Modern man is addicted to
engineering – bridges, buildings, machines, technology – especially the
latest and greatest of each – are a fascination to us.
Yet most people in modern mainstream North American society have very little clue about the exquisite engineering details of one of our most important tools ever: our body.
So here’s a quick tutorial on what it’s taken me years to learn. Questions and comments welcome! Please click “like” if you have friends you’d like to read this too.
Your Skeleton: The Compression Components of the Structure
Diet for your skeleton
Exercise for your skeleton
Your Muscles: The Gears and Pulleys that Make Things Move
Diet for your muscles
Exercise for your muscles
Your Fascia: Connection and Glue: The Tension Components
Diet for your fascia
Exercise for your fascia
Your Energy Body: Chakras, Chi, and Auras
Diet for your energy body
Exercise for your energy body
Notes for Skeptics
We all already know that our bodies are made of bones and muscles with a few important organs jiggling around in there somewhere. The key to health, though, is being shown more and more to rely also on our fascia, or the gluey strings that keep all the other bits in place.
The neat thing is that the old idea seemed to be that we kind of peaked in health in high school and went downhill after that, but that’s been disproven. We know now that it’s completely possible to find better health with age. People who get healthier when they are older typically introduce the following elements to their lives, which are not always available to younger people:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bones_of_the_human_skeleton
Unlike wood or concrete, bones are living tissue. They can be built (or renovated to be) stronger and denser, or bend, break, or decay. Like every other part of your body, the food, thoughts, and activities you feed your body make it a new body every day. In other words, you are either improving or disimproving your skeletal structure every day. (Hm. Stop and think about that! It’s true!)
bones need to be bulked up to handle the load. (As an illustration,
very thin people are more likely to have osteoporosis than fat people,
because the bones of heavy people have had a heavier load to carry and
tend to be more dense.)
* Exercise that includes getting your blood pumping (to make sure it’s
sloshing the nutrients adequately to the cells that make up your bones
and other tissues).
The interesting new information on the scene is that often muscle problems are related to the connective tissue surrounding them. Many an injured person has been advised to exercise and stabilize muscles or muscle group when the problem that’s pulling the muscle out of alignment might be related to the fascia surrounding it (which needs a different method).
The ways to keep your muscles healthy include:
* Cautions: Crash diets like the grapefruit diet, which do not include protein, cause your body to lose muscle mass. It’s possible that Steve Jobs’ high-sugar fruitarian diet may have contributed to his cancer.
Many people (including diabetics and body buildders) have been healthily successful with ketogenic diets (high protein, low carbohydrate) to trim fat rapidly and safely.
* Weight-bearing exercises builds larger muscles, but choose just how big you need your muscles to be. Whole-body exercises like rowing, walking, yoga, and martial arts can help your muscles develop in healthy relation and proportion to each other.
*Cautions: Working out muscles in a gym to get a certain look can get unbalanced pretty quickly. For example, it’s possible to make your abs so strong by situps and crunches that you destabilize your back muscles. Use sense and remember that your body is a system. The parts are meant to work together.
* When you begin an exercise such as running, sometimes your muscles
hurt for a while. This is due to the buildup of lactic acid, the
partially metabolized products of your muscles. Flooding your muscles
with beautiful oxygenated blood washes out the lactic acid and frees
you of the pain.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/body/interactives/3djigsaw_02/index.shtml?muscles
been largely ignored by mainstream medicine until recently. Everybody
kind of stripped things down and looked at just the muscles and bones.
(This is the big “Where We Went Wrong With Anatomy and Health” for the last, oh, 400 years. Going to a chiropractor is excellent for your skeleton sometimes, but if nothing is done to work with the connective tissue surrounding it, your problem will recur and recur. It's important to work on problems with the whole body for long-term solutions.)
So when these folks: http://www.anatomytrains.com/ wanted to start making a study of the fascia particularly, they went back to a 16th century anatomy book (particularly, ''De humani corporis fabrica libri septem'' by an intrepid fellow named Andreas Vesalius, who actually took bodies apart and made very thorough studies of all their parts and how they work together).
