Food for Thought...
Musings about muscles... What if...?
Following up on
The Secret SauceDebra Robinson·Apr 13Read full story
Food for Thought...musing about muscles.
People walk for all kinds of reasons…
Some people walk to get their required 10,000 steps in, to walk their dogs, run errands, enjoy nature, people-watch, etc.
Me? I walk to relax and let my brain drop down to my feet for awhile….
You know…to get out of my head, especially after a long work day.
To just be a body for awhile…
It is meditation for me…I am too high-powered for sitting still. I was glad to find that a walking meditation works just as well!
I walk until I am no longer thinking…just feeling.
I feel the air around me, I hear the birds, the traffic sounds, the rustle of of leaves or critters, the silence before the noisy world wakes up.
After awhile, I feel my blood pulsing, my body loosening up, my stride lengthening. I feel my energy for that day. I become aware on those other levels.
I remember what was lost or overlooked in the busyness of the day. Solutions come to me or associations are made that help illuminate my understanding.
My mind and body become more of a receiver.
On one of those walks, I found myself musing about muscles.
Just a series of simple thoughts, really.
“We are mostly muscle… (650 skeletal muscles alone)
So…muscle doesn’t change its character. Muscle is muscle your whole life, right?
So what happened to the muscles that you had as a kid and the muscles you’ve got in your 60s?’
If muscle doesn’t change its character…what changed?
The muscles that were young and supple, the muscles that felt downright delicious, tireless and ready for anything…
compared to these 60 year-old muscles that hurt and cramp, that feel weary, weak and stiff with age? “
We have headfuls of random knowledge that fail to answer this basic dilemma.
We are urged to exercise, rest, seek all kinds of treatments, swallow handfuls of supplements, drink protein shakes and smoothies, etc. etc. It seems like you would have to devote a large part of your life and income to achieve excellent muscle health…or at least our American concept of it.
And yet….
I continued to walk, softly pondering, when it began to dawn on me. The answers were simple in a way…
“Young muscles don’t hurt. They feel good to the touch. They give pleasure and ability. Old muscles hurt…a lot.
Young muscles are soft, elastic and fully mobile…(thoughts of toddlers sucking their toes with ease) Young muscles give alive expression to the body…
Old muscles are stiff, unyielding, inelastic…more liable to tear than stretch. They bind the body!
What happened? Muscles are muscles our whole lives. Their character does not change…
The experience of children… Clean muscles that don’t hurt…and Soft muscles that are relaxed and stretchable.
Clean and Soft…as opposed to old muscles that are dirty and stiff. That was essentially the difference between young muscles and old muscles This was the answer!
Just 2 problems… Dirty muscles and stiff, dry, calcified muscles. So simple!
Clean and Soft were the elements to strive for…”
My experience with Thai massage some years back, had provided a startling change in my understanding of the body. A child of the 70s, (mostly) all-natural, or so I thought… By 40, I had the beginnings of health complaints typical of Americans…overweight, stressed, hypertensive, prediabetic, with the onset of middle-age aches and pains. There had been some injuries along the way, a couple of minor car accidents…the usual things.
When I had my first round of 3 hr-long Thai massages, not only did I realize how inflexible I had become, but I found that every inch of my body hurt!
Most of us would not know that about our bodies unless someone put a heavy thumb into those muscles….a thumb that should go all the way to the bone…without resistance or pain! Not many of us can experience that by the time we’re in our thirties.
It is our expectation that we will age, get stiff and begin to hurt…and go downhill from there…the only variable being the pace at which we will decline. We believe that this is inevitable. Unfortunately, so do our doctors…
Of course, there are also the wild cards of cancer, kidney stones, gall bladder attacks, MS, Parkinson’s, dementia, arthritis, fibromyalgia, etc. that can spring up for no particular reason, as well, and change the trajectory of our lives.
Actually, these issues have their sources…which are rarely hereditary as we’ve been led to believe.
