Exploring and Learning from the Gift of Life

Posted on August 24, 2015 by admin

By Patrick Cunningham, LAc, BCST, FMT

I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to teach cadaver dissection classes and workshops with Stephen Cina at the New England School of Acupuncture over the past seven years, first through the Sports Medicine Acupuncture Program and later as a NESA elective course. We use unpreserved specimens that are flash frozen with no exposure to chemical preservatives so the tissue closely reveals the reality of the living body. In our classes, we utilize the specimen to the fullest extent. We examine tendons, ligaments, bones, disks, and menisci in situ and in cross section. We experience the strength of these structures by placing them under stress. I once cut through a sacroiliac joint with a scalpel, it took 20 minutes and I was dripping with sweat when finished. But this joint has a demanding job in the body, so it has to be strong. It’s amazing how well we are put together and how each structure is uniquely designed for its purpose. I’d like to share with you four things that have changed the way I look at the human body.

First

The first is the arterial system and the nature of arterial plaque. I had always imagined plaque to be similar to lard and you do find that, but when they say “hardening of the arteries,” it’s not an abstract concept. Our specimens ranged in age from 50 to 101, and most have had plaque, many to a degree that I find remarkable. Sometimes it forms pebbles embedded in the arterial wall, some small, some quite large and generally rough and lumpy. Sometimes it forms long needle-like shards of calcified plaque that are sharp as a needle and can easily pierce the skin through a glove. When you grasp the outside of an artery that contains this type of plaque and squeeze, you feel and hear it breaking under your fingers, like a muffled version of the sound of walking on thin ice on a winter sidewalk. Some of the thicker shards are strong enough that they are difficult to break with your fingers, and some of the pebbles are as dense as the pebbles in your driveway. We have seen arteries such as the common iliac or femoral artery, so densely filled with plaque that you wonder how any blood got through at all. In some cases, expansion of the artery during systole must have been the only way for blood to move past the obstruction.

One dissection was a woman who lived to the age of 90. I often discuss with the students what we’re going to see, and due to her age, I felt confident that we would see some significant arterial plaque. However, much to my delight, this 90-year old woman had beautiful arteries, they were clean, elastic and completely free of plaque. We removed the heart so students could hold it and feel the strong rubbery consistency of the heart muscle. When I held her heart, I was deeply moved. Time stood still and I could feel her spirit. Then it was time to pass the heart to the next person.

Second

I’d like to talk about the spine. There is such a remarkable difference between a healthy spine with thick disks and a spine in the advanced stages of degeneration where the disks have compressed and dried out. Healthy disks have thick, strong rings of tough annulus fibrosus with a nucleus pulposus that looks like thick creamy yogurt. In a spine with advanced spondylosis, you see the bone spurs that have tried to shore up the spine, while the disks are thin, dry and brittle. Stretching and exercising the spine is so important,

keep your disks supple and hydrated with movement and fluid intake. Sit less and move more.

Third

I’d like to talk about fascia. Through the work of Luigi and Carla Stecco (1) and many others, fascia has been analyzed to a degree never imagined just a few decades ago. During dissection, one can simply marvel at the interconnection and at the endless variation in how fascia responds to movement and muscular contraction. Fascia creates a complex web of connection throughout the body, and provides sensory and proprioceptive input to the nervous system. Fascia allows us to be far stronger than we would be with muscles alone. As many have said before me, traditional anatomy books were made by people who removed the fascia to get at the muscles, never appreciating the interdependent relationship between them.

Some muscles, like the erector spinae, vastus lateralis, and gastrocnemius have strong thick bands that resemble strapping tape. These structures provide great tensile strength and store energy when elongated, only to release it upon shortening. Fascia responds to the stresses it encounters, including elongation, compression and torsion. In one male specimen the suboccipital muscles had numerous thick bands of supporting fascia so strong they were like thin pillars of bone. I wondered if he had been a wrestler as I could imagine him doing neck bridges. In others, the suboccipital muscles are soft and almost mushy. Muscles will atrophy when not put to use. A recent specimen was from a woman inactive at the end of life, her multifidi were about 70% fat.

