Pain Free Living

FROM THE VERY FIRST DAYS OF HUMAN HISTORY, success and failure, perfect health and serious illness, happiness and despair have had distinct postures. We wear our health like a cloak.

Just as a modern sailor knows how to interpret subtle changes in wind direction, currents, and cloud cover to predict weather patterns (they’ll tell you they can feel that the weather is about to change), Neolithic warrior chiefs and Roman generals could forecast the impending victory or defeat of their armies by watching the way the infantry marched into battle.

Those commanders carefully inspected their troops. They noted an uncertain gait, restricted arm swing, or labored pace, and accurately foresaw disaster ahead. Or perhaps they observed heads held high, squared shoulders, self-confidence, boundless energy, and the fierce joy that presages triumph. Pure WYSIWYG: what you see is what you get. Yet those leaders would probably have scoffed at the idea that they could read the army’s combined musculoskeletal arsenal the same way they could inspect and evaluate a battery of catapults or a squadron of cavalry. Rather, it was a regarded as a hunch, an intuition, a gut check, or maybe even a magic trick. Actually, they were tapping into a special human resource—feelings drawn from a deep pool of emotions linked to an even deeper reservoir of collective experience.

Today, the posture you see continues to be what you get—and is derived from what you feel. But many of us have been persuaded to distrust and ignore the feelings conveyed by our posture. Instead of listening to those messengers and taking heed, we try to silence them with powerful drugs, invasive medical procedures, and the opinions of others—a huge irony, since many of us are certainly descendants of men and women who were acutely aware of their own feelings, acted on them, and lived to fight another day (and pass on their genes).

Did they at least suspect that what they saw and felt was the result of musculoskeletal system balance or the lack of it? I doubt it. The body informs; it doesn’t explain. Explanations are the work of the thinking mind rather than the aware mind. Does this stimulus feel good or bad? Is it enjoyable or not? Our ancestors used their aware mind to choose the ways and means to sustain positive feelings that were being generated, or, if the feelings were negative, to avoid as best they could whatever it was that was producing bad feelings. The truth doesn’t need an explanation or expert validation; instead, it must feel right.

Have you lost your mind? Don’t bother looking under the chair. You never had one. The brain actually exists as corporel matter. A surgeon can open the skull of a living human and examine brain tissue. There is no mind, however. It’s been described—ludicrously, I believe—as an immaterial substance. A what? The mind is more usefully understood as a process of the brain for recording and organizing experience. The mind is, in effect, a faulty memory. Faulty because it leaks its contents—memories, lingering displacement patterns of energy waves associated with past events—into our consciousness instead of keeping them sealed away in the background.

The memory, as repository of non-extant stimulus, seems to be walled off from the present in other creatures; nonetheless, it informs and helps shape present actions. For instance, a hungry seagull learns that hanging out at the town dump is an easy way to get food, but the bird doesn’t consciously think about the connection, much less deliberately assign value. The stomach rumbles and wings flap to the nearest landfill. This scruffy gourmand learns to repeat a past action over and over again, but doesn’t reason. That last step—reasoning—happens only to creatures with leaky memories who have reasoned themselves into possession of a “mind” and spent the better part of a hundred thousand years developing that faculty by reliving the past and trying to control the future.

Indeed, what you see is what you get is true. And what you feel is what you get is even truer. Posture is the mechanism that guides human beings to this essential fact. Balance feels good; imbalance feels bad. Without balance you cannot access your aware mind; all emotions except fear are walled off, out of reach. But protracted periods of full-blown fear were relatively uncommon (see Chapter 4) until recently. Pleasure was a more familiar emotion, as was its linkage to success and self-confidence.

The human body is extremely sensitive to imbalance because it can only be caused by lack of adequate high-wavelength energy. Our ancestors didn’t know high-wavelength energy from Zeus’ thunderbolts, but when those marching Roman legionnaires were balanced, they consequently felt invincible. They had the inner resources—strength, stamina, and willpower—to conquer the world. Out of balance, they felt vulnerable, and they were.