With a basic understanding of the body, these conditions can be understood. They can be prevented, addressed and often reversed. We just have not been given the basic understanding that would help us. And so we suffer needlessly, spending a lot of our lives in sickness and worry and we die prematurely.
We don’t live fully while we are alive…
In fact, Americans seem to have the worst expectations for aging of any people I have seen in my travels…and then we go on to fulfill those expectations…never the wiser.
So…on to the issue of dirty muscles…How did they get ‘dirty’ and what can be done to reverse it?
In massage training, we often heard about toxins, but no one ever told us what those toxins are exactly. On the street, the word is bandied about and assumptions are made. These days, people tend to think about additives, pesticides, chemtrails and the like.
They feel there is no escape from deadly toxic environments…to the point where their pessimistic world view adds to their toxicity! They become paralysed, hopeless and weakened by dread. Their angry thoughts produce acid and toxins around the clock. They surround themselves with ugly black clouds of their own making. In the end, sick bodies and sick minds are feeding off of each other…a kind of quicksand sucking people under.
I think there is a saner approach…and a better way through.
Taking a more useful look at things:
When something goes wrong, we typically reach for something to put in our mouths to make it better, be it an aspirin, a medication or a supplement. We never stop to consider that all these things leave a residue in our tissues…a residue that becomes a toxic build-up and a burden to the body.
Consider this…
I once had a series of deep tissue massages from a Rolfer. It is painful work (brilliant, as well) that goes all the way to the bone. In my 1st session (which brought tears to my eyes), the practitioner quite surprisingly told me how many times my ankles had been sprained…and then he went on to tell me in which years the sprains had occurred, as well as the severity of each sprain. In another session, he told me where I’d had numbing injections at the dentist and what chemicals were used. He could tell me how often I’d had surgery and which anesthetics had been used. He told me what OTC meds and supplements I had taken, accurately describing the time frames. I was astonished!
“HOW do you KNOW all this?!” His explanation was simple…
As he released and mobilized the various levels of tissue, the chemical residues of ALL those substances were released through the skin. He could smell and identify each one. Not only that, but unhealthy tissue from previous injuries could be detected along with necrotic (decaying) tissue…
Imagine!
As the flesh was cleaned up and mobilized, it became healthy and pain-free again…all the way to the bone! A consideration here….the muscles that lie closest to the bone govern your structure and your ability to move freely.
What I had accepted as ‘aging’ was simply the sum total of toxicity and lack of good blood and lymph circulation. Everything I had ingested or had injected into my body had left a residue. Old injury sites and scar tissue had inhibited circulation, as well.
It could all be cleaned and restored. Such are the bodies that we have been given!
In a another example…this in a salon setting…herbal clay body wraps, which also draw out toxins, have to be removed and handled with tongs and heavy gloves. The wraps have to be laundered separately with special detergents.
You could tell who smoked, drank coffee or alcohol, took meds and supplements, who ate red meat, who had had chemo, etc. by the strong odor of the wraps. Whatever you put in your body is excreted through your largest organ of elimination…your skin. Toxic to the touch!
Thai massage was the big eye-opener… Five days of three hour-long sessions of deep tissue work coupled with full-body stretching and deep thumb pressing along the energy lines of the body released an avalanche of toxins into my bloodstream. Within a hour of my 5th session, I became so violently ill that I ‘knew’ I was dying of food poisoning. For the next 36 hrs I was incapacitated with nausea, fever, chills, deep aching, strange odors…everything coming out of everywhere (to put it politely). Everything was headed for every exit. There were ‘hallucinations’ in which I felt like I was experiencing every illness I’d ever had in reverse, going all the way back to infancy.
This is material for a longer story, but the illness was not food poisoning at all! It was the discharge of all the toxins already lodged in my 40 yr old ‘all-natural’ American body. Once stirred up from the tissues, the toxins made their way to the blood stream, skin and bowels for elimination…all rushing for the exits at once.
