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Body Language: O

An Excursion Through the Alphabet in Somatic Terms
by Thomas Myers

In our journey through the alphabet, we have reached the 15th letter, O. The original letter was pronounced ayin (eye-een), and its meaning lies close to this sound.¹ The original hieroglyph from which the letter was drawn was a representation of the eye. As it moved from pictogram to letter, the oblong, almond shape of the eye got round. In early Hebrew alphabets, the letter showed only the lower half of the eye with the pupil indicated by a vertical line, which led to the modern Hebrew form of the letter ayin.

The Greeks brought the letter in as omicrom, from Phoenician and Hebrew, as a round circle with a dot in the middle, still representing the eye. The pupil dot disappeared in the subsequent centuries; leading to the simple O we have today.

Seeing what's hidden
The obvious meaning of ayin was to look, to see. The derivative meanings sprang from the idea of the eye - the literal ones of an orb or a globe; and the figurative ones, meaning to consult, and to make apparent. If you remember, the letter N conveyed, “that which is hidden in the murky depths." The letter O represents the emergence from this hidden world into the air and sunlight. Thus, another meaning that attached to this letter was that of a water spring, where the water hidden in the depths of Earth emerges into the light of the surface world.

If we turn our attention to what O, ayin, has to say about our hands-on work, certainly we can see that when someone consults us, it is our job to bring the hidden tension to the surface, to make it apparent to the client. Parts of the body that are not moved do not stimulate of the stretch receptors to the brain. (When no signals reach the brain for a long time, we lose the representation of that part of the body; it drops out of our body image.)

We can hold significant tension, as passive trigger points in chronically held muscles or short and bound fascia. But because they do not create constant pain, they do not "show" themselves to the client except in extraordinary movements, or when we get our hands in there. When we do get our hands in there, or when the areas start moving beyond their habitual pathways, they can hurt more for a bit rather than less - but this is hardly a bad sign.

Thus the letter O reminds us of our duty with clients to help them find themselves - all of their somatic selves, even the bits they would rather not be reminded of. In this way, all of their sensory perceptions and motor decisions are informed by the presence of the whole body, and we cannot ask for more than that.

In the bigger picture, there is another metaphor afoot in the meaning of O: What is hidden in our work, the invisible and mysterious, the energetic side of the work. What do we mean by the word energy? It is bandied about all the time in our somatic world, as both an explanation for inexplicable healing on the part of the client, or an inexplicable fatigue, illness or revelation on the part of the practitioner. But what is it?

Clearly there is something being described, although all too often the word simply becomes a catchall, a convenient term to easily categorize anything that goes on during or around a massage-therapy session. To make a more detailed map of this invisible realm, to make it more useful and less foggy, let us seek out one scientist who has labored to validate the world of energy healing, James Oschman, Ph.D.

Energy man
I am pleased to be able to call Jim my friend, as we have been teaching and working together since the bad old days of the late ’70s - when neither of us had written a book, and we almost had to pay people to listen to our messages. Now he basks in the comfort of two successful books and a full schedule of speaking engagements. All of this is well-deserved recognition for 20 years of researching the difficult subject of energy in healing, which is fraught with pitfalls as well as a frequent source of delight.

Bright, affable and possessed of a dry humor that sometimes skims over others' heads, Jim is both excited and bemused by the twists and turns of the scientific and natural-healing communities, between which he builds a bridge. "No way you can connect the mind with the body," he says, startling his listeners into attention before he adds, "That would imply that you could somehow separate them in the first place."

Jim was born and grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, obtaining a bachelor’s degree in biophysics and a doctorate in biology (zoology) at the University of Pittsburgh. After research and professorships in various places in the United States and overseas, he landed, at age 35, at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where he worked near and was inspired by Albert Szent-Gyorgi, M.D., Ph.D., the Nobel-winning biochemist who mapped the Kreb's cycle, synthesized Vitamin C and discovered actomyosin, which laid the foundation of modern muscle physiology.

