Wilberg on Wednesday - The Illness Is The Cure pt 31/46

The Anatomy & Physiology of the Lived Body

Life Doctoring is based on a quite different understanding of anatomy and physiology than that which is taken as standard by biological medicine - and also by some forms of ‘alternative medicine’. That is because Life Medicine understands the body essentially as a body of feeling awareness or soul, and the felt surface of the body as we perceive it from the outside – the so-called physical body’ - as essentially nothing more than a boundary uniting and distinguishing two fields of awareness. These two fields are:

1. an outer field of awareness encompassing and embracing the entire life world of the individual and all they experience within it including both things and other people.
2. an inner field of awareness consisting not of fleshly tissue and organs but of hollow spaces of awareness felt within the regions of the head, chest or heart, and abdomen or ‘hara’ (Japanese) respectively.

Part of both the training and work of the Life Doctor consists in cultivating their own and their patients’ ability to sense these outer and inner spaces or fields of feeling awareness, and to experience the latter as a singular inner space of feeling awareness allowing it to flow and centre itself freely in the regions of ‘head, heart and hara’.

Life Medicine also distinguishes between:

1. the lived body as a whole, which embraces both fields of feeling awareness or ‘soul’.
2. that portion of its inner field which takes the form of the ‘body consciousness’ or ‘physical soul’ – composed of those organising patterns of molecular and cellular awareness which are perceived from the outside (and within the outer field of any individual’s awareness) in the form of the ‘physical body’.
3. The atomic, molecular and, in the case of plants and animals, the cellular awareness which make up the physical soul of all perceived phenomena within the outer field of any individuals awareness, i.e. within their experienced life world or environment.

Finally, Life Medicine distinguishes between physiological functions and processes generally seen as belonging to the physical body and its organs – such as respiration, ingestion digestion and metabolisation of food – and the basic function of the lived body – namely to breathe in, digest and metabolise their lived subjective experience of themselves, other people and the world around them. It is these basic functions (or dysfunctions) of awareness that manifest in ‘organic’ physiological functions or dysfunctions – and not the other way round. Similarly it is patterns, tones, intensities and intents arising from feeling awareness that manifest as the sensed tone and motility of tissue and organs, muscular tonus and patterns of muscular tensioning and movement.

A basic motto of Life Medicine is that we are as much aware of our ‘self’ as a whole – our soul – as we are aware of our body as a whole - including both its outer field and all the inwardly felt regions or spaces of awareness that form part of its ‘inner field’.

As well as their capacity to directly see into and sense the tones of feeling awareness pervading the inner head, chest and abdominal spaces of the patient’s lived body, the advanced Life Doctor can also use their own lived body to sense various other critical features of patient’s own felt or lived body as a whole.

That is also why, in addition to biographical questioning (see What Most Doctors Don’t Ask) and in order to raise their own awareness of these features, questions of a very different sort tend also to be put to the patient during initial Life Doctoring consultations. For example:

1. To what degree, on a scale of 1 to 10, can you inwardly feel your body as a whole – from top to toe – including not just your head or upper body, but your entire lower body below the waist, including your legs and reaching down to the soles of your feet?
2. To what extent, on a scale of 1 to 10, are you aware of the entire surface skin and musculature of your upper body – including the surface skin and musculature of your face and eyes, of the surface of your entire head – top, front, back and sides, and of your trunk – front, back and sides?
3. To what extent can you feel the sensed inwardness of your felt body surface – in particular those of your head, chest and abdomen - as part of a ‘body without organs’ i.e. as hollow spaces filled with nothing but feeling awareness or ‘soul’.
4. To what extent, on a scale of 1-10 do you feel you are as much aware of your entire lower body below the waist as you are of your head, chest and upper body?
5. On an imaginary vertical line extending from the crown of your head to the soles of your feet, point to where you feel your breathing is centred.
6. On the same imaginary line point to where you feel your awareness is centred.
7. To what degree do you feel you can lower the centre of (a) your awareness and (b) your breathing, from a point in the inner region of your head or chest or belly to one in the region of your lower abdomen. Use your hand to point to the lowest point at which your can feel your awareness and your breathing centred.
8. Using your arms or hands, indicate both the size of any clear and hollow inner space or spaces of awareness you feel enclosed by your body surface and also where you feel that space or those spaces – whether just in your head, your upper body, or in your trunk as a whole including your abdomen.
9. To what extent, on a scale of 1-10, do you feel yourself and your awareness to be contained or encapsulated by your body surface, as if you were simply looking out at the world through ‘the peepholes of the senses’ – rather than actually sensing, encompassing and embracing that world in a larger more spacious field of awareness?
10. To what degree, on a scale of 1 to 10, do you feel your body surface to be sensitive to and aware of the entire space surrounding you in this room and all it contains?
11. Using your arms to indicate to what extent you feel your awareness extending into space in a way that reaches beyond the boundaries of your fleshly skin.

The answers sensed and given to these questions tell the Life Doctor about the specific ‘anatomy’ of the patient’s lived body, as well as providing suggestive keys to the patient about what it means to cultivate feeling awareness of their lived body as a whole – a body which is not enclosed or bounded by one’s skin but embraces all the spaces within and around it. Such whole-body awareness is a foundation for well-being as well as for the patient’s own capacity for self-doctoring. The questions above also provide a foundation for teaching the patient to engage in four basic movements or motions of awareness that are central to both sustaining whole-body awareness. These basic motions of awareness are:

1. Grounding – recovering and sustaining whole-body awareness – in particular through heightened awareness of one’s entire lower body below the waist as well as one’s head and upper body.
2. Centering – learning to seat or centre both one’s breathing and one’s very sense of self within the felt inner space of the lower abdomen: this being that spiritual and physical centre of gravity of the human being known as hara in traditional Japanese culture, but generally ignored in cultures that see human life only as an interplay of ‘head’ and ‘heart’.
3. Unifying – feeling the hollow inwardness of one’s head, chest (‘heart’) and abdominal region (‘hara’) as a singular and unified space of feeling awareness l – and one within which our awareness, like our breathing, can also be allowed to freely flow and centre itself in different regions and at different points.
4. Opening – using one’s upper body surface to sense the entire space surrounding one’s body as a whole and all other bodies within that space. In this way coming to experience one’s entire body surface as ‘all eye’ and as a totally porous membrane – one through which one can experience oneself as literally breathing in one’s awareness of the light and space around one.
5. Facing – giving form to a felt bodily sense of dis-ease through the look in one’s face and eyes, thereby both intensifying that sense of dis-ease and also coming to feel it as an all-pervasive state of consciousness i.e. an underlying mood, tone or texture of feeling awareness or soul that can be expressively embodied – rather than ‘somatised’ in the form of one or more localised bodily sensations, symptoms or organic disorders.

References:

Wilberg, Peter Head, Heart and Hara, the Soul Centres of West and East New Gnosis Publications, 2003 Wilberg, Peter The Little Book of Hara (Kindle e-book)



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