There is a term for this…’auto-intoxication’…a kind of self-poisoning.
It is the cause of many body aches, illnesses such as psoriasis, headaches, a sense of dullness, depression and more. In severe cases of constipation, it can mimic mental illness (increasingly common in young people.) It is like a clogged sewer…with the sewer gas and toxins backing up into the house…or in this case, our bodies.
On the other side of the detox experience, my body was running on a cleaner engine and everything started to work right again. I experienced a level of health, energy, aliveness and joy that I didn’t know existed. In a less polluted state, my mind cleared and the higher faculties opened. Over the next 9 months, my body continued to unwind and improve…and then I discovered to my surprise that I had NO pain anywhere! I had become a vastly different version of myself!
I could give a long list, but to give an idea… I’d suffered with an 8-yr long headache going into this experience. It never returned. I haven’t had a single headache in more than 30 yrs. even though I don’t live perfectly. Was that even possible?!
Everyone gets a few headaches a year right? That’s just the norm!
Well, this is evidence to the contrary!
In an ealier post, I described being carried in on a stretcher to various chiropractors, etc. I have never had to return. https://debra152.substack.com/p/dr-mace-to-the-rescue
And although I am a massage therapist, I have not needed a massage in 25 yrs. That came about as the result of a personal 6-month trial of magnesium gel to see if it was as beneficial as the nutritional doctors and the body builders claimed. I was so encouraged and felt so good that I continued for a year so I could demonstrate its benefits to my patients. That year turned into 25 years and counting…
In less than a year, I went from hurting all over (essentially the Latin meaning of fibromyalgia which I will cover in a future post) to NOT hurting anywhere at all!
(Over time, I became more aware of what should have been obvious…how many popsicles, how much cool whip, candy, flavored this and colored that, OTC meds, and supplements, etc. that I had consumed thoughtlessly. I was a mess! I had done most of it to myself. But it was fixable!)
Clean muscles…do not hurt.
Now…on to soft muscles…
The basic story here… Muscles work primarily through the dance of calcium, which makes a muscle work/contract and magnesium, which makes a muscle relax. It is a bit more complex, but this is enough to know for now. We should have roughly equal amounts of these primary minerals.
Magnesium, which is lost through stress, has been farmed out of the soils and not replaced. At the same time, we are urged to eat more dairy and take more calcium. Magnesium, which was the #1 remedy of the old doctors, performs many more functions in the body. But, for our discussion, magnesium relaxes muscles, balances calcium and makes calcium behave itself properly in the body.
Magnesium breaks down calcium where it doesn’t belong and returns calcium to the bones and binds it there. (arthritic or aging joints, stiff or calcified muscles, 80% of breast lumps are calcium, kidney and gall stones, the heart, arteries, etc.)
Hardening of anything in your body is simply calcification…
Calcification is often just too much of a good thing and/or lack of magnesium to maintain a balance. It is often just that simple…and easy to fix.
Again I mused…
“You know…kids put their little bodies through ALL kinds of stuff. Falling off their bikes, climbing and falling out of trees, beating each other up, getting into all kinds of mischief, but we’re not dragging them off to the chiropractor or massage therapist every other minute. They just seem to rebound all on their own, without anyone’s help! So why is that?!
Well, maybe it’s because their bodies are soft…they rebound quickly on their own…
Then it hit me! That softness…Kid’s bodies SELF-ADJUST all day long!
That was the way our bodies were designed to work!!
That was it! Just 2 problems…Dirty muscles and stiff, calcified muscles. So simple!
So what do you do about dirty muscles?
Putting less stuff in our mouths for starters…
Water, movement, clean diets, giving the body a rest now and then through fasting so it can devote it’s energies toward cleaning up and healing, deep massage, sweating, FIR (far infrared sauna) for detoxing the deeper organs. Nothing extreme. Nothing costly.
And what do you do about stiff calcified bodies? You de-calcify! Again, so simple!
