Pain Free Living

NOT THAT I’M BRAGGING, but I don’t look my age—and neither do you. Both of us are 13.7 billion years old, give or take 200 million.

We are built to last, literally constructed out of debris: space junk, to be blunt. You and I have the good fortune to be nothing less than 100 percent energy produced at the creation of the universe.

Who we are varies from person to person; what we are is the ultimate in basic material. Energy is—it just is. It doesn’t grow, procreate, subdivide, or pop out of a magic lamp. It simply exists, and is neither newly concocted nor in danger of being destroyed. Energy can move from place to place (or remain in place), and be changed from one form to another. In the process, energy performs work, exclusively as motion or movement. You—that is, as kinetic energy, without an ego, a face-lift, and a fashionable zip code—will always exist, be on the move, and be at work (unless you are stored or potential energy, and then you’ll get a break from work until you become kinetic energy again).

“Creation” has become a loaded word. Created when, we may ask, by whom or by what? Were we created by God; the big bang; the teeny, tiny bubbles of the primordial swamp; or something else? Take your pick. If you believe that the big bang was the source of all creation, then the age of the universe is estimated to be about 14 billion years, when what scientists call a “singularity”—finite matter so dense it compacted down into infinitely dense matter—suddenly exploded.

The Bubble universe attempts to account for the pre-bang existence of so-called infinitely dense matter derived from finite matter. Basically, it means that a foam or froth, stirred up by energy fluctuation in a parent universe, formed a tiny bubble that grew until it accumulated enough mass to spin off galactic structures and eventually life-forms, either before or after a sudden, huge expansion.

The bubble-and-bang process probably adds another 15 billion years or more to the age of our universe. It is guesswork, however. Thanks to astronomer Edwin Hubble, we now “know” that all matter in space has been proportionately expanding from one single flash point or event. Theologians have their own time lines. The Torah, or the Judaic holy book, for example, puts the age of the universe at about 5,760 years.

So, in a very real sense, we are all in the same big boat. We are like Dalande, the ghost in Richard Wagner’s opera Der Fliegende Holländer, doomed to sail forever.

From an energy standpoint, we’re all on a very long voyage. If the concept of immortality does not appeal to your sensibilities, would it suit you to have eighty, ninety, or a hundred years or more of perfect health? Energy tosses the whole idea of chronic disease and aging right out the window. Energy doesn’t get sick or old. Energy moves, yet there are no moving parts like those in a clock or an internal combustion engine, no sprockets and levers that can wear out or break. Instead, there are various expressions of energy, some working one way, some another. For example, when you digest breakfast, this stokes the cellular ATP boiler that converts the bacon and eggs into adenosine 5'-diphosphate, the metabolic fuel used to power the body’s cells. Meanwhile, others are busy repairing your stockpile of various specialized proteins—perhaps twenty thousand per cell—which undergo heavy wear and tear from basic tasks such as muscular contraction and respiration. Nothing is broken, diseased, or wrong; energy is merely doing its job in various anatomical and physiological structures. This work includes building, maintaining, and animating the body’s structures, since energy was involved in their creation in the first place. A constant interplay of action and reaction takes place as particles, waves, forces, and force fields carom off one another; become ripples, torrents, and tsunami; raise and lower temperatures; set fires, and trigger chemical reactions and combinations that even the maddest of mad scientists couldn’t dream up.

I am going to use a pocketful of metaphors to explain what happens to the energy in our bodies.

Matter tends to be both pushy and sticky. By “pushy,” I mean that it can use the equivalent of head-butts to abruptly alter the status quo. Particle energy collides with or zooms past slow-moving matter (and sometimes slips around loosely packed molecules and runs straight through without making contact), which tends to bring on a quick, dramatic reorganization of the neighborhood in which it’s traveling. Imagine a toddler pouncing into the middle of a flock of feeding pigeons. To understand “sticky,” think of objects that have mass attraction to one another. The greater the mass, the greater the attraction.

