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Class 9 Theory

     Welcome to Class 9! You've made it through the Heal Thyself series! If you have really gone one week at a time and fully integrated the lessons taught within each class you should be noticing that you are well on your way to living a life free of pain. This is an ongoing process, but you now have the tools to truly be a part of it and I congratulate you! Today's class is a philosophical study of the human body and its place with life. This class is not comprised solely of my theories. We will be expounding on a compilation from many different sources with a particular focus on the philosophies of a man named Thomas Hanna, a brilliant author and somatic integrationist. Let's begin.

So you have completed the rote learning phase of the series! Now what? You are now left to go out in the world and put the new bodily knowledge you have gained into practice. You have a phenomenal machine in this human body of yours. It's time for you to better understand what it is. What is this human body? What makes it so special? And what is life in relation to the human body? Thomas Hanna would have described life and the body as a never ending process of organizing and balancing. The body is forever reorganizing its structure and positioning to accommodate the things we do, the feelings we feel, and the emotions we express or hold inside. It is forever responding to the images inside your head and the images in your physical environment. As it is responding, it gains wisdom. When you first learn to ride a bike, your body does its best to shift a little here and there to keep you up in the seemingly impossible feat of balancing on two wheels. At first, it overcompensates and you fall down, but through repeated attempts, the body learns. What does it learn? It learns a new way of sensing itself within gravity and a new way to respond. It refines itself through repeated effort. That is what you have been doing your entire life, only at some point, your body became less resilient. At some point you started to notice pains and tensions. Your life, and therefore your body, became a bit more complicated. No matter how good you were at riding your bike, the more air you lost in your tires, the less enjoyable riding that bike would be. If you were not sure how to put air in your tires, the rims would start to break down. People might say, "Oh the bike is getting old.", but it wouldn't really have anything to do with old age, would it? It would have more to do with ignorance and being asleep to the fact that you have a choice. Well you now know how to put air in the tires of your body and I highly suggest you continue to do it.

The human body is amazing. Thomas Hanna discussed the body in terms of the three laws of thermodynamics. I'm particularly interested in the second law. This is the law of entropy. The second law basically says that the universe is slowly petering out. An example is made of a ball at the top of a hill. At the very top of that hill, that ball is at its most powerful! It has the ability to roll at increasing speed all the way down that hill. This is called potential energy. The ball's potential energy is greatest at the top of the hill because of its ability to forcefully move down it. Once the ball is at the bottom of the hill, however, it really cannot move back to the top of the hill without the help of some outside force. Therefore the ball's potential energy becomes zero. It is said that the universe is somehow in the process of rolling down the hill. Its potential energy is decreasing. All physical matter works like this except for one kind of matter. There is one very special kind of matter that has developed the incredible feat of reversing the laws of entropy to some extent and that is living matter. Living matter found a way to stay on top of the wave of entropy by maintaining itself. As our cells, die, we make more. As toxins accumulate, we clean them away. As the nutrients are used up, we eat food. Most people are able to ward entropy off for 80 years or so without hardly even trying. That is not to say they do not feel it's effects, but if they actually work at it, life is on their side to help them live at the top of the hill! Life takes maintenance to ward off entropy. You must maintain your practices of stretching and putting the right foods into your body. Entropy will always be trying to take the order of your body and make it random. This is the process that takes you from youth to old age. The tools used by entropy are your negative mindsets, and poor habits. Most people will do nothing to reverse this process, but you can! Help your body rebuild itself. If you have truly taken this series of classes in the manner in which I asked you to, then by this point, you are not just maintaining yourself, you are getting better! You have reversed entropy. You are climbing back up the hill. Get to the top and don't let any stupid habit pull you off! Even once you get to the top you have to maintain yourself. This process never ends.

Now this is where most people get upset. They were hoping for a quick fix. A quick fix does not exist. It never has. People looking for quick permanent fixes have always been swindled. So please, you must change the mindsets you have behind healing your bodies. There is no quick fix. Life is a process of organizing and reorganizing. You must have a maintaining hand in that process! You must practice the Art of letting Go of your body (the Neutral Center exercise) and you must continue to practice it in everything that you do. Practice it until it is not something that you do, but something that you are! Don't look at it relative to anything else. Anyone can do this. A flower practices the Art of Letting Go every minute of its life! Its whole life is one constant reach for the sun from the moment it sticks its arm out of the dirt to its great moment of fruition as a radiant fully bloomed flower. And it doesn't stop there. It continues to practice because that is what being a flower is all about! A flower will always reach to become more and more of itself and so shall you. A flower has never known anything else so it does not have the poison of having to compare its never ending reach with collapsing into entropy.

Live the Art of Letting Go and watch as your life becomes brighter and brighter. The body and the mind are not separate. When your body is free your mind is the same. You will get more out of your life and you will have more to offer to others! The balance you are looking for exists somewhere between rushed rigid forward movement and complete collapse. When you are rushing forward, your arms are pulled back tight, your legs and your back tense up and your pelvis tilts anteriorly. When you collapse and hide from the world, the opposite happens. You rib cage tightens up in front, your arms roll forward and your legs feel weak while the pelvis tilts posteriorly. Both are imbalances. The goal is to use the Art of Letting Go to live in between these two physical states of being. The goal is to live in a place that is neither pushing forward or pulling back. This is a physical state that brings a feeling in the body that says, "There is nowhere to rush to. I've already arrived." It is calm and awake. It is neither pushing nor pulling. In this state, you will have less accidents because you are calm enough to see what is right in front of you. In this state you can trust yourself, because you are agile enough to take action to walk away if a situation is detrimental to you. From this state your body radiates calm and trust and you are therefore seen as comforting and trustworthy. This is big stuff here. People do respond by what they see in your holding patterns. If you change these patterns by changing the way you respond to life, you will change the way life responds to you. Start to notice those people in your life that are calm. Start to notice those people who always seem to get what they want without harming anyone. What does their structure look like. How do they physically respond to life? What you discover may surprise you. Be aware of your interplay with life and try to see how your response to life mirrors life's response to you. Are you heavy or are you light. When you step into life do you greet people with heaviness or levity? If your body feels heavy, you now have the tools to change that. Gravity is not your enemy. Gravity is your best friend!

Gravity is your advisor and it will teach you how to let go of the holding patterns within your body. When you are starting to hold on, gravity will use its weight to tap you on the shoulder and tell you that you are misaligned. It gets your attention by making you feel heavy. It tugs on you. If you ignore what it is telling you, it will progressively tug harder until you get the message. When gravity tugs on you, practice the Art of Letting Go. If you can't quite get there, you know you need to do some stretches to release the muscular holdings. Can you see how simple this all is? Use gravity. Don't shun it. It is your advisor. Let it guide you to that physical state of being that is weightless and free.

This course is not an end for you, it is your beginning. You cannot fix everything in nine weeks, but you have acquired the tools to do so. Go for it! And let me know how you're doing. I want to help. If you're really dedicated, I will do my best to guide you in the right directions to get you where you want to go. I have done it for many others and I can do it for you. Please tell everyone you know about this free course. If even one person that you tell really goes for it and improves the quality of their life, what a wonderful opportunity for you to be a part of. Turn the pursuit of happiness and health into a game and enjoy every move. I will be here, waiting, with open arms to help you on your way.

With Love,

Liam Keever LMT, Structural Bodyworker