How is that accomplished?
Far less dairy, NO calcium supplements (trust me…if you knew the source, you would not touch anything ‘calcium-added’-like dairy substitutes boasting more calcium than milk!) I added lots of regular transdermal magnesium gel to break down calcium where it’s not supposed to be (joints, muscles, hardened spines, hearts and arteries, etc.) and to return and bind calcium to the bones, where it belongs. Strong Epsom salt soaks work, but I find it cheaper and faster to use magnesium gel (magnesiumshoppe.com/ skydancer@ij.net)
It is possible to get too much of a good thing…
We Americans are overloaded with dairy and calcium supplements with all the resultant harm that has come since the Dairy Council got in bed with the government in the early 70s and changed the food pyramid in order to ‘sell more product’. Problems became apparent within one year, but it has taken almost 50 yrs. for the FDA to suggest a reversal of that advice. (I’ve not met a single doctor who has implemented the new guidance). Moreover, there is a lot of junk science and decades of TV and billboard advertising, etc. to overcome.
Then there is the matter of stimulants. We have been taught (mis-taught) to rely on them for energy. Coffee, nicotine, tea, coke, mountain dew,energy drinks, pills and all their chemical cousins. Stimulant medications such as ritalin and adderal, etc. have turned a generation of kids into meth and heroin addicts. Even stimulant herbs such as guarana sold in health food stores work against you when you’re trying to relax or sleep. When your muscles are tight and you splash caffeine/stimulants on them, it’s like pouring gasoline on a fire! It makes all 900 muscles tighter.
In the final tally, stimulants actually ROB you of energy Magnesium, on the other hand, converts your food into energy or ATP…the soft, vibrant energy you had as a child… Much preferred over the harsh energy of stimulants.
In general, we should not be putting more stuff in our mouths to get better. We should be putting less! It is a deeply-rooted instinct in our culture to put something in our mouths at the first sign of anxiety or discomfort (not all cultures operate this way, btw). But a little awareness goes a long way and you can dismantle that instinct. (think about it…they don’t call them ‘pacifiers’ for nothing!)
As I walked and mused, it came to me that if we could simply soften and clean our muscles, we might be able to return them to their early state of health and ease. We could self-adjust without any special thought or effort. We could remain pain-free.
We might not have to go to the chiropractors anymore…
https://debra152.substack.com/p/dont-be-shy-get-that-2nd-opinion
Using just these 2 ideas, I practiced on myself. My sole aim was a child-like body. Soft, self-adjusting and not hurting. A body that was happy and self-healing.
I wondered how far I could take this idea?
I remembered my body at different stages…
How and when did things change? As kids, we were kicked out of the house to play. We played with reckless abandon! But when organized sports, dance class, etc. entered the mix, we became more self-conscious, regimented and inhibited…less natural. Back then, it was nothing to sprawl half on the floor and half on the couch to do our homework. But, as young adults, certain things became off-limits. No more careless play or free movement.
Our work lives lay ahead. We dressed and moved differently. We became increasingly body-inhibited. Eventually the fascia that surrounds your muscles shrinks to fit. Your body is becoming bound down now that you no longer move freely. You’re told to expect such things. You think it’s normal…
Society had steadily taken our pastimes away…no more dancing, goofing off, casual sports. We have been reduced to being spectators and consumers. And our kids have been especially targeted in terms of not having free time. We yell at the kids, but we did it to ourselves and now we’re doing it to them, by example and by caving to unhealthy, increasingly neurotic societal norms.
It’s all pretty obvious when we take a minute to think it through. Not only is the body inhibited, but the personality becomes inhibited, as well.
Back to the experiment…I remembered my youth…and leaving my youth behind, adapting to a culture that just wants us to work and consume and worry…and grow old along scripted lines. We fail to question it…
I thought with a smile about camping out on the ground with a flimsy sleeping bag when I was younger…even a bit of winter camping…sans frills.