Gravitational attraction acts as a glue between newly arriving energy to existing matter, layer by layer. This sort of attraction encourages the creation of many different forms of matter and can help transform a stagnant, primordial puddle, for instance, into a chowder teeming with life. Billions of years of pushy and sticky churned up these ingredients, combined with extreme temperatures and pressure to help jump-start single-celled life-forms.

Energy vibrates by moving through space in zigs and zags, like the teeth of a serrated knife. There are sharp peaks and narrow valleys—the steeper and deeper the declivities, the more potent the energy. In other words, the serrated blade is sharper because the cutting edge is longer and moves faster and more efficiently. There may be hundreds more peaks and valleys. Ultra-high-wavelength energy zooms past low-wavelength energy because sluggish energy has negligible gravitation attraction. It may twitch or throb but doesn’t solidly bond to the incoming energy. Its mass is too spongy.

All life prospers or perishes as a result of its ability to make productive use of this swirl of energy. The failure rate is high. Eventually everything that lives dies—yet its energy is here, there, and everywhere to stay. Meanwhile, extinction—the wholesale elimination of particular life-forms—seems to be in the cards. In the short run, fewer than one-tenth of 1 percent have made the cut since life on Earth began about four billion years ago. There have been millions—one estimate is 30 billion—of now-you-see-them-now-you-don’t species, many lasting seconds and a relatively few others holding on for centuries. Today, estimates of the number of living species of plants, insects, animals, and “organic others” (not counting all the tiniest of the tiny multitude of micro-organisms) range upward from five to thirty million. The as-yet-undead are extraordinarily, and improbably, lucky to have lasted so long.

The casualties all lost the ability to change internally, a non-negotiable requirement that allows for the continual accommodation of the fluctuating external flow of incoming energy. For a while, reproduction and hereditary gene transfer go on, though it is more than likely that the processes are gradually compromised until systemic equilibrium and viability weaken and collapse.

The premature aging and death of an individual are similar to the extinction of an entire species. John, for instance, was a high-powered Washington lobbyist who, in his twenties and thirties, managed the stress of his demanding professional life by running every morning and working out at the gym several times a week. He loved his routine—for good reason. Incoming energy (stress, including fatigue, cellular damage, and other ramifications of a toxic lifestyle) was counteracted by the release of internal energy stored in the muscles, which boosted John’s heart rate, metabolism, and cell replacement cycle. In other words, by working out regularly, John deliberately made an internal change take place. His physiological systems were working smoothly in balance. Yet, for some reason— “too busy” is the usual suspect—he started cutting back on running and visits to the gym. Gradually, there was more incoming stressful change and less internal balancing change. Cells died at a higher and higher rate, their efficiency declined, and subtle alterations of all of his physiological processes took place. John started to feel the effects, so he resorted to vodka to adjust his internal chemistry. Drinkers think they are imbibing to make merry or to unwind, yet what they are actually doing is desperately fiddling with their body fluids. Ethanol is matter; hence, it is energy. However, not much work is accomplished by drinking alcohol, other than a quick alteration of mood and, more insidiously, an interference in oxygen intake, blood composition, and liver function. As a result, stress gets the upper hand. The cumulative imbalance from incoming change swamped John’s health. He died of colon cancer at the age of fifty-two.

Millions of women and men like John prematurely age, sicken, and die because their health loses balance and is unable to bring about routine internal changes that once took place in the course of daily life. Historically, when bad weather wiped out an important food crop, business as usual came to a halt: people migrated, ate grasshoppers, or plundered their neighbors. When all else failed, they starved. Change—behavioral change—was imperative, and they knew it.

Even so, some changes are out of reach, which may be the very reason dinosaurs became extinct. There is convincing evidence that a gigantic dust cloud, kicked up when a meteor the size of Times Square slammed into the Earth, probably doomed large dinosaurs by blotting out the sun’s rays. The lack of sun killed plants, which in turn killed plant-eating animals, and so on up the food chain. The voracious reptiles were unable to change their internal requirement for readily available calories. Adios, T. Rex.