The infraspinatus muscle is one of my favorites for observing fascia. I always look forward to carefully exposing its surface where you often see circular swirls and curving lines of fascia going out in many different directions, to accommodate complex, multiplanar movements.

Fourth

Let me briefly mention the organs. The stomach wall is much thinner than I had imagined it. It’s thin and stretchy and the mucosal layer internally is also much less formidable that I expected. I’m more careful now not to stuff my stomach with excess food. The Chinese have a saying “eat until 80% full.” It’s good advice. The intestinal walls are much thinner than the stomach, thin enough that you can easily see through them to the waste within. When you see the intestines in all their blue-collar glory, fasting and cleansing seems like a smart idea. Abdominal fat stores toxins to a greater extent than fat in other parts of the body. People who had chemotherapy shortly before death often have greenish abdominal fat with a toxic chemical smell, while fat on the rest of the body appears normal. The greater omentum also seems to reflect overall health. It too absorbs chemical toxins, and in smokers is gray, dry and shriveled, when it should be moist, yellow and bright. In smokers you can smell the cigarette smoke as you expose the greater omentum, almost as if someone in the room were smoking. There is a vast difference in the appearance of healthy and unhealthy organs. Healthy organs are brightly colored, there is a vibrancy and integrity to the tissue. They look beautiful.

Changed My View

I lead a healthy lifestyle, but doing dissection has changed how I look at myself and how I look at others. We all have an inner reality, but we focus on the outer. At this moment, your bones, muscles, organs, (3) nerves, and arteries all have a reality that is partially hidden from you. We’ve all heard stories or had patients who suddenly experienced chest pain, went to the doctor only to find that their coronary arteries were 90% blocked. Maybe they were feeling fine up to that moment. The body does a remarkable job of coping with the constraints and stresses of life and lifestyle, until it can’t.

I’ve always been a people watcher and as a structure and movement specialist I look at how people stand, sit and move. Now there’s an added dimension, I picture what people look like on the inside. I visualize spinal degeneration, picture the pitting of osteoarthritis and the joint destruction of rheumatoid arthritis. I have seen metastatic colon cancer that colonized the entire abdomen, and the blackened lungs of smokers who died of lung cancer. I picture the many different kinds of fat in the body, how different it looks in different areas, and how much it varies between body types. I feel and imagine the fascia, resilient and protective in active athletes and less than it could be in sedentary individuals.

We begin and end every class with a ceremony of gratitude for the individual who donated his or her body to further the education of others. Maybe they did it years before death, maybe shortly before. These people took the time to think of others not only in their lives, but afterwards. If I can see into the body it is because of these generous individuals, and I am forever grateful.

Reference

1. “Fascial Manipulation: Practical Part,” Luigi & Carla Stecco, Piccin, 2009.

Patrick Cunningham is chair of the manual therapy department at the New England School of Acupuncture. He specializes in orthopedic and myofascial acupuncture, zhenggu technique, craniosacral and visceral therapy, chronic pelvic pain, and manual lymphatic therapy. He can be reached at livinganatomy@gmail.com.

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(Editors note: I have known Patrick for many years and have been the grateful recipient of many hands-on sessions with him. I was also privileged to attend one of his dissections and am still absorbing lessons from that amazing day. Those of you in the Boston area have an amazing resource in him. This article was originally published in Acupuncture Today.)

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(apologies for the formatting; for some reason, this one has been a disaster.)

Celtic Yoga

Posted on July 21, 2015 by admin

One of the fascinating joys of the awakening process is the discovery of another brilliant and charismatic teacher who captures this amazing moment in unique and deeply insightful ways. I am a bit late to the party with my Irish Catholic brother John O’Donohue, who very unfortunately for those of us still here, passed on in 2008. But, wow, is he is opening the eyes of my soul in unimagined ways with his amazing imagery and use of language. As his brother Pat says in the introduction to “Four Elements: Reflection on Nature, “he wrestled the terms of reference that were used to think about ‘soul’ from the religious institutions. He carried them outdoors to the landscape and let them free among the elements. Here they danced their dream of possibility…”

He reminds me a lot of one of my other mentors, Thomas Berry. Both were Catholic priests and scholars who found tremendous spiritual depth in Creation, the manifest world of earth, water, fire and air. While not formally a monk, John also found deep healing in solitude. The powerful forces of Mother Nature shaping the landscape on the western coast of Ireland were his inspiration, providing an invitation to plunge into the inner world of mystery beyond the seen and the known. Without needing the formality of asana, he knew the body to be a gateway to the soul, that the body is immersed in the soul, and not the other way around.

