Realizing how complex, sophisticated, and magical our bodies are is an endless challenge. For starters, only a few yards of arteries and veins are visible and our nerves are completely hidden. Yet, each of us harbors a mind-boggling 60,000 miles of arteries and similar lengths of veins and nerves. Talk about efficient packaging. How is that even possible? Throw in thousands more miles of lymphatic vessels and, end-to-end, all this would stretch around the earth close to seven times.
There's no free lunch. Every inch of blood vessel and nerve must be able to accommodate our movement without imparting any drag on the muscles, joints, bones or internal organs to which they connect. Otherwise, that structure's range of motion, function and vitality will be diminished, and we may experience pain or pathology.
Of all the organs to which the blood vessels and nerves directly connect, the heart and the brain are the most important. Being hierarchically organized, the body bends over backward to protect any internal organ but especially the heart and brain from mechanical interference. But as important as heart, brain and their plumbing and wiring may be, they nonetheless remain dumping grounds for emotional overloads and afflictive issues, beliefs and attitudes. In other words, even absent restrictions from mechanical trauma, which most adults have in spades, emotional and spiritual content alone can impair our movement, impede the function of our internal organs, damage joints and hasten the day when we need artificial replacements.
For example, a musher began one Iditarod with a frozen shoulder, her right arm nearly useless, possibly from some combination of survivor's remorse and physical trauma. Somehow, that shoulder and arm healed over the next brutal, bitterly cold, nearly-sleepless 1,000-miles of trail. Who'd a thunk?!
Once, in a moment of panic while hunting alone in the Alaska Range, I tried to jerk a recently downed caribou onto its back. The physical tweak combined with the panic traveled up my outstretched median nerve into my left shoulder. There it remained until a colleague helped me release it, after which the pain quit and my arm worked as before.
A patient had been mauled by a grizzly bear who mistakenly thought her cubs were in danger, leaving a restriction in an intercostal nerve in the patient's chest. The patient assumed this was either his own terror, the sow's rage or some combination. Afterward, his breathing improved and his recovery accelerated.
On the last day of a workshop, a classmate mentioned that she'd had a headache of steadily increasing severity all week. Finding a restriction in her right vertebral artery, severely restricting blood flow to her brain, I asked if the restriction was more physical, emotional or spiritual. She said it was her sense of inadequacy compared to our classmates. The moment she let that go, the associated restriction released, we both felt arterial blood surging into her cerebellum, and her headache began to dissipate.
The bottom line? Every inch of that 180,000+ miles of blood vessels and nerves is vulnerable to mechanical injury and deposition of emotional content. Indeed, as the bodymind connection promises, the two often intertwinkle. Is someone you know experiencing symptoms which baffle the doctors? All may not be lost: A manual therapist may be able to find and address the underlying cause. One place to look: iahp.com.
—For 30+ years, Mike Macy, LMT, has specialized in CranioSacral Therapy and Visceral Manipulation. An avid skate skier, hiker, and birder, he can be reached at [email protected].