On the opposite end of that spectrum, I noticed that my patients were spending crazy sums on special mattresses and pillows, seeking out practitioners and gadgets and getting less agile and comfortable by the year!
Why not just make the body softer?
I needed a baseline for my experiment, so I headed to the nearest campground and spread out a sleeping bag and a tent…nothing fancy. I spent a pretty uncomfortable night on that ground…and my body was cranky the next day. But I got what I needed. I took inventory of my aches and hard places…my stiff neck, the arthritic spots, the scoliosis that I attended to sporadically.
I ditched the dairy, upped the magnesium gel, and took an oral dose as well. I let the caffeine go and started relying on magnesium for better sleep and energy. Once in awhile, I would savor a really lovely cup of coffee in a special setting and sip it slowly, like a European or Bosnian (the photo above is my Bosnia journal), rather than guzzling a super-size beverage like we Americans do.
I softened my attitudes, and my pace. I stopped living such a hard, regimented life. In our culture, we push people to work harder at everything to better themselves. My feeling is that more work is not the answer! We need to come out from under that tyranny, as well! I questioned my unconscious attitudes toward living and aging…in my body and mind.
Where food was concerned, I thought “Where is it written that I must have 3 meals and 2 snacks a day?!! As if these were commands from on high… It was a tyranny that prevented me from reaching a healthy weight. And it got in the way of life! As a kid, I could hardly be bothered with food and I never came to the table without reading material. I was busy eating Life! and Knowledge!! As my Bulgarian dance teacher friend, Petur would remind us, we must also eat Beauty! In Thailand, a housewife will come home from the market with an armful of fresh vegetables and fruit and an armful of tropical flowers for the same reason. We must eat Beauty, Music, good Conversation…
I became indignant with the bombardment of half-baked information, advertising and the impositions of the over-culture. It is a nonsensical rotation of dieting and being derailed at every holiday or celebration. Food has become our ‘entertainment’.
I adopted a “who cares” attitude to their noise and returned to innocence and common sense.
An unhealthy, unhappy and neurotic culture that had lost its way had little to offer…
I broke with the habits that bound me. I broke up with the diet, self-improvement and supplement worlds with their incessant, commercial, life-gobbling demands.
I stopped being a slave to fads and schemes. I took back my brain and authority.
In tackling our own attitudes and expectations…
What do you think? What do you envision as the path your body will travel on? What unsupported ideas/beliefs have been handed down to you through your family and the over-culture? Why not write them down, taking nothing for granted….and question them?
I know from hard experience working with patients that it is very difficult to dislodge an idea like “I have my mother’s knees (so I will suffer now until I’m old enough to get a replacement).” Another person I know started to have annual pleurisy attacks and a chronic cough…just like her mom. I helped her challenge that and learn how to take better care of herself. She has been free of them…and the fear of them…ever since. She shares that it has been mostly doctors who have tried to instill the ‘fear of the family’ in her, raising issues such as heart problems, cancer, depression, etc. They want to ‘pre-treat’, urging hyper-vigilance rather than offering good health advice in its place. Fortunately her dad would often say that ‘we have good genes for fast healing.’ That was worth taking in.
“Bad” backs, migraines, heart problems, kidney stones, cancer, arthritis and a raft of other things have dogged us all our lives because a doctor or family member declared that they were hereditary.
That’s cheap, easy and convenient…and most often, wrong!
What is more likely is that our habits are hereditary, the environment is hereditary, family myths and expectations are hereditary.
Most of it can be challenged. Each person can carve out a better path for themselves despite the naysayers. What you believe and expect can make all the difference!
So I began to unwind, relax, soften and improve. I began to play, dance and enjoy my body rather than over-analysing it, constantly disciplining it and dreading the coming years. I don’t hang out with old people who are hardened in their attitudes and habits. I see myself as 74 years STRONG and wise, rather than 74 years old. A few times a year, I take the sleeping bag out and test my theories. There is improvement each time! At this point, I can sleep on a hard surface with just a foam pad and no pillow for 10 nights when visitors come. Each time my body feels more like it did when I was a kid!
