Where is health? (Part 4)

Something profoundly mysterious happens from conception onward. A Knowing in the tissues and fluids that precedes genetic unfolding.  “This force inside the fluid actually contains the idea of the form of the human body, whether it’s a kidney or vertebra or eye, and it brings it into manifestation. Then the genes modify it.” (James Jealous, DO, Cranial osteopath, from Alternative  Therapies, Vol 3, No 1, January 1997)

I will be quoting from this wonderful interview with one of the pillars of biodynamic cranial osteopathy a fair bit in this fourth blog post because it keeps honing my central inquiry: “where is health?” in a way that deeply resonates with what I perceive when I hold and witness Health in my relationship and gentle hand contact with clients’ bodies.

“The embryo knows what to do”, repeats embryologist Jaap Van Der Wal during his renowned course ‘The embryo in us’. We come from a society and a way of thinking and being that places the brain and the nervous system on a pedestal, but the brain did not make us. The neural tube which will become our spine and later our brain does not begin to form until week four and will take months to be functional. Our nervous system responds to and is moulded by forces of creation in sync with all other dynamic processes in our organism. It is one of the instruments being played in a magnificently complex symphony. Doubtless one of the major ones (although there is no hierarchy, that’s a projection of our top down competitive mindset) but definitely not the conductor. Something else orchestrates the Whole that knows and remembers ‘blueprint’ as BCST Anna Chitty would say, or our “originality” to borrow from James Jealous.

So that a biodynamic craniosacral session is a re-membering of this “originality”. The original form-making Knowing underpinned by Health’s constant organising and creating, reorganising and recreating. Why should it suddenly stop at birth? We know it doesn’t. We learn at school that our nervous system, our cranial bones, our sacrum continue to evolve and form way after birth, but everything else in our bodies moves, changes, and evolves throughout our lives. Nothing is ever complete or completed. We are beings in constant dynamic creative and regenerative process.

Life is continuous cellular, tissue, fluid movement: friction, oscillation, spiralling, flowing, sliding, gliding, tensile, flexible, resistance, pressure, ’rhythmic interchange’, interdependent and intertwined. Nothing is static, even inertia. The apparent ‘immobility’ of compressed tissues carries within it the seeds of emerging motion ready to germinate. Like a stone in a river, what is dense and motionless in our tissues may move to a different rhythm, a different time (deep time in the case of a stone), but its very presence influences how fluids organise around it and this(these) relationship(s) themselves denote multidimensional and multidirectional motion; an ‘interface’ between various expressions of Health’s Intelligence which finds balance, an equilibrium also called homeostasis. An equilibrium which keeps evolving because the fluids and tissues themselves keep changing. 

“The health maintenance organisation that we’re all looking for is what makes an embryo,” explains Jealous. “It generates and maintains life.” We, alternative health practitioners, and I can mainly speak about biodynamic craniosacral practitioners here, offer what Jealous calls “an alternative perception of the world, not just disease. It’s a way of life.” Health in this paradigm is not the absence of disease. “We are not listening for symptoms but for a pre-established priority set in motion by the Health in the patient.” In this sense, we facilitate the resurgence of Health as the midwife of this “originality” birthing anew in every moment. 

Healing is not getting rid of illness, it is “the emergence of originality.”(Jealous)

Like breath, Health cannot be diseased because Health is blueprint not imprint. It may be distorted, ‘colonised’ by ancestral and current historical forces at play at any given time and place but it remains essentially present wherever life and living matter abound throughout Earth.

As Jealous nicely encapsulates: “The blueprint to get the patient well is there because the thing that made the body is the thing that sets up the blueprint.” 

Health seeks balance, homeostasis but it doesn’t mean this will happen without disease still being present. I have felt Health forcefully express in terminally ill patients. I have not had the experience, like other BCSTs including James Jealous, of witnessing and accompanying the ultimate letting go of death. Jealous and at least two other practitioners of my acquaintance speak to sensing the force of Health continue to express after the patient drew their last breath.

“The disease process is an intelligent decision made by the breath of life [a phrase borrowed from the Bible to name the whole body primary respiration which breathes us throughout our lives] to protect the organism from destroying the whole of itself. Disease is not the enemy. It’s an intelligent, wise decision to come into balance.”

