Bodywork & Sensory Nerve Speed: Good News, Bad News, and Yet Again Good

Job's Body: Due to the speed differential of sensations, bodywork can provide the touch that overrides pain, shifting the mind to a more pleasant focus.

Unfortunately, this same differential allows us to ignore pain and problems that need attention; we can keep our bodies occupied with innocuous sensations that reach our brains more quickly.

For these sitations, bodywork can help us increase self-awareness, so that we do not continue to distract ourselves.

p. 180

Why We Don't Jump From the Frying Pan Into the Fire

Job's Body: Sensations carried by the Dorsal Column System, i.e. more detailed and more neutral impulses, arrive in the brain more quickly than the pain/hot/itch of the Spinothalmic System. This allows us a moment to assess a threatening situation before reacting, so that our "reflex withdrawal can be more appropriately tailored to the actual source of the pain and more effectively directed." p. 179

Ascending Sensory Pathways: Spinothalmic System

Job's Body: The slow lane. Travels at 1/5th the speed of the Dorsal Column System. Transmits sensations such as pain, hot or cold, crude touch or pressure, tickling, itching, and sexual feelings. p. 179

Ascending Sensory Pathways: Dorsal Column System

Job's Body: The fast track. Impulses travel 40-70 meters per second, as these paths are insulated with myelin sheaths and have fewer synapses to cross. They transmit fine tactile sensations requiring sensitive distinction. p. 179

My Special Purpose

Job's Body: "The goal of bodywork should not be to impose universalized standards of posture and movement upon an individual, but rather to help the individual to cultivate the mental awareness and the physical flexibility to continually adapt to the changing needs of the environment." p. 142

Hey Big Spender

Job's Body: Muscle makes up the majority of our weight and bulk and is the biggest energy consumer in the body. p. 133

Muscle requires constant electrical energy from its motor nerves for health and existence. Nerves stimulate muscle function and without this activity, muscles would eventually break down, lose their myosin and actin and be replaced by fat or connective tissue -- aka miasma. p. 136-7

The Vicious Circle of Chronic Tension

Job's Body: "Sustained [muscle] contraction reduces circulation in the area by squeezing the small arteries and capillaries which service the working cells with glucose and oxygen -- the more work, the more need; the more constant tension, the less the fuel delivery, the less the delivery the more difficult the work." p. 131

These tense muscles suffer from "deeper metabolic debts, draining energy from other parts of the body, producing ischemia and toxic wastes, creating discomfort and eventual disuse." p. 133

She: And disuse isn't going to help the situation any

Contraction vs. Tension

Job's Body: An active, contracting muscle assists in its own circulation by pumping fluids in and out. By contrast, "a muscle in a state of sustained tension is working, exerting a pull against a fixed resistance -- usually another muscle that is working in a static position. Therefore its nutritive needs are much higher than if it were at rest...or even contracting smoothly without resistance." p. 131

O2 + ATP 4EVA

Job's Body: The volume of oxygen that can be inhaled, circulated, and delivered, as well as the speed thereof, [aka V02 max] dictates the absolute max of muscular output by establishing the rate at which ATP can be reconstituted in the mitochondria. p. 130

She: This underscores for me the importance of breathwork for wellness and energy

Rigor Mortis: CSI meets ATP

Job's Body: Rigor mortis occurs when all the ATP (adenosine triphosphate) is used up within the muscles. ATP is what prevents the magnetic lockup between the actin chains and myosin heads (ATP is negative, as is myosin). p. 130

Furthermore, according to NurseMinerva.com: "Even when a person is clinically dead, some cells within their tissues continue to survive for a while. After the circulation of blood ceases, surviving muscle cells resort to anaerobic glycolysis but eventually they become unable to make any more ATP...Calcium ions also leak into the compromised muscle cells, moving regulatory proteins away from the molecular cross-bridges between the myofilaments. The myofilaments then become locked in position as a result of these changes, and the skeletal muscles no longer ‘give’ or stretch when parts of the body are moved.

Rigor mortis wears off as the tissues begin to decompose - proteolytic enzymes in the lysosomes of the muscle cells escape and begin to dissolve the myofilaments."

