walk better. I look down and see my chest instead of my belly. I sleep better. I am “functionally integrated.”

But the Saturday session was special. First, it revealed pain, a lot of it. Every muscle that she touched in large sections of my back, chest, side, and legs cried out in pain. I did not know this pain was there. Where did it come from?

With very gentle probing and manipulation, subtle adjustments, a little pushing here and there, matching this point on my sternum with that point on my back, pulling this leg gently and turning that one slightly, and many other mysterious operations—skills she has learned and that she applies intuitively—Joanna proceeded to untie all those knots.

Usually I do not feel the effect of an FI until I rise from the table and walk. This time, however, I felt a progressive release in my body as she worked. My body had been cold, frozen ground. Suddenly it was spring thaw and plowing was going on.

It was so dramatic that it was not altogether pleasant. I suddenly became cold, started shivering violently. She covered me with a blanket and called on her husband and father, both energy healers, to help contain and shift my chi as she finished. At the end I was bundled off to bed under warm quilts, still shivering, where I slept for 10 hours and dreamed of a large Victorian house under repair. It was fixed up on the outside but only partially restored on the inside. It was the first pleasant dream I had had since my health crisis.

It was the dream that clued me in to what had happened. The previous healing, the hospital healing, aided by the energy boost I wrote about in the last post, was only partial. My body still retained, in dozens of muscles, the trauma of a near-death experience. I was not conscious of this. I didn’t even feel this tension and pain. The Feldenkrais technique, skillfully and intuitively wielded by my daughter, both revealed and released the pain. And now I am aware of feeling much better than I did before, much better than I thought possible.

This made me think about the essential complementarity of conventional medicine and all the “alternatives.” Conventional medicine can cure and even heal—but can it heal completely? I wonder. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if every patient who came out of the hospital was treated to a series of Functional Integration sessions? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if doctors knew about all the complementary alternatives, routinely prescribed them, and insurance companies routinely paid for them?

We may be getting there. Today's email brings this newsletter from WebMD on acupuncture, one of the alternatives that is going mainstream. But science, medicine, and insurance are slow to accept  practices that fall outside their boxes, even though they may carry far less risk than conventional treatments. I, for one, am willing to experiment.