Poring over computers and papers had given Jim a permanent backache, so he went to see Peter Melchior, a Rolfing practitioner in Boulder, Colorado, one of Ida Rolf's original students. (Jim traveled for his sessions from Massachusetts to Colorado, which must qualify for one of the longest commutes for bodywork ever undertaken.)

The work was so surprisingly and permanently helpful that Jim sought out Rolf to find out what was going on. He met her (and me as well, incidentally) at her advanced training in Philadelphia in 1978. Rolf inspired him to go off on a literature search about the connective-tissue network, and the results of that search are still reverberating through the natural-healing community. A successful encounter with acupuncture got Jim into researching what might be happening with chi, and the myriad changes that result from point stimulation. Now everybody has the opportunity to read the distillation of all these many years of diligent digging, in Jim's two books: Energy Medicine (Harcourt Brace, 2000) and the fascinating follow-up, Energy Medicine and Human Performance (Butterworth Heinemann, 2003).

A better dialogue
Setting Jim in orbit around the theme of the letter O, the widening gyre soon takes in the entire universe, if not more. "I like the thought of bringing the invisible into the visible world," he says. "Making the invisible forces visible is very important in energy medicine, because people have fears of invisible forces, and part of science is to help people get away from their superstitions and confusion about invisible forces so that they can feel less threatened."

As it turns out, however, scientists are among those who can feel threatened.

"Making the invisible visible is very important in energy medicine because the organism does have a biological field," Jim says. "This has been well-described for thousands of years by sensitive people who have seen the field around the body. Until a couple of decades ago, scientists 'knew' that this was hallucination. They 'knew' that there was no such thing as a field around the body.

"But, oops, that has all changed dramatically because we have recently developed sensors to detect that field in various ways," Jim continues. "Even so, there are many people in medicine who don't realize that this research has been done, so they still are very critical and very suspicious of therapists who claim to be able to work with the energy field. In fact, it is a very sensible explanation of what's going on, when your field interacts with the field of the client."

In other words, it isn’t what you don't know that's going to hurt you; it's what you “know” that isn't so.

"My work," says Jim, "is in encouraging a bigger dialogue. I want to talk about energy work using the language of science, both because it is more precise and also because there is an important audience that only understands things couched in this language. If you talk about vibrations, it sounds New Age. If you talk oscillations, it sounds like physics. I'm encouraging people who are skilled with their hands to talk to scientists, and wherever possible, use the language and metaphors that science has gone to a lot of trouble to perfect, to demystify, to make the invisible both visible and discussable. This takes away the mysticism, fear and superstition on both sides."

Jim agrees with me about client education: "The other aspect of making the invisible visible is helping the client demystify what is going on in the body. That is one of the great contributions of structural bodywork, bringing forth an appreciation of human structure, of which medicine has had hardly any consideration at all. Medicine considers your body structure to be your body structure and that's that.

"You can drug the muscles or the tissues, or take out parts that aren't working, but that's [medicine’s] limit," he continues. "What the structural-bodywork people show us is that there is much to be learned - and I'm interested in patients being educated. This is transformational for the patient, to understand how the way his or her body is moved and how other things we do with our bodies affect our structure. They learn how problems arise and how they can do things themselves that will get them away from their aches and pains. That's a great revelation."

One piece Jim has looked at in this regard occurs in athletic performance. "Athletes are able to do things that are really impossible from the neurological perspective," he says. "They are able to make changes in their motion, make choices far faster than can be explained through the usual model of a signal from a sensory nerve informing a motor nerve that operates the musculoskeletal system. A martial-arts master who is attacked from behind, the first inkling he has of being attacked is that his student is flying across the room. There must be some other way of sensing and responding to the world than the traditional one."

More than brain
This idea about alternate pathways for movement points to Jim's overarching idea, that modern science is overly focused on the brain as the sole seat of consciousness. Jim has given substance, coherence and backing to the intuition that almost all of us have had: that the body itself contains its own intelligence. It has always been evident that our body acts intelligently; could you manage something as simple as growing your hair or digesting your food with only your conscious mind? Of course not - but the scientific presumption is that all things are managed from the brain and brain alone.

