Dana Foundation Blog: Using Mirrors to Reduce Arthritis Pain.
I find it fascinating that by showing people a healthy limb in a mirror, they can remake their maps of their own bodies and gain functionality. Before now, mirror therapy has been useful for amputees. Now it’s being extended to those with osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis.
I wonder what other kinds of mirror therapy are waiting to be discovered.
This blog post isn’t about anything especially far out. It’s actually pretty ordinary. It’s about injuries and pain and a book I came across in my studies that I like a lot. It’s very left-brained — and very practical.
Listen to Your Pain: The Active Person’s Guide to Understanding, Identifying, and Treating Pain and Injury is one of my textbooks in massage school. It’s not written for massage therapists, but I know I will find it useful.
I recommend this book for anyone who leads an active or adventurous life, who might occasionally experience falls, twists, or other accidents, who wants to know more about what’s going on.
I wish I had had this book in my library years ago. You might need to have a certain kind of information-freak mindset like me to appreciate this, but it could increase your understanding of your own body, save your medical dollars, and give you realistic information about what kind of time and attention it takes to heal from an injury.
Most of the injuries I’ve had have come from things like falls, bike wrecks, dance, yoga, running, pulling the lawnmower cord, a car wreck, and so on. Some like plantar fasciitis have crept up on me. It would have been helpful to me to be able to learn more about what was happening under my skin. One thing I’ve discovered in massage school is that most of us know very little about what’s going on inside our own bodies.
Before massage school, I used books like The Anatomy of Movement and The Key Muscles of Yoga to help me understand my body better. In fact, referring to books like that probably helped draw me toward massage school and more study of anatomy. I love the drawings and the insight I get, and the language is a wonderful skill to acquire.
Here’s how Listen to Your Pain can be useful. Say you begin to experience knee pain. This could be obviously from something that happened, or it could be knee pain that gradually appears and worsens for no discernable reason, or maybe it comes and goes.
You can use this book to identify which structure in your knee is injured, how this injury usually occurs, ways to verify that you have this injury and not another, how long it could take to heal, what you can do yourself (ice, rest), what a massage therapist or doctor can do (deep frictioning, injections, surgery), and rehabilitative exercises.
The chapter on the knee is 54 pages long. It describes the anatomy of the knee joint and includes a drawing with arrows pointing to sites on the knee where injuries are felt to help you identify your injury. Fourteen specific knee injuries are described along with descriptions of several other knee injuries and conditions that are more difficult to pinpoint.
Each of the injuries includes a description of what it is, how and why this injury can occur, a drawing of the anatomy involved, ways to test whether you have this injury with drawings, and treatment choices.
The treatment choices section describes the self-treatments you can do — waiting it out, limiting activity, icing, and so on. The author gives some rough guidelines for healing time — for example, for Pain on the Outside of the Knee (Lateral Collateral Ligament Tear), which can happen to yogis who spend a lot of time in the lotus position, it may take three weeks to three months to heal, depending on how severely the ligament is torn. He also lists possible medical treatments and exercises to strengthen the injured tissues.
Note that the book does not include ultrasound or acupuncture as possible medical treatments because the author was not familiar enough with them to include them. The book is purely Western medicine in orientation. From my experience, those modalities can be very helpful for injuries, so don’t rule them out. Maybe the 3rd edition will include them!
The author of Listen to Your Pain is Ben E. Benjamin, a Ph.D. in sports medicine and education. He studied with Dr. James Cyriax, the father of orthopedic medicine. This book has been around for 25 years and is in its second edition.
I’ll be doing my 50-hour internship at The Lauterstein-Conway Massage School starting in December and ending in early February. I’ve created a page on my blog, Massage Internship Schedule, where you can see my schedule so that if you like, you can schedule a massage with me.
The school and clinic are located at 4701-B Burnet Road, behind Phoenicia Bakery, in central Austin. Student massages are $35 for 60-minutes, no tipping allowed.
Regular massage — weekly, biweekly, monthly, or every six weeks — not only feels good, it’s very therapeutic for the body. It lessens stress, pain, back aches, injuries, headaches, and fatigue.
Regular massage reduces blood pressure, improves circulation, strengthens the immune system, elevates mood, and relaxes. It stimulates the nervous system and helps maintain general health.
Plus, it feels good!
Ninety percent of doctor visits are stress-related. Imagine what getting a regular massage — very affordable at this rate — could do for your health and well-being.
I’d love to see you there and work on you.
Charlie Todd: The shared experience of absurdity | Video on TED.com.
You’d have to be humorless not to enjoy this video! Thanks, Keith Fail, for sharing.
Yesterday I got certified in CPR and first aid as part of my training to become a massage therapist.
I’ve been certified several times in the past. It’s gotten simpler as doctors learned more about what really works and refined the curriculum. It’s pretty damn simple now.
These days, the real value of CPR is to keep someone’s heart going until you can use a defibrillator on them. About 70% of the time, an AED saves a life.
There’s a free smart phone app called “handsonlycpr” that you can install. Even if you’re not trained in CPR, if you see someone collapse, and they’re not responsive and not breathing, this little app will help you dial 911, and then it will show you where to push and tell you how often with a beep.
If you’re giving CPR and aren’t sure how fast to push, here’s all you need to keep the rhythm. May this song get stuck in your head at exactly the right time!
The Biology of Meditation. | elephant journal.
