By Cintain Quintana

Sometimes, it is easy to forget how important it is to keep things moving. 

Life is movement. Not just the ability to go from one place to another (otherwise we might think plants don’t fit into our categorisation), but also the fact that, in order to maintain themselves, all living systems must perform numerous functions that require things to move within them, into them and out of them. The movement of life is everywhere, and we apprehend it instinctively. We just know when something is alive: vibrant and colourful, strong and resilient or delicate and fragile. Even if we can’t see it, we know when things are moving, and whether that movement is wholesome or erosive. When the movement is disorganised or blocked, when it loses its rhythm or its proper pathway, life suffers. If it ever stops, so does life. 

It is interesting to compare how different forms of healthcare look at this fundamental truth.

We humans are a self-centered lot. We tend to want to explain things in terms that reflect back on us and make us look good. Whatever we aspire to, or whatever we think that is desirable or greater, that is what the world looks like to us, and we talk about it that way. Modern medicine, the triumph of science and technology, tends to describe the body as a machine, with pumps and pipes, flow rates and pressure, and its interventions tend to take the same approach that one would do when fixing a car or an engine: assess the parts and replace the ones that wear out, break down and malfunction. Indigenous people, by contrast, lived close to the land and its rhythms, dependent on the whims of rain and flood, blizzard and locust, unable to influence outcomes and bound to listen and follow to what the world around them was doing. Thus, they would describe themselves in terms of tides and floodplains, river basins and oceans and seas. The interventions of a medicine that came from such a worldview would be very different, and rely on a profound respect and understanding of what is naturally happening in order to follow along and find balance with, not against or in spite of, the conditions surrounding them.

Yet both systems speak to the importance of the movements happening inside the person to their overall wellbeing.

Modern medicine places supreme importance on the heart and its main blood vessels. We all know that if this ceases to function properly for any of us, that’s the end of the line.

Chinese medicine also places the circulation of blood, nutrients and oxygen at the forefront; where there is movement, there is health; where there is disease, there is no movement.

Andrew Taylor Still, the father of Osteopathy, declared that the rule of the artery is supreme, that is, that whatever the blood vessels were doing, the rest of the tissues followed along and complied with.

Dissection of tissue and techniques of preservation such as plastination bear this out: the body is in the shape that the blood vessels give it, because there can be no tissue without the supply that gives it vitality and nutrition, and removes what it no longer needs. Blood and lymph vessels are everywhere, and in the few structures where they’re not, other fluids created and nourished by the blood do the same all-important job: to keep things moving, keeping every part, every cell, every structure, connected to the whole. 

I am biased. I studied Chinese medicine from curious, crazy and very intelligent people, and they conveyed the love for these teachings to me, so I can’t help but be partial to the view that the body is more like a river basin than like an internal combustion engine. There is just something about the idea that the tissues of the body are like a wetland, infused through and through with the fluids that traverse in their midst, collecting like tributaries into larger and larger reservoirs until they pour back into the place where they’re cleansed and renewed that isn’t just profound and evocative, but also true.

Our bodies work that way: tiny capillaries, some no wider than one flattened cell turned sideways, force oxygen into the blood at one end, out at the other, in a never-ending cycle of oxygenation, nutrient saturation, diffusion, waste collection, purification, wash, rinse, repeat.

It’s like water evaporating from the surface of the ocean, forming clouds, then taken by the winds to the mountains, where it rains, running down the soil into springs and streams, down rivers and into the sea and back again. It’s beautiful. And in a very real sense, it is exactly how it is. 

So, if this is the guiding principle of what we’re doing, what exactly does that mean in practice?

First of all, it allows us to think more holistically about what is going on when a person has a problem.

If the body is a machine with a pump pushing blood into smaller and smaller pipes, obstructions to the flow logically require clearing them by force, or simply replacing pipes that seem to have lost the ability to conduct the fluids within properly. If, on the other hand, we think of wetlands, where diffusion happens as a result of variables such as the composition of the terrain and its position and gradient, then an obstruction isn’t just a blocked pipe: it is the result of a range of conditions that occur along a spectrum. Dryness, heat, changes up- or down-stream from the place where the problem manifests; even cold congealing the fluids can slow down or even interrupt the flow. 

Life is not always gentle on us: sometimes we hit hard, stationary objects whilst we’re moving at high speed.

Other times, we brace for impacts real or imagined and that makes things harder for the flow inside. Perhaps we ate or drank or were otherwise exposed to something that caused heat, or cold, or dryness or clogging dampness to arise within us. Whatever the case may be, the flow is disrupted. Just like one year might have more rain than another, or a flood, or a drought, maybe a band of overzealous beavers built a dam too close to home, the flow is altered and now it is affecting us. In nature the solution might be to pack up and move somewhere else; in our bodies, the solution is to gently nudge things into a state that is better balanced.

Our techniques are intended to address this by working on the terrain directly, or in some cases, to help the body clear out the obstruction on its own.

The highly precise and gentle techniques of visceral and craniosacral therapies gently nudge the structures of the body into better position and movement, and of necessity they bring their attendant blood vessels along. In visceral manipulation, we speak of “therapeutic pulse”, a palpable change in the feeling under our hands that alerts us to an increase in the local circulation around the place we’re working. This is why our techniques are so gentle: we need to feel the body’s changes, and its response to our nudge.  

Myofascial bodywork does the same for the muscles, tendons, ligaments and joints of the body.

These structures are, in a way, much more important because blood and fluids not only flow through them: they also serve as reservoirs for the circulation in many parts of the body. Not all blood moves at the same pace — that is the secret that one is bound to miss if one thinks in terms of pumps and pipes. The myofascial body exists in gravity. Returning blood to the heart requires good posture and optimal movement: it is the muscles that push the blood back into the main vessels. Aligning them to work together harmoniously and effortlessly in gravity makes this easier, and everyone benefits: not just myofascial tissue, but the internal organs as well. 

Finally, acupuncture is for when the obstruction is just too stubborn, too stuck for the body to completely resolve it on its own.

The most ancient Chinese medical classic describes acupuncture in terms of finding and removing such obstructions in order to restore the flow in the rivers of the body. A properly-trained acupuncturist is more gardener than mechanic: our job here is to prune just right, tie the roots of this bush, shore up the bank just so, occasionally evict the beavers… needles are small and precise, and the body gardener knows to use as few as possible. It behooves us to find the obstruction first and be sure of its location before needling, so we try other things to get our bearings around the garden first.

Restoring circulation is the highest goal of our therapies.

This comes from the wisdom that, like any natural system, each of us is self-regulating. What this means is that, given the proper conditions and guidance, we can heal what ails us pretty much on our own. Sometimes, life is hard and confusing, or we hit something hard, or the weight of too much bad stuff gets to us and we get stuck. What we offer you when you come see us is an expert, informed approach to getting un-stuck, using well-trained, skilful hands to nudge you in the right direction.

So you can keep moving, wherever it is that you want to go.