To learn (graphically) more about that, go to this website and click the “fascia” tab: http://www.anatomytrains.com/
You can even see a video of a dissection of the connective tissue and the "anatomy trains -- the long bands of fascia that connect our body.
Adding modern physical and mathematical knowledge, particularly Buckminster Fuller's study of tensegrity, the Anatomy Trains scientists have been able to explain rigorously how muscles and bones relate to other muscles and bones – the connections are not just to other muscles and bones that are adjacent.
The missing piece in so much of our medical and physiotherapy to date has been forgetting to include the connections of the fascia. For example, that problem in your knee might actually be related to tense fascia tissue in your lower back.
You have seen ama. If you have had a long crying jag of an evening, OR you're sick, OR you ate an excess of something that your body doesn't digest all that well, you wake up with a thick white coating on your tongue. That's ama.
Now isn't that interesting? Ama is produced in your body by three
ways: bad emotion, bad food, or illness. Same goouegy stuff. You can be as skeptical as you want and say that you don’t believe me – but start taking note of what happens in your body. See it happening for yourself.
obstruction is pretty much the same way you would clean a dish cloth.
Run lots of water through it, and wring it out. You have heard the
advice to drink lots of water before -- now you know why -- it's to
wash out the goouegy stuff, particularly if you have been experiencing
a lot of emotion or been ill or been eating badly.
While you’re drinking a lot of water, fast now and then. Add some lemon juice and cayenne pepper to your water to help wash out your tissues, and give your body a break on the food.
Massage is great for your connective tissue too of course. That's what massage is all about, digging in to increase the circulation of your lymph through your tissues. Loosening up tight muscles is often more about loosening up the surrounding connective tissue, than the
actual muscle fibres themselves.
bones, your muscles, and your connective tissue. Throughout and on top of
these layers is another essential layer, and one that many
practitioners would say is the most important one: your energy body.
Whether you say it's lines of qi or chi, or chakras, or you visualize
white light flowing through and around your structure, it's all the
same idea. The basic principles are:
1. Energy flows through you.
2. You accumulate small blockages, usually by emotionally upsetting events or injuries.
3. When blockages get too large or stay stuck in your body for too long, you can get sick or feel injured.
4. You can become more well by facilitating the free flow of your energy again.
Fasting is also excellent, whether it’s for half a day or one day a week, or for several days in a row. Fasting gives your body time to clean up. Dr. Adam McLeod explains it this way: when you constantly eat enough food, your cells don’t recycle the materials that you give them. When cell organelles get broken or trash accumulates, your cells just create a trash heap. This trash heap can turn into toxins that create cancers and other diseases.
When you fast, your cells start digging in the trash heaps when they need new materials. They recycle all the materials in your body, and this removes the opportunity for those trash heaps to ferment into toxins.
Since ancient times in India, there has been an understanding of an
energetic component of the human body, known as the chakra system.
It's well-documented and has been a working part of medicine to maintain health and heal people for, oh, a few thousand years now.
Many people find healing thoughts, explanations, and energy work by visualizing and even seeing the chakra system. There are recommendations for diet, mental attitudes, and activities to help heal and clear
Since ancient times in China, there have been maps of the energy
meridians and chi lines running through the body. Acupunturists have
helped people to heal and cure themselves for... oh, a few thousand
years now.
There are an increasing number of public speakers who are
spreading the word of energy healing. You may have heard of some of these people. If not, look them up. Some modern American speakers/authors of note in the realm of energy medicine:
Amazingly, there are still many people in North America who have
bought into the cult of materialism, believing (despite reams of
evidence to the contrary) that only that which can be seen or measured
by the limits of our current technology, actually exists. More sadly,
our entire conventional medical system is currently based entirely on
this false belief.