He lived a life of integral spirituality with vitality and joy. And he was at home with the deep pain of loss and despair and other afflictions of the human psyche and soul. To John, all is sacred, all holy. To lead a good life, all one requires is solitude and friendship; longing and belonging; being deeply engaged with one’s own inner world, and deeply engaged in sharing that journey of self discovery with others. And to recognize that even on the inner journey one takes alone, we can befriend all we encounter. There is no ‘other’.

Here are some of my favorite observations from John.

From Anam Cara: (Irish for ‘soul friend’ or, friend to your soul)

“The Celtic mind was not burdened by dualism. It did not separate what belongs together. The Celtic imagination articulates the inner friendship that embraces Nature, divinity, underworld and human world as one. The dualism that separates the visible from the invisible, time from eternity, the human from the divine, was totally alien to them.”

“Humans are new here. Above us, the galaxies dance out toward infinity. Under our feet is ancient earth. We are beautifully molded from this clay. Yet the smallest stone is millions of years older than us. In your thoughts, the silent universe seeks echo.”

“If we become addicted to the external, our interiority will haunt us. We will become hungry with a hunger no image, person or deed can still. To be wholesome, we must remain truthful to our vulnerable complexity. In order to keep our balance, we need to hold the interior and exterior, visible and invisible, known and unknown, temporal and eternal, ancient and new, together. No one else can undertake this task for you. You are the one and only threshold of an inner world. This wholesomeness in holiness. To be holy is to be natural, to befriend the worlds that come to balance in you. Behind the facade of image and distraction, each person is an artist in this primal and inescapable sense. Each one of us is doomed and privileged to be an inner artist who carries and shapes a unique world.”

“Human presence is a creative and turbulent sacrament, a visible sign of invisible grace. Nowhere else is there such intimate and frightening access to the mysterium. Friendship is the sweet grace that liberates us to approach, recognize and inhabit this adventure. … Friendship is a creative and subversive force. It claims that intimacy is the secret law of life and the universe. The human journey is a continuous act of transfiguration. If approached in friendship, the unknown, the anonymous, the negative and the threatening gradually yield their secret affinity with us.”

‘Silence is a great friend of the soul; it unveils the riches of solitude. It is very difficult to reach that quality of inner silence. You must make a space for it so that it may begin to work for you. In a certain sense, you do not need the whole armory and vocabulary of therapies, psychologies and spiritual programs. If you have a trust in and an expectation of your own solitude, everything that you need to know will be revealed to you.”

“At the deepest level of the human heart, there is no simple singular self. Deep within, there is a gallery of different selves. Each one of these figures expresses a different part of your nature. Sometimes they will come into contradiction and conflict with other. If you meet these contradictions only on the surface level, this could start an inner feud that could haunt you all the days of your life. They are in a permanent war zone and have never managed to go deeper to the hearth of kinship, where the two forces are not enemies, but reveal themselves as different sides of the one belonging.”

From “Four Elements”

“How can people be so sensitive to the dignity and independence of landscape?….Landscape has a vast and wonderful presence. … But landscape is not merely extensive; it is full of opaque depths. The depths of landscape reach down into eternities of silence and darkenss. But they are not the hopeless depths of a black inferno, for at their ultimate level they rest upon the tender emptiness of the cosmos.”

From “Eternal Echoes”

A Blessing

May you listen to your longing to be free,
May the frames of your belonging be large enough
   for the dreams of your soul.
May you arise each day with a voice of blessing
   whispering in your heart that something good is
   going to happen to youMay you find a harmony between your soul and
your life,
May the mansion of your soul never become a haunted place,
May you know the eternal longing which lives at the heart of time
May there be kindness in your gaze when you look within,
May you never place walls between the light and yourself.
May your angel free you from the prisons of guilt, fear, disappointment and despair
May you allow the wild beauty of the invisible world to gather you, mind you, and
   embrace you in belonging.

