Patterns of Physical Transformation

Historically, the core concepts of our work can be tracked back through the millennia. In order for there to be yoga, someone had to notice that there is a relationship between getting your unconscious mind to allow you to have enough freedom throughout your body to be able to accomplish all those positions and having your mind and emotions be able to function in a magically more effective way. To describe this state of enlightenment, the yogis used words like oneness, unity, bliss, or inner peace. Being at peace, or any of these other words, makes no sense with straining to achieve some particular posture. All too often, people copy the superficial details and entirely miss the point.

There is a story that when Buddhist monks first went out from India, they needed to develop a way to make themselves safe from attack, and yet not interrupt their state of blissful oneness. They developed martial arts from this perspective. Again, the connection between having the physical freedom to move powerfully and gracefully was noticed to be related to a state of profound transformation. Martial arts have continued to be taught as a spiritual practice. Most of the Japanese forms end in the word do, as in judo, or karatedo, or aikido, which signifies Tao -- transformation. But, all too many martial arts classes are taught as if their purpose is to teach you how to tolerate pain and abuse.

So this kind of understanding has been around throughout all time. But, because we're talking about functioning in better than normal ways, and because there is a general epidemic of poor functioning, many of these concepts have become confused. Medically the world is divided into normal and pathological. The main reason that practicing medicine without a license is considered a problem is that medicine is for treating pathologies that would lead to death if they were not treated properly. More recently, medicine also treats skin wrinkles, poor eyesight, and pain even if they are not true pathologies. If someone is not sick, at the moment, then they are normal, not pathological. The medical hair loss treatments make a kind of subpathology category, but there are no subcategories for any kind of functioning better than usual. This kind of thinking has been extremely prevalent, so frequently, people mistakenly have had the idea that our work is only useful if they have pain or some blatant problem. They failed to make distinctions between degrees of healthiness or comfort or gracefulness. When you think of all the different levels of human functioning which are possible, you can not go too far worse than normal because of death. However, there seem to be no end to the degrees of superb and most exquisite conditions anyone can experience. We have so few examples of really good functioning and so many examples of pain and suffering, that people mistakenly shift their normal, in their thinking, to include all sorts of bad things. I remember the patient who told us that he was perfect, except for the pain in his knee. When we asked him more specifically he admitted to having the usual headache that everyone gets every afternoon. A much more common example, is that getting older, necessarily produces infirmity. "Tell me the truth, Doc, it's because of my age isn't it?" has been said to us by people as young as 14 years of age. Whenever someone has a pain or some other symptom in one of their parts I may ask them" how old is your other hip, the one that feels fine?” These are very idiotic beliefs for which there is a lot of support available in our culture. It takes an extraordinary person to go ahead and think about these things, in a new way. And it works the other way around, the more distinctions we can train your unconscious mind to respond appropriately to, the more extraordinary person you become and the better you feel.