The strange thing is that this skeptical insistance that the intangible does not exist, this narrow belief in materialism, has only been present for a tiny part of human history, and a small proportion of the human population. It just happens to be our English-speaking current culture. But don’t get trapped in thinking that the narrow closet you were raised in holds all the truth in the world.
Billions of people in this world believe in their energy bodies – more people believe, than not. If you’re one of the people finding your virtue in skepticism, why don’t you sharpen your own observation skills and start doing your own experiments? Try fasting, massage, meditation, alternative diets. Actually keep records and see how various changes affect your experience of your health.
Yet most people in modern mainstream North American society have very little clue about the exquisite engineering details of one of our most important tools ever: our body.
So here’s a quick tutorial on what it’s taken me years to learn. Questions and comments welcome! Please click “like” if you have friends you’d like to read this too.
Table of Contents
The first two sections are very boring. Nothing new. But what about the last three? I'll warrant you have not heard all of this before.Your Skeleton: The Compression Components of the Structure
Diet for your skeleton
Exercise for your skeleton
Your Muscles: The Gears and Pulleys that Make Things Move
Diet for your muscles
Exercise for your muscles
Your Fascia: Connection and Glue: The Tension Components
Diet for your fascia
Exercise for your fascia
Your Energy Body: Chakras, Chi, and Auras
Diet for your energy body
Exercise for your energy body
Notes for Skeptics
We all already know that our bodies are made of bones and muscles with a few important organs jiggling around in there somewhere. The key to health, though, is being shown more and more to rely also on our fascia, or the gluey strings that keep all the other bits in place.
The neat thing is that the old idea seemed to be that we kind of peaked in health in high school and went downhill after that, but that’s been disproven. We know now that it’s completely possible to find better health with age. People who get healthier when they are older typically introduce the following elements to their lives, which are not always available to younger people:
- A better attitude
- A better diet
- More time for the beauty of life
- More thoughtful, smarter, full-body more customized exercise regimens that work with their whole body, such as walking, martial arts, yoga, and tai chi (gyms and sports, typical choices of young people, often injure certain parts of the body while developing other parts of the body)
- Less rigidity of belief and more willingness to try new ideas and experiment with what works for them individually.
Your Skeleton: The Compression Components of the Structure
Most people are fairly familiar with the idea of the skeleton. We have 206 of these little and big hard things called bones that hold us up and protect our innards. If you would like a little review, here’s a Wikipedia link:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bones_of_the_human_skeleton
Unlike wood or concrete, bones are living tissue. They can be built (or renovated to be) stronger and denser, or bend, break, or decay. Like every other part of your body, the food, thoughts, and activities you feed your body make it a new body every day. In other words, you are either improving or disimproving your skeletal structure every day. (Hm. Stop and think about that! It’s true!)
- You improve it by: load-bearing exercise (walking, working) and healthy diet
- You erode it by: drinking soda, eating sugar, sitting in a chair
Diet for your skeleton
* A diet that includes bioavailable calcium, magnesium, and vitamin D. (Not all sources of calcium are processed equally by your body, did you know?)Exercise for your skeleton
* Weight-bearing exercise, which gives your body messages that yourbones need to be bulked up to handle the load. (As an illustration,
very thin people are more likely to have osteoporosis than fat people,
because the bones of heavy people have had a heavier load to carry and
tend to be more dense.)
* Exercise that includes getting your blood pumping (to make sure it’s
sloshing the nutrients adequately to the cells that make up your bones
and other tissues).
Your Muscles: The Gears and Pulleys that Make Things Move
We have all pulled a muscle at some point in our lives, and may have received some help from physiotherapists or massage therapy.The interesting new information on the scene is that often muscle problems are related to the connective tissue surrounding them. Many an injured person has been advised to exercise and stabilize muscles or muscle group when the problem that’s pulling the muscle out of alignment might be related to the fascia surrounding it (which needs a different method).
The ways to keep your muscles healthy include:
Diet for your muscles
* A diet that includes enough protein.* Cautions: Crash diets like the grapefruit diet, which do not include protein, cause your body to lose muscle mass. It’s possible that Steve Jobs’ high-sugar fruitarian diet may have contributed to his cancer.