Grounding: Lessons from the Muladhara

Posted on July 6, 2015 by admin

Now that we have landed in Ojai and are starting to grow some permanent (?) roots here, the muladhara, source of all rooting, has begun to reveal many new layers and levels of meaning to me.

There is something about mountains that is very grounding. They announce ‘stable presence’ quietly and elegantly. This view looking north from our front yard shows the Nordoff Ridge, an extension of the Topatopa Mountains, the range that gives the Ojai valley such a powerful spiritual energy. The region provides a habitat for thousands of species of living beings, including us newcomers, the humans. The Topatopas may be 15 -20 million years old, as they were formed as a result of the Pacific Plate first colliding with the North American Plate 20 – 25 million years ago. The collision is still taking place, of course, so even here, stability is relative. Tadasana, mountain pose, is the yogic expression of roots and rooting, and the foundation for all standing asanas. Here the legs, an extension of the muladhara, are trained to channel energy from the body to the core of Mother Earth and back again, like the two prongs of an electrical plug. How, in our lives, can we be a stable presence, as life passes through us in waves of change and transformation?

Trees are masters of grounding. Quercus agrifolia, the California Coastal Oak, is the dominant tree hear in the ‘Arbolada’ section of Ojai. This beauty, just by our front door, is but one of a dozen on the land, and is easily over 100 years old. Because of the Mediterranean climate here in California, the coastal oaks need a deep root system that often mirrors the canopy. I am surrounded by my teachers as I sit here typing away and I feel their presence. They are very patient, stable and mature, and also provide homes for the local birds and tree squirrels. They inhabit the land with grace and elegance, and invite others to join. The oak trees told Kate that this was to be our habitat when she first saw the property several years ago. How can we allow this precious gift of a human body become a safe haven and place of nurturance for the other beings who share our space?

Now, we have have only been here a few weeks, so our roots are not quite as deep as the Topatopas or the oaks, but the sage plants you see above have been in place for only a few months themselves. Like us, they are new to the neighborhood, and also need a lot of nurturing while their roots are getting established. Once settled in they will be quite self sufficient, but for now they need to be watched and watered. What aspects of ourselves need special treatment these days, to help their roots to become strong?

In our asana practice, what does it mean to ‘ground’ this human body we have inherited? What does it mean to inhabit it, to invite in new forms of aliveness, to help it thrive? We can answer this from the three levels of embodiment we have been exploring, structure, energy and fields.

Structure

The structure is simple on the surface. Can we allow the weight of the body to be carried effortlessly by the legs, from pelvis to toes? Every bone, every joint, every muscle and collagen fiber has a role to play. Standing poses are the teachers. They request and teach strength and flexibility, power and elasticity.

As we have inherited our feet from our mammalian and reptilian ancestors, the use of the tarsal bones, especially the talus, navicular and cuboid to transfer weight and integrate movement is crucial. (Remember, the heel bones are secondary when it comes to grounding the energy flow. Quadriped’s heels never touch the ground.) Can we fully inhabit our feet so we can feel and move every bone and joint? Can we open the energy channels of the heel bones without jamming the ankle joints, or losing the grounding through the tarsals – metatarsals – phalanges? Grounding is not necessarily weight bearing. Old injuries of course inhibit free flow, but life finds ways around the injuries if we can only slow down and explore the subtleties. Hands on help, self administered, or from a friend or somatic practitioner can nurture the bony pathways into more life and flow. Nurturing the roots is always a good thing.

On the structural plane, we also have our old friend, the Deep Front Line, from Tom Myers’ Anatomy Trains, as a fascial highway of perception and action, of monitoring and modulating the energy and information flow. As best possible, feel the DFL as a continuous elastic band that can shorten and lengthen as the demands of posture and movement change. When we explore the ‘drop and glide’ in a few minutes, this is the highway we want to travel.