By rediscovering the primary purpose of musculoskeletal system balance and achieving that balance, you are in a position to reclaim an important health legacy:

Hold on; don’t write off peace of mind as a hippy-dippy, space cadet state of goofy detachment. Peace of mind is the pillar that supports courage, wisdom, and happiness.

The exercise that you did in Chapter 2 demonstrates that peace of mind awaits your summons. When you plug into the universal power grid by balancing your posture and drawing on its high-wavelength energy, the mental and physical static quiets down; in its place are clarity and focus. The incoming energy flow smooths turbulence by augmenting and supporting the metabolic power required to renew the body’s cells. That same power is needed to fuel cells and build, maintain, and operate your many systems. This infusion of high-wavelength energy serves to remove waste, fight disease, and allow you, in general, to kick back and enjoy life’s pleasures. You are able to live in the present where the aware mind connects to feelings that accurately convey what the body needs to remain optimally healthy.

You experienced a small taste of that in Chapter 2 by briefly trying a posture-balancing exercise. If you used proper form, you may have felt the following:

• Your weight was equally balanced on both feet side to side and front to back.

• Your load-bearing joints (ankles, knees, shoulders, and hips) were vertically aligned.

• Those joints, arranged in pairs, were also aligned horizontally on parallel planar surfaces side to side.

• The head was level, riding on your neck (the top of the spine) in vertical alignment over the pelvis.

• Imaginary lines drawn through these musculoskeletal components formed ninety-degree angles and a stable but flexible, ladder-like structure.

If someone had snapped a picture of you at the time you were doing the exercise, you would have seemed younger, stronger, healthier, and happier.

Postural balance looks good—because it is good. We like the look of it because we value the feel of it even more. Far more than the comeliness or athletic talent that some people have and others lack, balance perfectly equips each individual to move freely while at the same time guarding his or her own health. Balance is not optional. Without balance, those who believe the human body cannot cope with the demands of modern life are correct. There is no substitute for postural balance.

One look at our friends Mary and Joe from Chapter 5 tells me all I need to know. They are out of balance and, consequently, badly lack energy. Their postures do not reflect age, accidents, heredity, disease, or bad habits. Diet, weekly trips to the gym, joint replacement, or exotic pharmaceutical concoctions won’t offer much lasting help. The best remedy for what ails Mary and Joe is the courage to make independent decisions based on how they feel about their health. Courage requires energy—a lot of energy. By returning to postural balance, they’ll top off their depleted energy supplies, obtain the inner resources to make corrective changes, and put an end to years of being unaware of what their bodies have been trying to tell them. They’ll have peace of mind. And in the event that those “important things” include warnings of serious illness brought on by their long-term energy deficits—which the body is hard-wired to detect—Mary and Joe will be aware of them and aware of what has to be done.

By returning to musculoskeletal system balance, they can access the flow of limitless energy that brings peace of mind, lack of fear, and strength to heal. Without balance, all of us are left in double jeopardy. We lack the high-wavelength energy to sustain our health, and don’t have the assurance—let’s hear it for national health assurance—that our bodies give us reliable feedback on whether our actions (lifestyle, choices, habits, and so on) are helping or hurting. Humans have a subtle yet immensely powerful emotional apparatus assigned to perform those missions. To be cut off from it is a sad fate for creatures that have clocked more than a million years by relying on the emotional feel of things rather than the think of things (to borrow a phrase attributed to Stanley Kubrick, the great film director).

I do not see it as a choice between modern medical care and faith healing. Yes, faith is involved—faith in yourself, faith in your innate ability to act in your own best interest. Yet, faith does not preclude using technology or expertise as long as your emotional radar is switched on. As complicated as medical treatment has become, you can still keep faith with the body’s unerring wisdom, but only if you regain and maintain balance and listen to its messages.

Still have doubts about the essential role of postural balance? I’m not surprised. Don’t take my word for it—words rely too heavily on the think of things. Get the feel of it for yourself, and then you’ll be ready to live well and do it with peace of mind.