Lisa Wimberger provides a Cliff’s Notes version of the book Power Up Your Brain: The Neuroscience of Enlightenment, by David Perlmutter and Alberto Villoldo.
Excerpt:
Stress, trauma and the health perils associated with those states all begin and get perpetuated in the limbic brain, which is comprised of the hippocampus, hypothalamus and amygdala. These are responsible for making our emotional connections outside of logic, taking snapshots of life, creating our dream state experiences, turning on our fight-or-flight response, and storing and delivering emotional information independent of time. The limbic system cannot discern past, present, or future — each “picture” it accesses is experienced by the body as though it’s current.
Fasting and/or a low-calorie diet, antioxidants, voluntary exercise, and meditation are key ways to turn down the limbic brain.
About meditation, she says…
…it is found that those who meditate or enter states of trance have increased blood flow to their pre-frontal cortex (PFC). This area of the brain is the executive decision maker, but is not quite the same as the neo-cortex “logic” mind. The PFC is activated on EKGs during states of compassion, inspiration, motivation and love. It has the ability to project and envision a future reward. It is the part of the brain responsible for motivating us to attain our goals and dreams. Blood flow to the PFC decreases when blood flow to the limbic brain increases.
Best Careers 2011: Massage Therapist – US News and World Report.
Massage therapy is considered one of the 50 best careers of 2011, according to US News and World Report, and it is expected to have strong growth over the next decade.
The Yoga of Protest. | elephant journal.
Here’s a yogic take on the Occupy Wall Street movement. Excerpt:
In the midst of all this muddle, a yogic concept called ananda popped into my head. Ananda is Sanskrit; it is one of the highest purposes of Anusara Yoga, and can be translated as deep joy, deep expressiveness, or bliss. It can also be understood as “loving acceptance of what is.”
It hurts to think about practicing this idea in relation to what the Occupy Wall Street protesters are pointing at. It hurts to think about lovingly accepting the deep dysfunction and suffering that is occurring in this world. If I imagine doing that, my heart feels like it might stretch and break. Yet it is what the mystics call for us to do, to love what is hurting us, to empathize with our torturers. Not blindly, naively or passively, but powerfully, radiantly and compassionately.
All of us, 99% and 1%, need to be loved. We need to be seen in our wholeness. Our suffering, yes, our greatness.
One evening this past week, I received a special honor. I got to do changework and bodywork with someone who has done changework and bodywork with me. I’m not going to provide any identifying information out of respect for her privacy. Think of this as a case study: it really happened, but you will never be able to tell whose experience it was, and in any case, it doesn’t really matter.
I’m writing this session up to illustrate what I am offering in my private practice: changework combined with bodywork.
Most everyone is at least familiar with what bodywork and massage are. Changework is less known. You can think of it as a kind of coaching, with applications for managing stress, becoming more relaxed, changing your stories, shelving beliefs that no longer apply, clarifying, removing obstacles, getting unstuck, achieving goals, knowing yourself, expanding, transforming emotions, and more.
I have some training and experience I can draw on, but mostly I listen to understand and offer support for a client to explore and find movement toward resolution. Sometimes just being really listened to makes a huge difference. Sometimes a client just needs another point of view. Sometimes a question or two can open up a whole new direction. Sometimes a technique can help.
When a positive shift has occurred, we move into the bodywork part of a session — to literally embody the change.
My client had overdone it with some physical activity and then made a ducking, twisting movement — and her back started spasming. After several days, the spasms were entirely gone and she went back to work…and they returned. She understood then that the spasms were probably tied to something else.
She had already done significant work on this before we met. She examined what had been happening emotionally before the injury occurred — especially in regard to work, because the spasms resumed when she went back to work.
She had been feeling irritated about some of her clients not taking care of themselves despite all she had put into their sessions. (This experience is pretty universal among health care providers.) She was just being with this awareness, not knowing what she was going to do about it, when she overdid it and started having back spasms. She put resolving this issue on hold.
Once she identified the unresolved issue, bringing it into the light, she made some changes in her work, and a deeper level of healing began.
She was still feeling like more exploration was needed when she came to me.
I asked how I could help, and she said maybe we could do a little tapping — EFT, the Emotional Freedom Technique. I shared with her a version I like, and she tapped away as we talked.
With EFT, you identify what you are feeling. Behind the irritability, she recognized that she felt sad about not being able to help.
I asked if she could really know that she wasn’t helping these clients, and she said no.
Sometimes people have to step in the hole again (or a thousand times; see Groundhog Day, one of my favorite movies) before they walk around it.
When someone finally makes a decision (or the decision makes itself) to walk around the hole, changing has become more attractive than not changing. Her clients’ experiences of her own healthy vibrancy, her work, and her commitment to well-being are of course part of the force-field that makes changing to healthier habits more attractive. It just might take them awhile to really be ready, though.
On her own, she came up with an inspiring course to take — if some of her clients are choosing the shadow over the light, and she’s resisting them doing that, then maybe now is a great time for her to examine her own shadow side.
Brilliant. Perfect for the season, too, as the nights get longer.
Then she got on the table, and I gave her a deep massage, which she had not previously experienced. She loved 9 points (TLC people, if you’re reading this, you’ll know what I mean). I reached some back muscle tenderness and melted into it.
She blissed out on the table, and I finished working on her, and we talked a little more, and she slipped away into the night — until we meet again.
The Well: bodymindheartspirit 