… Now imagine yourself standing in front of the water bucket. You know that you are about to lift and carry it, without, as with many of our everyday activities, particularly focusing on that anticipation.
At lightning speed, the brain captures the challenge and passes on the necessary signals to the musculoskeletal system.
These unconscious impulses for tension instantaneously reach our muscles and the tendons which connect them to our joints and bones.
Where the body is about to exert force, the corresponding tissue cells contract. The antagonist muscles loosen, for example, allowing the arms to bend while lifting the water bucket. On the inner arm, the muscles and tendons shorten and tense, while on the outside arm, they are longer and more flexible. The muscles and tendons transmit impulses to our entire musculoskeletal system, exerting pressure and tension on the joints involved before we actually lift the bucket and before we visibly and noticeably tense our muscles. This happens within a fraction of a second. The execution of the movement either follows this movement preparation, or if we decide not to lift the bucket and abort our attempt at this point, the already activated areas of the body relax again.
However, if one can’t release tension when it’s no longer needed because they are already carrying too much stress, they live in a body that is constantly tense.
Such damaging tension isn’t always apparent to us: It can go unnoticed, overlooked, or underestimated, especially since the triggering situation may be quickly over or so familiar that we consider it normal. In either case, it represents unnecessary stress. Its intensity and the quality of posture and body movement are interdependent.
Some people visibly and palpably tense larger or more muscles when stressed. So much so that their fellow human beings can also see and feel the tensed muscles and realise, “You’re all tensed!” and then usually go on to say, “Come on, relax!”
To the degree that tension has become integrated into our everyday physical awareness, we become somewhat blind to it: Because it is so normal, we no longer feel the tension and therefore don’t perceive it as overloading or uncomfortable. And as long as we feel healthy, there seems to be neither a need nor an option for change, after all: Change what? Everything seems to be well. When it came to rheumatoid arthritis, this was one of the crucial points for me. When I fell ill, I couldn’t feel what made me so sick. But I could and did learn how to sense and relieve my tension before it turned into overload.
Stress and thus tension turn into overload when they influence us:
consistently
or
suddenly, with overwhelming force.
When one doesn’t relax or only relaxes insufficiently, tension remains. If that tension is not relieved in time, it accumulates, spreads, and can overload our joints.
When overloading tension has made us sick, the usual moments of peace and relaxation don’t do enough; they are insufficient to prevent the permanent overload.
To my body, the overload meant: My tension exceeded the upper overload limit.
The way my HeilÜben exercises worked showed me that, depending on how well I had achieved relief and relaxation of my muscles and tendons, which had already seemed soft and therefore relaxed, the inflammatory and thus destructive process in my joints receded, and with it the inflammatory pain. Once I, as a result, could stay below my upper-overload limit, my rheumatoid arthritis healed.
In the sense of the HeilÜben exercises, healing from overload-induced RA means that the destructive chronic inflammatory process comes to a standstill and eventually ends. In that I distinguish between the disease itself and its possible consequential damage.
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