Jim's "matrix concept" goes a lot further than this. Briefly, the matrix is the context for body activity: the connective-tissue fibers, the mucousy ground substance and the fluids that surround them. This matrix forms a continuum around each and every cell, connecting the entire body. Although individual aspects of the matrix have been studied chemically, the actions of the matrix as a whole, especially its invisible communications, are just beginning to be uncovered.

It might be easy to dismiss, except that science keeps coming up with confirmations. We know that every cell is Velcro-ed onto the matrix, and that the physiology of the cell, right down to genetic expression, is dependent on these cellular ties. Recently we learned that the glial cells (part of this connective-tissue matrix within the brain) are responsible for shaping the brain and even for thinking itself.

“The matrix concept, regulation via the matrix continuum, matrix consciousness, however you want to see it, gives us a hypothetical construct in which we can explore these extraordinary observations common to athletes, martial artists, intuitives and bodyworkers," Jim says. "The matrix has its innate intelligence. It is the storehouse of vast amounts of information; it can store far more information than the brain.

"The brain has lots of neurons and synapses, but the connective tissue has trillions of molecules, each of which has millions of bonds and all of those bonds are indicative, a way of storing information about movement and tension in the body," he continues. "Wet connective tissue is a liquid crystal, and thus acts as a semiconductor for transferring information about tension, compression and spatial relationships."

What we call cellular memory may be part of this. We have the well-documented organ-transplant stories where the experiences of the donor are transplanted along with the organ to the recipient. This could be a neurochemical fingerprint that comes with the tissue, and the neurochemical fingerprint will affect the new person for some time and then fade away. Or maybe it's stored in the matrix. Or maybe there is cellular memory, cells storing information within the microtubules.

"If there's a physical trick available in the universe, I believe the human body will have capitalized on it," Jim says. "Physicists need to study life, because life has appropriated these tricks. What about the energy fields coming out of the human hand, for instance? We have the sensors now for this research. I believe they will find that what comes out of the healing hand is quite a mixture of highly organized heat, magnetism, light [and] sound, and this mixture has remarkable properties for healing. The mixture might be very interesting - it will be discovered to be an organization of these forms of energy unlike others."

The O or ayin squared: Jim makes visible the otherwise invisible process of how we make the invisible visible for our clients.

References

• Fields, R. “The Other Half of the Brain,” Scientific American, May 2004: 55-61
• Horwitz, A. “Integrins & Health,” Scientific American, May 1997: 68-75
• Hunt, V. Infinite Mind, The Science of Human Vibrations, Malibu Publishing, Malibu, California, 1989.
• Kunzig, R “Climbing Up the Brain,” Discover, August 1998: 61–69
• Oschman, J.L., Energy Medicine: The Scientific Basis, Churchill Livingstone/Harcourt Brace, Edinburgh, Scotland, 2000.
• Oschman, J.L. Energy Medicine in Therapeutics and Human Performance, Butterworth Heinnmann, New York, New York, 2003.
• Pearsall, P. The Heart's Code, Broadway Books, New York, New York, 1998.
• Pollack, G. Cells, Gels, & the Engines of Life, Ebner & Sons, Seattle, Washington, 2001. 

Footnote
1. Mysteries of the Alphabet, by Marc-Alain Ouaknin, 1999, Abbeville Press, Paris, France.

Thomas Myers studied directly with Ida Rolf, Ph.D., and Moshe Feldenkrais, Ph.D., and has practiced integrative bodywork for more than 25 years in a variety of cultural and clinical settings. He directs Kinesis Seminars, Inc., which develops and runs international training courses for manual and movement therapists. Myers served as a founding member of the National Certification Board for Therapeutic Massage and Bodywork and as chair of the anatomy faculty at the Rolf Institute. His articles have appeared in numerous magazines and journals, and he is the author of Anatomy Trains - Myofascial Meridians for Manual and Movement Therapists, (Churchill Livingstone, 2001).

See Issue 113