This article was supposed to link together several article on the wisdom inherent in the body. Kind of a follow up to the Controlling Desire post, I suppose…
From “Subjectively Philosophical”:
“Breath is something that we are born with, something that we use all the time, but for some reason unknown to me, as life goes by, we generally forget how to use it well. We see children, running around, full of energy… and we see adults, coughing, running out of breath, trying to catch up. And catch up they can, quite easily. What we are after here, the thing that distinguishes children from adults, is abdominal breathing – breathing in using the full extent of the lungs, breathing seamlessly and without obstruction.”
Although I’ve mentioned it before, “Alchemically Braindamaged” post on Neo-Reichian body therapy is worth checking out in regards to this as well.
Another article that’s been referenced here before is this piece from Newsweek about a lady who ended up with a knitting needle through the heart (emphasis mine):
It was early Saturday morning, just 12 days after surgeons had delicately removed Ellin Klor’s splinter and stitched her up. Klor had been home for a week, thankful for the attention of her husband and daughter, but she awoke with excruciating chest and back pain. Writhing and struggling to breathe, she had no idea what was happening, and she rushed to the emergency room.
Doctors poked and prodded her. They listened to her heart and lungs. They whispered their greatest fear: perhaps it was a pulmonary embolism, a potentially fatal blood clot in her lungs. They ordered immediate scans along with enough morphine to erase the pain.
When the doctors returned, they shook their heads and seemed confused. The tests were all negative. Her lungs were clear and her heart was healing just fine. So they explained it away as some kind of fleeting discomfort from surgery and gave her more painkillers before sending her home.
The next day, Klor was home alone when the phone rang. A radiologist from Stanford wanted to see her right away. At the hospital, the doctors explained the urgency. On a CT scan, the radiologist had detected a mass under her armpit. It looked like an enlarged lymph node, a telltale sign of breast cancer.
A decade earlier, she had battled the disease on the other side. But this was a brand-new malignancy and not a recurrence of the old tumor, which has lower survival rates. This was like starting from square one, a brand-new battle. Klor felt so lucky that she let out a whoop when the doctor informed her that only one lymph node was implicated and the disease was contained.
The knitting needle through her heart had actually saved her life, her doctors said. If she hadn’t gone to the ER—if she hadn’t been screened with all those machines—the tumor probably wouldn’t have been detected until it had grown and spread. Klor believes she’s one of the luckiest people in the world. I didn’t die from the knitting needle, she remembers thinking, So I’m not going to die from cancer.
What the article never goes back to is what actually caused that excruciating pain, 12 days after her surgery. They shrugged it off as “fleeting discomfort” from surgery? Yet this is what saved her life, this moment of intense pain that had no apparent cause. Something must have caused that, but what?
From an article on Parkour:
“It is a means to understand the body as a vehicle of transportation, and to further progress the self, as well as learn the many ways in which the human person can be useful in personal, social, physical, and mental situations. As this understanding is established, the utility of Parkour not only comes from the ability to escape, but the ability to properly use both the body and the mind. The applied focus of the physical practice extends outward, where the physical fitness and intense training for functionality serves a useful purpose, and the meditative pursuit of the mind as a result of training also serves a useful purpose.”
I guess it can all be rather simply put in these word’s from a comment made on one of Tim Boucher’s major posts:
Yes, because your body knows everything it needs to know. There’s a passage in the Tao Te Ching about this, but I leant my copy to someone. He says something about how to know the universe you just need to look at your own workings. It is not mere metaphysical speculation but an active command to master your mind and body.
Why do we try to control, rather than master? Why force rather than learn? We know so little about our bodies and how to use them, yet we seem to think that we already know everything, and that anything that stops us from getting what we want is wrong. But we don’t even know what this “we” is that wants it!
There is so much more knowledge we could gained by just listening…
Cool, man!
I work on breathing everyday. I am not a really disciplined person, but I do it whenever I remember. Its definately trauma that causes shallow chest breathing, and negative motions, like anxiety, fear, shame, that type of thing.
I am finding out too, that we all have an “emotional set point” kind of like a default. This can be associated with shallow breathing. All this from paying attention to my body!
Comment by Ted — February 27, 2009 @ 8:11 am