Self-Healing Addenda

This is part of a series of postings on self-healing, which you can access via the "Self-Healing" tag which appears in the Slog’s left margin below "Popular Entries".


In my previous post, "Self-Healing is the Move You Don't Want to Do", I explained how I've worked out fixes for conditions like tendinitis and arthritis. Here are a couple of followups:

But Which Stretches Exactly?
In the arthritis section, I describe stretching and contracting "the bejesus out of" my feet "in every direction", and that I can "earn a sublime 24 hour pain timeout via 30 seconds of clenching and wriggling."

"But wait!" you holler. "WHICH stretches? WHICH clenches? WHAT wriggling?"

It seems like a sensible question. After all, I glossed right over this seemingly critical issue. Arthritis sufferers (or tendonitis, which I cured via a different sort of stretching...described with similar vagueness) would surely need precise directions for the exact magic stretches that will fix the problem.

This is a distinctively grown-up request. Seven year olds wouldn't ask this. They'd instantly know what to do, and get busy with their hands and feet, trying different stuff curiously, all in a spirit of play. They'd keep coming back to it. And it would work.

With adults, I could sigh, roll my eyes, and cook up absurdly detailed intructions to meet the whiny, helpless, fraught need to have everything explained (and, at some point, I guess I will). But they'll get so caught up in instruction-following and compliance-self-doubting (all on top of the intrinsic skepticism that this stupid weird fuzzy crap even works) that they'd remain light years away from the spirit of it all. They won't be Doing The Move, they'll be anxiously Following Instructions, which is a whole other sort of activity.

There's no one magical action to do, nor am I doing anything unusual or cleverly sequenced. Honestly, nothing smart here. Just stretch and contract the bejesus out of your arthritic body part (if your doctor approves). That's really the best instruction. That's the move.

So: summon some resourcefulness. Clench and stretch your feet IN EVERY DIRECTION. Be creative! Take time! Explore, and keep coming back to it, like kids learning to whistle! Learn what works! It doesn't need to click immediately. Find some patience and curiosity.

You needn't replicate my exact foot movements. You do need to replicate my spirit of playful, patient exploration; stretching and contracting in lots of different ways; trying stuff. That's the easy part! I've already done the hard part by pointing the way, so it won't take you the full year it took me. But it might take a week. One lousy week of playful experimentation to relieve the pain without expense or side effects or doctor visits. Sounds reasonable to me, but it's too much for people, who mostly can't manage to get to the gym or keep up their French lessons or meditation practice, or drive an extra mile for slightly better pizza.

People don't do stuff. They can, however, bitch prolifically about the torment of their arthritis.

Life consists of a series of revisitations to tired clichés, certain with each new pass that we now really understand them. It's time to reconsider "God helps those who help themselves."

Success from Slowness
In that previous posting, I wrote that

Despite my success with self-healing, it's a realm where I'm extremely slow, and have never sped up. Nothing smart, snappy, effortless. Never a snazzy "TA-DAH!". It takes me a year or two to figure out each Move, and when I do it's always cloddishly simple. The Move never involves praying to Akhkhazu or grinding owl molars or concocting some perfect blend of rare herbs. It's dopey, coarse stuff.

Riffing on the odd-seeming combination of slowness and success...

I can toss off nuggets of shiny impressiveness in realms where I'm talented and fast-minded. But magic can be conjured from the realms where I'm pathetically slow and ploddish.

Yoga is like that for me. If a teacher directs me to reach my left hand behind my head, I need to think about it. For a long time! I've driven teachers mad with my hapless dimness. I seem absolutely unsuited for yoga. But when I finally get a move (after working 1700 times harder than the rest of the class), I get it deeply (see the Vedic anecdote here). It took me 25 years to touch my toes, but the insights I gleaned en route could fill a library, whereas a naturally bendy person who easily flops right over learns nothing. And I'm here to learn.

This quote is often attributed to Einstein: "Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid". Turns out Einstein never said it, but it's still a great quote. And the reason most people never discover their genius is because it usually lies in our slow/sticky zone, which teachers and parents urge us to give up on. Most people need to feel smart and look smart, and steer well clear of their Achilles heels.

Me, I embrace my shmuckiness. I ply, with perverse delight, those realms where I'm thick as a fricking malted. I'm not trying to improve/accelerate that side of me (our innate plodding talentlessness, being innate, can't be sped up any more than our innate gifts can be retarded). I plow those fields because I've discovered a great secret: that's where the best stuff comes from.

The hard stuff I can do effortlessly might impress you (cool party tricks!) but doggedly relentless slogging through bleary thick-headedness produces minor miracles. For instance, I can cure incurable conditions...but it takes me forever to figure it out, and, when I do, it always sounds super "duh" and leaves me feeling extra stoopid.

I linked to this post ("The Infinite Potential of Slow Learners") above, but I'm repeating it now because it's such an important point, and one I don't see anyone else making.