In my experience with healing my rheumatoid arthritis over twenty-four years ago, the cause for the emergence and maintenance of the disease was overloading tension of muscles and tendons on my joints, during posture, movement planning and execution.
In my experience, the source of overloading tension can be mental or physical.
Stress causes tension.
Emotions and sensations we register as negative lead to negative stress on our bodies and minds.
Tension, again, causes stress.
Depending on how well we address the problem causing the stress in the first place, we can relieve the accumulated tension.
Years before I fell ill with rheumatoid arthritis, I found what back then I mistook for a solution to all sorts of stress:
To counter negative emotions and uncomfortable sensations, I built up a muscular counterpressure within myself that was slightly stronger than the tension my stress was causing me. By meeting my tension with counterpressure, I could push away uncomfortable sensations, gain control over myself, and assert myself. Countering tension with more tension felt helpful, and while I initially used it in individual situations, it quickly became a habit that crept into everything I did, leading to a higher, constant internal tension. If I felt more pressure from outside, I would regulate it with a little more counterpressure. My internal tension persisted; I had become so accustomed to it that it had become part of my everyday life, and I no longer noticed it.
,,You tell her”, my soul told my body, ,,to me she doesn’t listen”.
In 1994, I was diagnosed with the onset of severe rheumatoid arthritis with an aggressive course.
But the diagnosis only told me the source of my symptoms, not that of the autoimmune disease itself. To my question of why my body reacted this way, I got no answer. So I began looking for it myself.
Basing my approach with my HeilÜben exercises on the fact that the position of the skeleton determines muscle function and that muscles and tendons, in turn, influence bones and joints, my primary focus was on anatomically correct movement and uncovering and relieving overload.
The further I went with that approach, the more ingrained habits I found which followed the underlying pattern of reacting to anything uncomfortable by building up counterpressure. Those habits integrated pressure and tension into my posture and movement, and fostered poor posture in my daily life. Working on these habits allowed me to improve further in how I dealt with myself.
When I fell ill with rheumatoid arthritis, I couldn’t yet experience the relation between the disease and the overloading permanent tension I was so used to back then. I had no clue as to what had caused my RA and felt overwhelmed.
To make sense of my situation, I fell back on the common-sense facts I knew.
We experience stress physically and emotionally through tension. To identify the correct trigger for our tension, we draw on what we’ve experienced and learned so far, using our reason and our intuition. Sometimes equal parts of both, sometimes more of one and less of the other.
But tension isn’t always as evident as when it shows in hardened, enlarged muscles. Small-scale tension is often more difficult to sense. Let’s look at an example of how we usually detect and expect tension to work:
Imagine yourself healthy, lifting and carrying a heavy bucket of water. The muscles you need are tensed and easy to identify and sense as such—the biceps, for example. We all have experience with how well we can sense this kind of obvious, situational tension; it is easy to visually and physically identify it, both for ourselves and for others. The muscles that harden and shorten during lifting and carrying are connected to tendons and joints. So the force transmission in our musculoskeletal system impacts our joints and bones via our muscles, tendons, and fasciae, enabling us to influence our quality of health through body movement and posture.
Now, imagine putting down the water bucket. Again, experience tells us that once the job is done, our tense muscles will relax and soften. In their rest position, our muscles and joints lengthen, and we perceive relief.
The higher the degree to which we achieve a smooth dynamic of force/tension and relaxation, and of stress and relief, in our body movement and posture, the healthier we can be!
What would happen if we didn’t relieve our tension after putting down the heavy bucket, or if we held it until muscle exhaustion? The muscles would tremble and start to burn until the load eventually turns into overload, which would force them to give out. In such or similar situations, we can directly observe how our actions or behaviours lead to pain and, if not controlled, even injury.
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