But other forms of life did change and survive. In such cases, a change in behavior was involved. When John changed by giving up running and working out, he was really acting like a giant, bad-tempered reptile with a tiny brain. He kept stressing his body, provoking the need for internal change, and stopped providing precisely the kind of behavioral response that accomplishes the necessary internal change. Why? Not stupidity. My answer is that John allowed himself to be distracted by a modern lifestyle that drowns out the most essential messages delivered by his senses—for example, important news flashes such as: This feels good, keep it up! That feels bad, stop right now!

Not only was John smart enough to know that running and reasonably strenuous and varied, regular physical workouts were the right things to do, his posture supplied graphic evidence just in case he was not thinking straight, not receiving the sensory messages. The stiff joints and short-windedness he experienced after giving up his exercise routine were handwriting on the wall, but he misread the message. They were signs all right, but not of aging.

Nature rewards efficiency and punishes inefficiency. Gathering infirmity for weeks, months, and years is colossally inefficient. What is the point of wasting valuable resources—food, fresh water, and shelter—on someone who is weak and soon headed for the grave? On the contrary, sudden death by way of accidents and plagues of virulent disease are far more rational in that the fewer mouths to feed, the better. Logic strongly suggests, therefore, that humans were built for either a very long life or a very short one. The vain among us may scoff, but facial wrinkles do not mean that the end is near; however, a dysfunctional, collapsing musculoskeletal system usually does. Posture is the equivalent of the gasoline gauge in the dashboard of a car. A quick glance revealed to our early ancestors who among them was fit to fight, bear and nurture children, and work hard enough to prosper in the face of adversity.

John could feel his good health draining away. He could see it as well. Unfortunately, the lobbyist who never forgot a face couldn’t remember what his deteriorating posture meant. Just as a building verges on collapse when its load-bearing floors and walls slump, tilt, and buckle, the musculoskeletal system that loses its horizontal and vertical structures is teetering on the edge of disintegration. Without symmetrical muscular support our essential, gravity-defying, ninety-degree angles give way, leaving the head, shoulders, hips, and knees wobbling, grinding, and gyrating until smooth, strong, spontaneous movement becomes more and more difficult. When posture is no longer fully erect, balanced, flexible, aligned, and well supported by strong muscles from head to foot, the entire physiological package is flatlining. Breathing is compromised, the heart works harder, the colon struggles. Everything gets disrupted.

John regarded his slow-motion, cataclysmic collapse as a natural consequence of living a stressful three or four decades. His unschooled but eminently observant ancient ancestors would have looked at a brother or sister in the same condition and begun setting aside firewood for a funeral pyre.

As a community, humankind has been getting smarter, more knowledgeable, even wiser about its energy heritage, but it has taken more than seven thousand years. As early as 5000 BCE, spiritual practitioners in what we today call India recognized that Prana, a form of energy, an invisible and powerful life force, is a central causal fact of existence. Notice I didn’t suggest that the gurus “discovered” or “invented” Prana. Human beings, ancient and modern, inherently know and trust energy because they can feel its vitality without intermediation or indoctrination, and they are capable of full awareness of its gifts. From time to time, however, the thinking mind—possessed of a tendency to upstage the feeling mind—sets out to dethrone energy on the grounds that it is not objective.

If your mother says she loves you, you may take it at face value, but Western science demands proof in the form of carefully defined, observable standards of verification that remain true in all cases. Proof doesn’t resort to opinion, bias, or emotion. We’re taught to deal in cold, hard facts, even if those facts clash with personal experience or gut instinct. In other words, the objectivists have gone outside of themselves by ignoring the feel (the personal emotional content) of what they’re directly experiencing. Instead, they attempt to evaluate their own experiences by secondhand criteria endorsed and prescribed by committees of researchers.

From about the mid-seventeenth century to the mid-twentieth century, Western society was hung up on using a clock or some other intricate mechanical contraption as a model—an object serving as an objective standard—to explain how most things worked, including human health. Newtonian science looked at the world and saw the equivalent of whirring sprockets, wheels within wheels, springs that sprang, and levers that lifted, all governed by laws and forces that could be mathematically plotted and summoned to objectively explain the deepest mysteries.^* Seen from this perspective, the world is the sum total of its many component parts. But to understand any complex natural phenomenon you have to take it apart and keep taking the parts apart until you come to the smallest bits of matter, which behave predictably based on their position in space, their mass, and their velocity.