Aging in reverse! Why not? It’s just chemistry…
I took another cue from the Thai practitioners. They rarely tell a patient what is wrong with them. They just fix the problems. Why is that?
“Well, if I tell my patient they have a problem, I now have TWO problems to fix!”
On one trip to Thailand, I decided to have a physical (Bumrumgrad Hospital in Bangkok. A very worthwhile experience for anyone!) It was an all-day very comprehensive affair…very affordable, as well. At the end of a day of testing, you have a roundtable discussion with all your doctors to go over the tests.
At one point, I was gently asked if I had ever required a wheelchair. (I have been prescribed a wheelchair and disability a couple of times, but deferred and worked out my own solutions when I was much younger) I had actually forgotten those early chapters and told them ‘No’, wondering why they would ask such a thing. They gently pivoted to walkers and canes. I again shook my head. “Any pain when walking?” I laughed at this. “I’m travelling with a 36 yr old 20 yrs my junior and I am outwalking her through all the maze of Bangkok!” (we are ferocious walkers).
I was completely perplexed at this point. “Why do you ask?!”
They faced a moment of confusion, as well, as they presented my spinal x-rays. I was taken aback by what I saw! I immediately deep-sixed the image. I would not let it enter my psyche. By all regular medical standards, I should have been incapacitated and in constant pain.
I thought for a moment about the disparity. And then I realized that the magnesium gel had made all the difference… It had kept my muscles soft, it kept bone loss at bay and helped ease me past most of the scoliosis (along with a single simple dancer’s stretch)
Further into that roundtable discussion, it was found that the magnesium had reversed active heart disease in a way never seen before in their extensive experience. Magnesium had also resolved a congenital heart murmur….and it had eroded 3 small breast lumps. ”You will never have to worry about these.”
*****
Did I work my way out of a job? Well…yes and no.
My feeling was always to educate my people so they could understand their bodies and be able to move beyond the need for inadequate or unethical, uncaring and self-serving practitioners. If I empowered them to not need me, that was alright, too! I wanted them to understand the basics, regain their confidence and authority and to be able to make intelligent decisions for themselves. I had to demonstrate it in my own body first. There would always be other hurting people to help. A patient should never be a meal ticket.
Am I anti-doctor? Not at all. They have a depth of training that I do not possess, though I self-educate constantly. We are all here to help each other. Perhaps I fill a gap in the current scheme of things.
In the old days, doctors were brilliant in terms of muscles and the healing abilities of the body. Magnesium in the form of Epsom salt soaks was their #1 remedy. That is not taught any longer. Again, since we are mostly muscle, that becomes a problem.
******
In praise of good doctors…there is a brilliant, caring former hospitalist now in private practice, who chose to work in a pretty beaten-down rural community. I remember sitting in his chelation room with 8-10 other patients. It was quite an assortment of people…hard lives and hard-living apparent (people that I would have seen little hope for, in truth).
But a year later, these same people were so elevated above their former selves. They were upbeat, intelligent, spiritually-minded, cheerful. They were educating themselves, helping each other and their loved ones. They were so transformed that I hardly recognized them!
“Doc! What have you done with these people?! How do you DO that?!!”
He said “You know, first you have to attend to their physical needs…put them on a good foundation…give a little encouragement, make them well in their bodies. People cannot take on the other aspects when they are suffering. When the foundation is secure, a person can naturally ascend and blossom. I just remove the hindrances. That’s all. Nature does the rest.” He was a canny blend of the best of allopathic medicine and natural treatments. I watched as he had the wisdom to go at each patient’s pace, never forcing one way over another. In time, they would gravitate to the best of what he had to offer.
*****
As always, thanks for reading. Revisit this post now and then…
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The Secret SauceDebra Robinson·Apr 13Read full story
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