Many people (including diabetics and body buildders) have been healthily successful with ketogenic diets (high protein, low carbohydrate) to trim fat rapidly and safely.
Exercise for your muscles
* Exercise that includes getting your blood pumping and breathing so that you oxygenate the muscle cells. Longer-term aerobic exercise develops endurance muscle fibres.* Weight-bearing exercises builds larger muscles, but choose just how big you need your muscles to be. Whole-body exercises like rowing, walking, yoga, and martial arts can help your muscles develop in healthy relation and proportion to each other.
*Cautions: Working out muscles in a gym to get a certain look can get unbalanced pretty quickly. For example, it’s possible to make your abs so strong by situps and crunches that you destabilize your back muscles. Use sense and remember that your body is a system. The parts are meant to work together.
* When you begin an exercise such as running, sometimes your muscles
hurt for a while. This is due to the buildup of lactic acid, the
partially metabolized products of your muscles. Flooding your muscles
with beautiful oxygenated blood washes out the lactic acid and frees
you of the pain.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/body/interactives/3djigsaw_02/index.shtml?muscles
Your Fascia: Connective Tissue and Glue: The Tension Components of the System
The elastic tissues that hold your muscles and skeleton in place havebeen largely ignored by mainstream medicine until recently. Everybody
kind of stripped things down and looked at just the muscles and bones.
(This is the big “Where We Went Wrong With Anatomy and Health” for the last, oh, 400 years. Going to a chiropractor is excellent for your skeleton sometimes, but if nothing is done to work with the connective tissue surrounding it, your problem will recur and recur. It's important to work on problems with the whole body for long-term solutions.)
So when these folks: http://www.anatomytrains.com/ wanted to start making a study of the fascia particularly, they went back to a 16th century anatomy book (particularly, ''De humani corporis fabrica libri septem'' by an intrepid fellow named Andreas Vesalius, who actually took bodies apart and made very thorough studies of all their parts and how they work together).
To learn (graphically) more about that, go to this website and click the “fascia” tab: http://www.anatomytrains.com/
You can even see a video of a dissection of the connective tissue and the "anatomy trains -- the long bands of fascia that connect our body.
Adding modern physical and mathematical knowledge, particularly Buckminster Fuller's study of tensegrity, the Anatomy Trains scientists have been able to explain rigorously how muscles and bones relate to other muscles and bones – the connections are not just to other muscles and bones that are adjacent.
The missing piece in so much of our medical and physiotherapy to date has been forgetting to include the connections of the fascia. For example, that problem in your knee might actually be related to tense fascia tissue in your lower back.
Diet for your connective tissue
If you aren’t flushing your body out enough by drinking enough water and moving enough, then your fascia will store up goouegy stuff and get stiff and rigid. “Goouegy stuff” is my technical term for it. Ayurvedic practitioners call goouegy white sticky stuff in our bodies "ama."You have seen ama. If you have had a long crying jag of an evening, OR you're sick, OR you ate an excess of something that your body doesn't digest all that well, you wake up with a thick white coating on your tongue. That's ama.
Now isn't that interesting? Ama is produced in your body by three
ways: bad emotion, bad food, or illness. Same goouegy stuff. You can be as skeptical as you want and say that you don’t believe me – but start taking note of what happens in your body. See it happening for yourself.
Diet for your connective tissue
The way to keep your connective tissue clean and healthy and free ofobstruction is pretty much the same way you would clean a dish cloth.
Run lots of water through it, and wring it out. You have heard the
advice to drink lots of water before -- now you know why -- it's to
wash out the goouegy stuff, particularly if you have been experiencing
a lot of emotion or been ill or been eating badly.
While you’re drinking a lot of water, fast now and then. Add some lemon juice and cayenne pepper to your water to help wash out your tissues, and give your body a break on the food.