Isaac Newton, 1642–1727, formulated the law of gravitation. Newton’s The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy is often regarded as the most influential book ever written. It showed how a universal force, gravity, applied to all objects in all parts of the universe, and how it also formulated the three laws of motion.

Newton laid the groundwork for classical mechanics, which is the basis of modern engineering. He was far and away the leading scientist in Britain and Europe by the late 1600s.

What the Newtonians didn’t count on was that small just keeps getting smaller. In due course, quantum physicists detected matter so minuscule, it behaved not like a clock, but like something that had the feel—a highly subjective feel—of energy: entangled beams of light, swarms of molecular fragments, and torrents of disobedient subatomic matter that defy objective science by acting like waves when they are supposed to be particles, and vice versa. Eventually, scientists discovered that matter shrank until it entirely disappeared, only to instantly reappear thousands of miles away and challenge Albert Einstein’s twentieth-century contention that nothing travels faster than the speed of light. Predictability went out the window; quantum theorists started concocting outlandish ideas that they admitted couldn’t be proven. Suddenly, Prana didn’t seem so crazy after all.

Sleeping when we are tired, eating when we are hungry, and subtly modifying our diet to counteract nutritional deficiencies (a summer of leaner fish in the place of winter’s fattier red meat) are vestiges of our subconscious, instinctive, self-adjusting health awareness.

The widespread use of electricity disrupted our awareness of our own health, including our sleep patterns. Meanwhile, processed foods and beverages began to manipulate our sensory perceptions of what we eat. Excessive amounts of salt, fat, and sweeteners are shamelessly used to trick people into making unhealthful choices. Widespread obesity is not an illness—it is evidence of a crime. Does that mean I think we should lock up all the evil food producers? No. We need to return to our health awareness and stop eating their harmful products.

The way the body operates can be compared to a clock, but in modern medical terms, it is akin to a malfunctioning Timex in need of an expert watchmaker. Why? One reason is that the medical establishment has a vested interest in its own success. Like any other industry, to be successful, medicine needs customers—that is, people who believe in the expertise of their doctors.

In addition, human beings are superb toolmakers. Since the invention of the hammer and the wheel, we have employed new tools to extend our control of the environment and to reshape reality. Like Archimedes’ lever and fulcrum, our innovative tools move the world by doing what had once been impossible. Micro-medicine, whether it is diagnostic, surgical, or pharmaceutical, thrives on new tools. The notion of fixing or replacing defective body parts as the way to good health grew very slowly, but eventually it took hold. What initially seemed impossible became likely, and even more important, seemed necessary.

Over time, thanks to humankind’s tool-making talents, there was a reduction in work effort. There was less walking, stooping, carrying loads, climbing, vigorous hand-and-arm engagement, and the rest of the physical repertoire that had once taken men, women, and children through a full range of motion each day. In its place came an increasingly settled, prosperous toolmaking culture, with each successive generation quietly losing small though vital amounts of musculoskeletal system balance.

Physicians are probably dumped on more than any other elite profession, with the possible exception of lawyers. This is in contrast to the respect people had in an earlier era toward men with a black bag—and a smaller number of women, many of them midwives. The affection for likeable, empathetic, less-is-more medicos who made house calls lives on as nostalgia, for the old-time country doc’s most powerful medicines were his listening skills, gentle common sense, patience, and bedside manner. This contrasts with the current images of a physician, which tend to be more synonymous with impersonal standards of care and invasive methods of treatment.

What happens when balance goes? There is less energy available to grow, maintain, and sustain the body; physiological systems are under more and more stress; chronic health problems multiply; and the instinctive awareness of the body’s health needs is drowned out by fear.