And Health is intertwined with it until a practitioner holds and facilitates the possibility of gentle transformation or as James Jealous says of “transubstantiation”: “changing the physical force into another form of force it can deal with. At a certain point of softening, very quickly, like the snap of a finger it switches into another form of energy.”

I have felt this many times. This awe-inspiring transmutation, akin to alchemy because what felt like base opaque metal becomes translucent golden glow. The frequency, texture, and size even of what expresses changes completely to make way to something which underlies, sustains and embraces the whole organism and beyond. Some of my clients have called it a ‘coming home to oneself’, our original Home. But what was ‘stuck’, painful, diseased was also balanced intelligence as it protected “the organism from destroying the whole of itself”.

I realise this is no mean task to soften our intellectual gaze, querying and questioning but

our thinking minds need to let go to another type of knowing in order not to try to apprehend, grasp or understand what this means. I can sense it because I have felt and witnessed it through my hands and my whole body both as a practitioner and a client. It can feel like a gradual unfolding or a sudden unlocking of wide open, clear, potent spaciousness. I hold and witness it through my anchored dynamically still whole. I do not interfere or direct it. I give it space and safe grounding as Health knows what to do. Jealous calls this embryological knowing “aboriginal”, an expression of our inherent indigeneity, ‘autochtone’ (or from the earth, the soil in French, itself derived from Ancient Greek), not intuitive nor instinctive but a knowing awareness, which connects and interconnects our bones, our organs, our blood, our fluids to Earth and the cosmos; lost through much conditioning but steering life in each moment within us.  

Irish mystic and philosopher John Moriarty calls it a “commonage consciousness”. “All cosmic and precosmic deeps are in us.” (Turtle was gone a long time, Vol 1, 1996 and 2014)

And this knowing, this primeval awareness, includes death and dying, the ultimate return to our original form. The big letting go of all that’s not blueprint. This of course turns how we see health and healing on its head: Health always prevails from conception to death, and before conception till after death, something our brains find difficult to comprehend because in this scenario, disease is not the enemy we must destroy at all costs.

This limitless vision of Health does not conform to our more narrow-minded version of health: a perfectly packaged and savvily marketed disease-free wellness. Sure Health expresses there too but also way beyond these confines. Our vision of health mirrors our reductionist mindset: when we reduce reality, we resist its expansive, wild, untameable aspects (Health’s attributes) in an effort to defend ourselves against the unwanted, in other words to attempt to control what’s inherently out of control (our mortality). Disease in our bodies operates similarly, it restricts and tenses and results from a defence response or reactions to what disrupts the balance. Collectively, reductionism is also a form of disease, imbued with its own intelligence, imprinted by centuries of isolationist and separation patterns severing us from a natural world to which we inherently belong.

Can we step away from our familiar binary thinking of good and evil, right or wrong here and ask ‘where is health?’ in a collective scenario when Health interweaves with disease to seek balance? 

Physician, activist and Deep medicine founder Rupa Marya in her excellent book Inflamed, co-written with Raj Patel, looks at collective disease patterns such as racism through the lens of white patriarchal supremacy, and capitalist colonialism, potent words that name some of the reductionist restrictions mentioned above. “Antiracism is a process of changing the dynamics of power in a transformative manner. It is not a declaration or a seminar. It is not a training session you can attend or a book you can read. It is structural change that redefines practices. At an institution that offers its workers a mindfulness stress-reduction class, it’s the workers coming together to tell the institution to reduce burnout and workplace stress by dismantling the systems of white supremacy within its own power structures.” (Marya and Patel, 2021)

Ditto with disease and Health. Skilled touch can change the power dynamics to seek a new balance where blueprint can breathe the Whole more expansively, with more potent vitality.

“What we have lost we can reacquire. We can reacquire, or acquire for the first time, ‘those pure and virgin apprehensions’ (…)

Will you see the infancy of this sublime and celestial greatness? Those pure and virgin apprehensions I had from the womb, and that divine light wherewith I was born, are the best unto this day, wherein I can see the universe.” (Moriarty, Turtle, Vol 1, 1996 and 2014)

Beneath the fear of uncertainty, the total absence of control inherent to what makes me a mortal human, I, as a human holobiont, BCST practitioner and a herbalist, remain aware of and trust in the certainty of Health. 

I will conclude this exploration in the next instalment.