Energy

From the energetic perspective, can our legs channel energy like a river flows into the sea. Can we find flow from core to feet and back again? Can our legs become one with the whole body, including head and hands, and not just appendages that hang out or hold on in unnecessary tension? How would your cells ‘feel’ if your trikonasana looked like this? Can the leg energy liberate the spinal column, so it regains the freedom of a fish in water?

Here, imagining a new tail can be very liberating. There are three energy channels emanating downward from the muladhara: leg, leg and tail. Humans have long legs and tiny tails and that is very confusing to them. The tail energy disappears early on in development, when the anal rooting reflex is no longer being utilized for stability. But infants and toddlers are really good at using the tail energy for staying connected to Mother Earth while being engaged in activity. Adults can use the leg energy, as well as imagination, to awaken the tail aspect of the muladhara. We will use this simple movement exploration to help find this, and also open up the fields.

Fields

“Drop and Glide, or “Load and Lengthen”

To work from the field level, we will add the chakras in the ‘drop and glide, load and lengthen’ movements we have worked on before. One foot/leg grounds with weight as the other lengthens down and out, like a skaters action. Complete the action through the inner back heel, which has a direct link to the tail energy, through the floor, and on to infinity. Do not stop or block the flow when it meets the floor. Follow the energy through the DFL. Because this is a bi-lateral action, we will be feeling the side dimensions of the chakras, and also the posterior, as there is a slight backwards components also. There is a lot of tension and resistance in the structural components here, so awakening the field energy will eliminate a lot of unnecessary strain.

By chakra field, I am referring to all of the energies emanating from that particular chakra. They all overlap, of course, but like colors in the rainbow or notes in a chord of music, each chakra can be differentiated, as can the layers of energy associated with each chakra. As somanauts, we utilize movement to awaken the fields, but we also have to open our lens to resonate with the other possible dimensions. As well as grounded movement, the muladhara is associated with the color red, the sense of smell, the element earth, the physiological function of defecation, survival at the most primal, organismic level. The four petals surrounding the square at the center represent the four cardinal directions. The downward pointing triangle shows the direction of the energy flow. According to tantra, the muladhara’s associated animal is the elephant, the deity, Ganesh. Lots going on here! Have some fun with this.

From tadasana, shift your weight onto one foot (load) and bend the opposite knee to the chest. Lengthen from the 1st chakra field/space as you extend down, back and slightly sideways, in a curving path of grounding energy. Open the tail, legs, pelvis and sacrum. Find space and flow. Imagine the chakra energies are like cars waiting at a traffic light. The ground is across the intersection. When the light turns green, make sure the intersection is clear of tension (relax!) and release the 1st chakra energy down the DFL. The 2nd chakra is the second car, etc. Each car has to wait for the one in front to move. A healthy car length between is good. Make sure they all travel at the same relative speed so there are no fender benders inside. If there are obstructions, slow down, work more subtley. The habit is to fight from the knots at the structural level. Resist this patiently and calmly. Stay in the field level and melt the tension.

Return to tadasana and repeat from 2nd chakra, and then from each subsequent one up through 7. Change legs and repeat. Or, as an alternative, do 1st chakra both legs, then 2nd chakra both legs, etc. Clear out the channels as best possible. Every chakra needs grounding, just as every part of a plant needs connections to Mother Earth through its root system.

You can also recreate this in ardha chandrasana or one legged dog pose. In the classical standing poses, you do this energetically, once you are in the posture; back leg, front leg, and then both, grounding each chakra as best possible. Many of our chakras have weak root systems and need lots of nurturing. The chakras fields are loaded with memories, emotions and stored traumas, as well as light and healing energies. Grounding is an important part of their healing and the integration of the whole.

This is an open ended mystery that we are just beginning to awaken to. And for some more fun, check out ‘our new friend from Ojai’ Meredith’s short video on sacred geometry and sciatica. She is a delightful person with a visionary sense of somatics.

http://neuralresonance.kajabi.com/funnel_events/36288-sciatica-segment?pt=z19cFmvGmEJEt9vl253J&art=http://www.kajabi.com/admin/funnels/23963