After many years, fear eventually opened the door to Newtonian medical science becoming the dominant Western health-care model. The toolmakers joined forces with the watchmakers. Fearful, running low on energy thanks in part to rapid urbanization and massive industrialization, our ancestors’ thinking minds prevailed over their feeling minds. They began to think the body was like all machines, made up of smaller and smaller parts that were prone to breaking down. If experts were needed to build, run, and repair the mechanical marvels that moved freight, milled grain, and loomed textiles, it followed logically that experts were needed to rebuild, repair, and run the human health machine. Non-experts stepped aside to allow those with specialized knowledge and training in objective medical science to take over. Thus did once-lowly shamans and herbalists, midwives and barbers, tinkers, alchemists, and quacks evolve into educated, respected, wealthy, and licensed members of the ruling elite.

A combination of engineering and alchemy sprang up to replace a more passive form of medical care that had been practiced by a quasi-priesthood at ease with miracles (not to mention a willingness to foist off cheap tricks for the sake of a quick profit) and an emphasis on spiritual healing as a foundation for physical well-being.

For a time, the new tools and the procedures in medicine co-existed with human awareness. Doctors were in short supply; the average person rarely saw one. And why bother? The body’s own predisposition to cure and care for itself prevailed more often than not, and the placebo effect helped save many who otherwise would have been killed by bumbling apprentices. As trial-and-error experience accumulated, crude, superficial, and relatively benign medical technology was wielded by many kind and prudent men and women who knew better than to risk overly drastic treatment. They gave medicine a good name. But as medical practitioners learned how to control pain, blood loss, and infection, the techniques grew bolder and more invasive. By the mid-nineteenth century, a quick march was underway toward a dominant and domineering Newtonian model.

At the same time, the manual labor required in an agrarian culture—digging, plowing, reaping, lifting, carrying, weaving, and building cottages or castles—gave way to the Industrial Revolution, with its heavier reliance on mechanical tools that emphasized less sustained physical movement, and therefore decreased strength and endurance. A shovel, for instance, is a hand tool—and a high-tech one in its first days—that helped the hands dig deeper holes faster, but powerful muscles and coordination were still essential to its proper use. A steam shovel, on the other hand, does the digging while the operator sits and moves levers and foot pedals. Fewer (and different) muscles are involved; the close interaction of joints, nerves, and physiological processes, including metabolism and respiration, changes in both minor and major ways.

Until the Industrial Revolution, manpower and womanpower did the work. In other words, the movement of the human body produced energy. In just a few decades, technology changed that, liberated humankind from drudgery, and started a de-conditioning process that has drastically affected human health. Urbanization and industrialization have eliminated at least 50 percent of the muscular and skeletal movement that was once routine. Overcrowding and primitive conditions were indeed factors in causing devastating outbreaks of diseases like bubonic plague, but urban dwellers were threatened by another scourge: lack of motion.

By chasing after smaller and smaller physiological components, systems, and processes deemed to be diseased and defective, the latter-day Newtonians set off an explosion of costly medical technology that promises to make the care it offers us as unaffordable as it is dangerous. Your body, ever aware, even if your thinking mind is not, is still trying to make itself heard.

What I am suggesting is to “feel” your way toward musculoskeletal system balance and move away from the broken-clock analogy. I believe you can do it because I have done it myself and now know the incredible peace of mind of good health. I have helped many other people make the same journey.

The very fact that you are still reading this book indicates that you are evaluating my message by the “feel” of it rather than just the “think” of it. In terms of the thinking mind, Newton was a brilliant conceptualizer and abstract thinker. But your body is even smarter. It won’t let you die without fully deploying its genius for survival.

I almost wrote, “It won’t let you die without a fight,” but I don’t feel comfortable with health-as-warfare metaphors. The body is far too wise to seek war. It goes toward peace—a state that can be achieved only by postural balance.

* Newton was not necessarily a Newtonian—he was way too smart for that. The clock metaphor would probably have struck him as simple-minded. Lesser mortals needed an intellectual crutch to understate what the great man meant by terms like “acceleration,” “velocity,” “friction,” “position,” and the like.