- Dying & Death section

E Pluribus Unum Musculus

Job's Body: "Muscles may have anatomic individuality but they do not have functional individuality...we will never release a single muscle, but rather we will increase a range of motion that involves several, or many, separate components." p.113

Which brings us back to EICTE: the contraction of one muscle or muscles requires the lengthening of another, as well as extension and bracing in yet others. No muscle fires in isolation (except in a textbook). p. 113

Connective Tissue [1noun] \kə-'nek-tiv\ \'ti-(,)shü

Job's Body: Connective tissue is the framework that organizes muscle fibers into meaningful directions of pull. It anchors muscle to bones. p. 113

Muscle [1noun] \'mə-səl\

Job's Body: Muscle gives shape, substance and stability to the body. It actively utilizes the cables and levers (fascia, ligaments, tendons, bones) to suspend the limbs and organs aloft. Muscle provides the tension in the tensegrity structure.

Without muscle, the network would collapse and flatten like a "handful of limp balloons piled on a jumble of sticks." p. 110

Massages, Not Miracles

Job's Body: "The role of bodywork is not to eliminate stress, but rather to educate the individual to recognize the right kinds and right amounts." p. 105

I'm Muscle, Adhesions are Glue

Job's Body: Disuse and/or compression of tissue leads to tighter fibers of collagen, with more (hydrogen) bonds between them. Two functionally separate structions may develop adhesions, with loss of range of motion and "finely differentiated movements." This is especially problematic with knee injuries [drat], where the joint relies on connective tissue to a great extent. These unwanted bonds may feel like "thick, lumpy bandaging around a joint, fibrous masses, or tough, fibrotic ropes/cysts in muscle bellies. These bonds prevent the very movements necessary to break them up." p. 73-74

Even Newton Would Get Massage

Job's Body: Bodywork neither adds nor subtracts (vs. Rx or surgery) to the tissue. The mechanical stimuation promotes the thixotropic change from gel to sol and the exchange of nutrients and wastes, and it increases energy potential. p. 69

Me/Sir Isaac: You might even say that a body in motion tends to stay in motion, whereas a body at rest tends to stay at rest.

L'Chaim!

Job's Body: "[I]f by 'good health' we mean something more than the absence of a life-threatening emergency, if we mean rather the ongoing development of the individual, his awareness of his body, the optimum maturation of the nervous system, and the resilience of the tissues to resist toxins and repair damages, then let us not forget bodywork either." p. 56

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy

Job's Body: "When the conceptions of reality that we maintain do not square with the things that we are experiencing, it is not because we are flawed or because our experiences are wrong, but because our conceptions cannot contain all of the facts as we perceive them. And there is no constructive way out of this crisis but to enlarge our sense of reality to include our actual experiences."

Me: I love when clients have strange sensations or reactions that they find just as intriguing as I do. (Vs. 'What the @&$% is going on, and how do I [meaning me the therapist] fix it?')

Stille Wasser Sind Oft Tief (aka Still Waters Run Deep)

Job's Body: The brain, nervous systems, and skin all develop from the same embryonic cell layer. p. 35

In other words, "the skin is no more separated from the brain than the surface of a lake is separate from its depths...To touch the surface is to stir the depths." p. 43

[Blank] Builds Character

Job's Body: "We require situations which the experts cannot resolve, situations which throw us back on to our own resources. This is how we learn that we have resources." p. 5

She: Mrs. Stephens always assured me that B's build character. I put off that lesson until college, however. A veritable hotbed of learning.

Hands! Hands in New Places

Job's Body: "[H]ands are not like pharmaceuticals or scalpels. They are like flashlights in a darkened room. The medicine they administer is self-awareness."

The Circle of (Habitual) Life

Job's Body: "There is a circular relationship between habits and bodily condition -- we unconsciously select movement habits that reinforce a consistent sense of self, even if these habits no longer serve us. By allowing another person to move us -- new sensation -- we may see those habits apart from our selves." p. xxvi

EICTE in a nutshell, version 1.0

Job's Body: "Movement is the unifying bond between the mind and the body, and sensations are the substance of that bond." p. xxv