Exercise for your connective tissue
Restorative, or "yin" yoga involves getting into various twisty or gently stretching positions and allowing your body to melt into them for 5-7 minutes at a time. This allows the goouegey connective tissue to loosen and ooze open, similar to (and in fact better than) the way it does when you get a massage.Massage is great for your connective tissue too of course. That's what massage is all about, digging in to increase the circulation of your lymph through your tissues. Loosening up tight muscles is often more about loosening up the surrounding connective tissue, than the
actual muscle fibres themselves.
The Wireless Electrical Systems: Chakras, Chi, Auras
We've looked at three layers of your body's anatomy so far: yourbones, your muscles, and your connective tissue. Throughout and on top of
these layers is another essential layer, and one that many
practitioners would say is the most important one: your energy body.
Whether you say it's lines of qi or chi, or chakras, or you visualize
white light flowing through and around your structure, it's all the
same idea. The basic principles are:
1. Energy flows through you.
2. You accumulate small blockages, usually by emotionally upsetting events or injuries.
3. When blockages get too large or stay stuck in your body for too long, you can get sick or feel injured.
4. You can become more well by facilitating the free flow of your energy again.
Diet for your energy body
Your energy body is best served by getting clear, which means drinking lots of water and eating healthy, clean, unprocessed food.Fasting is also excellent, whether it’s for half a day or one day a week, or for several days in a row. Fasting gives your body time to clean up. Dr. Adam McLeod explains it this way: when you constantly eat enough food, your cells don’t recycle the materials that you give them. When cell organelles get broken or trash accumulates, your cells just create a trash heap. This trash heap can turn into toxins that create cancers and other diseases.
When you fast, your cells start digging in the trash heaps when they need new materials. They recycle all the materials in your body, and this removes the opportunity for those trash heaps to ferment into toxins.
Exercise for your energy body
- Meditation, especially light meditation, is the way to clear your energy body.
- Behaving with integrity and compassion for those around you prevents regrets, creates good happy energy, and keeps your energy clean.
- Right past wrongs that you have done to others.
- Find peace with your past.
For the Skeptics
Since ancient times in India, there has been an understanding of anenergetic component of the human body, known as the chakra system.
It's well-documented and has been a working part of medicine to maintain health and heal people for, oh, a few thousand years now.
Many people find healing thoughts, explanations, and energy work by visualizing and even seeing the chakra system. There are recommendations for diet, mental attitudes, and activities to help heal and clear
Since ancient times in China, there have been maps of the energy
meridians and chi lines running through the body. Acupunturists have
helped people to heal and cure themselves for... oh, a few thousand
years now.
There are an increasing number of public speakers who are
spreading the word of energy healing. You may have heard of some of these people. If not, look them up. Some modern American speakers/authors of note in the realm of energy medicine:
- Louise Hay
- Deepak Chopra
- Wayne Dyer
- Adam McLeod (Dreamhealer) is a remarkable young Canadian, who started by seeing energy and healing people, and teaching others to do energy healing, and then worked through mainstream medical research instrumentation to prove to material scientists that he could show them the effects of moving around energy to heal.
- A rather famous past energy healer who healed many people was commonly known as Jesus Christ.
Amazingly, there are still many people in North America who have
bought into the cult of materialism, believing (despite reams of
evidence to the contrary) that only that which can be seen or measured
by the limits of our current technology, actually exists. More sadly,
our entire conventional medical system is currently based entirely on
this false belief.
The strange thing is that this skeptical insistance that the intangible does not exist, this narrow belief in materialism, has only been present for a tiny part of human history, and a small proportion of the human population. It just happens to be our English-speaking current culture. But don’t get trapped in thinking that the narrow closet you were raised in holds all the truth in the world.
Billions of people in this world believe in their energy bodies – more people believe, than not. If you’re one of the people finding your virtue in skepticism, why don’t you sharpen your own observation skills and start doing your own experiments? Try fasting, massage, meditation, alternative diets. Actually keep records and see how various changes affect your experience of your health.
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