Healing and Imagination($)

Healing is beyond any medicine to know.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge .”
— Albert Einstein

While it’s fresh in my mind—and while I’m still on oxygen—I want to consider the role of intention in healing oneself. In Covid-19, Illness and Illumination, I went through the systems in the body affected by the Sars-Cov-2 virus. My purpose was to amplify a person’s awareness of balance in these systems and what it feels like to maintain balance. Since these systems are not separate and we believe them to be insensitive, one has to imagine them. The idea is that through created mental imagery you can attain a greater level of control of your internal systems than your otherwise complete indifference provides.

Consider how you learn a physical skill, like hiking a trail. You have to learn how to see and navigate the trail, and to recover from mistakes. We take for granted our breathing, walking, orientation, and situational awareness. We don’t pay attention to how we do these things, and because we don’t, we are limited in our skill in recovering the abilities should we lose them. Much of physical therapy is relearning things we could not imagine the ability to forget.

Fell running has its origin from the Old Norse word 'fell' which was used to signify a mountain’s alpine region above the tree line. Fell running means running the mountain with no trail presumed. Anyone can do it if you're fit and have good balance. It’s rock hoping, it’s like dancing. Depending on the terrain, it’s easy to hurt yourself.

The week I just spent in intensive care reminded me that something as basic as who I feel myself to be can be quickly forgotten when I lose my work, routine, and familiar environment. Add to this an inability to breathe and you begin to lose your sense of self.

Longevity

There is a difference between preparation for disruption and prevailing through a crisis. There’s a difference between finding your way home and being lost in the wilderness. There is a difference between holding your center and regaining your center.

Part of the difference is in your mind. It’s hard to think straight in a crisis. It’s hard to act from a place of balance and confidence, but it’s only when you do act from a place of balance and confidence that you can hit a target or achieve anything. To regain anything you must remember it.

When you act in panic, fear, or in a state of exhaustion your senses of sequence and connection are distorted. As you lose your sense of order, focus itself starts to blur and you lose accuracy. When you actions are based on forces that are unnatural to you, you lose your natural identity and your natural abilities.

Panic arises when what’s necessary appears unachievable and what’s basic disappears. In a relationship this could be intimacy. In fell running panic could be triggered by a loss of balance. In a psychedelic journey, I once lost my memory. In my recent experience with Covid, a sense of panic hung on the idea of not getting enough oxygen.

Trauma is an injury to the self and many disturbances can have lasting traumatic effect. Where fear acts in the present, trauma echoes into the future. The seriousness of a traumatic effect is measured by its impact on your memory.

In some cases the trauma is the fear that you continue to remember. In other cases the trauma lies in part of yourself you’ve forgotten. In neither case do you want to explore your vision for fear of being further injured by it, but in both cases you cannot overcome what has become a delusion until you can replace it with a more enabled vision.

Trauma is fear that so clouds your perception that you are afraid to approach it. Healing requires trauma’s replacement but that does not require it be conquered or engaged. All memory is malleable, and the purpose of all memory is balance. With support, trauma can be released without being relived.

Longevity means health and long life. It’s something that is more appreciated as a state than the result of an effort. If our longevity is due to an intentionally healthy diet and exercise, what is our mortality due to? Longevity and mortality are not exactly opposite.

Mortality

Mortality is seen as a specific vulnerability and acute condition. You’ll be blamed for an unhealthy lifestyle, but it’s not smoking that kills you, it’s cancer. You don’t die of obesity, you die of heart failure. You’re guilty of what you choose but rarely are you blamed for what develops. You are responsible for the path you choose.

Could you be more connected with your body and its condition? Could you be more aware of the threats your behavior invites? Could you temper your bad habits if you were more sensitive?

Your heart and lung are not functionally separate organs. It is possible to be aware of your breath and pulse and to synchronize them. “Synchronize” roughly means increasing your pulse on inhale, and decreasing it on exhale. This is what you can be consciously aware of, but there are further subtle levels of your pulse that you are not aware of that mediate other beneficial synchronies.

Many people with chronic heart problems lack this coordination, and the resultant stress tends to permeate their body. But even for these people, it’s relatively easy to improve this situation by allowing them to hear, see, or sense overlapping cardio and pulmonary beats, and to visualize greater synchrony. The imaginary act of providing sensation allows the body to reorganize itself.

It was difficult to work on anything while I was in the hospital. A physical therapist told me to exercise while in bed, but this gave me little to work on, The respiratory therapist didn’t provide either a path or goal. They wanted me to raise the percent of oxygen in my blood without increasing the percentage of oxygen I was inhaling, but they didn’t know how I could do that.

Should I exercise or rest my breathing? Should I increase the depth of my breath, increase the volume of my inhales, or should I make small changes or keep an even tempo? Should I cough or not cough? They were completely unhelpful in terms of what sort of healing I needed. When I think about it, this is what allopathic medicine believes: you cannot affect your health.

It was not until I’d been home for five days, and the nurses stopped calling to focus on what they saw as my disabled state, that I was able to begin exploring the boundaries of breathing. I needed some latitude, flexibility, and range of possibility before I could even start to intentionally heal myself.

Recovery

I have not yet recovered. I am well aware of my continued pulmonary limitations. I’m afraid to think of how limited I might be but, assuming my confidence grows, I expect to find out that healing is possible. In doing so, I will develop a picture of how to make this happen.

It’s easy to imagine that I might develop a program of progressive depth, breadth, or length of breathing and this will rebuild my lungs. After all, this is how you develop your lung capacity when you’re healthy.

This is the crux of mind-body healing: what can you accomplish? Can you accomplish more if you’re aware of more? Much of awareness is imagination built on shreds of perception, so if you imagine more does that increase your ability to bring what you imagine into reality?

This is an age-old question. Athletic training has shown that there is a path to greater self-awareness, control, and function that is incremental, foundational, and necessary for the achievement of greater skill. On the other hand, what are the limits, and are these physical or perceptual limits?

If you could develop an exquisite sense of your body, could you develop exquisite control? I was asking myself these questions while in the hospital, but the hospital environment is hostile to learning.

At some point allopathic medicine goes away and you may be given lessons in how to recover your health. It’s a mystery that allopathic medicine ever believes it’s own story, the story that you lack the ability to heal yourself. This notion, the primacy of interference, seems to originate in the failure to understand what health is.

In my case, my health was my ability to put oxygen into my blood. There was some knowledge of what would prevent this, such as fluid in my lungs or a lack of flexibility in my tissues, but there was no theory of recovery. I think this is outrageous.

The scientific answer is that you have a theory, a method, and observe consistent results. But healing is not a consistent process. Healing is inherently contrary to the current condition.

Allopathic medicine attempts to change the condition on the presumption that your health results from what chemicals are in you. Allopathic medicine presumes you are an unintentional chemical process, while intentional healing presumes that you must be involved.

Interoception

Return to the ability to control and the notion that you cannot control what you cannot perceive. The problem here is fundamental and rests on this question: are we training control or imagination?

What if the hospital implemented a program of biofeedback? What if they spent time each day teaching me how to improve all the statistics that their machines were recording? Could that change my oxygen levels, pulmonary functions, and blood chemistry?

“Certainly not,” would be the allopathic response. In fact, the allopathic response is that you can’t do anything. That everything is a mechanical result of your chemical situation. Yet we know this cannot be true because the chemical situation of a person who is in the process of healing is the same as that of the person who is not. So what is healing?