If I can turn against myself, then I can also stop and get well!

And so I pondered in June 1996 at an introductory course in Autogenic Training. I had signed up for this course because of my good experiences with the relaxation warmth; I had had after my pictorial image of the soft, light, enveloping blanket. In the course, I hoped to find more inspiration for relaxing and warming exercises. Before the class began, the instructor told me: “This doesn’t help with autoimmune diseases.” However, I didn’t let that discourage me and sat in my seat on time.

As we introduced ourselves, the instructor’s first note on my introduction was: “An autoimmune disease arises when the body is attacking itself.” While the other participants gave me compassionate looks, I figured:

“But I am my body!”¹

So if “I” can attack myself, then I can also stop and get well!

What power I must possess over myself so that I can cause rheumatoid arthritis – and without knowing anything about it for all the past time!

“I can help myself!”

and I pondered on:

“What does RA feel like? Like a knife searing through tissue and joints – similar to a cramp in the calf or foot! Like a constant and building one.

“And what eliminates a cramp? Relaxation! “

This fantastic finding stayed with me, and made me marvel and happy, for it opened a new perspective that led to new possibilities and gave me hope.

In the beginning, we participants should enter into conscious relaxation with the phrase “everything is heavy and warm “².

It became clear that I wasn’t only able to feel and relax more extensive body regions (like my hand, foot, arm, leg, etc.) as instructed. Involuntarily, and in contrast to the other participants, I was adept at feeling into even much smaller areas due to the terrible pain that raged in my body. Down to my finger and toe joints, for example.

So I first exercised quietly while the other participants around me continued to make cumbersome progress. I had suffered from RA for so long that I wanted it all at once, right now and right here: my entire body pain-free. In my attempts to consciously focus on the relaxation of all pain regions simultaneously, I failed because of my subjective pain sensation, which was initially increased by the relaxation. It was just too much for me because my subjective pain sensation was so intense that I felt overwhelmed and, at first, gave up on the attempt. And back home, as usual, I found enough work to get done that was piled due to my RA restrictions.

The class became my haven where neither household chores nor work mattered. It was a free zone where I only needed to sit in my chair and care about myself. I no longer dared to make my all-encompassing body training attempts from earlier on. So I was in a big circle, all the other participants were busy, and I sat around. No stress, no racing.

My right thumb reported pain. My hand rested calm and open on my upper leg. I looked down on it and tried my first own exercise on my thumb and my heel of the thumb.

And it worked as soon as I combined conscious relaxation with mental images and followed my pain perception!

This way, I overcame the pain! 

It faded away.

I then repeated this exercise with every sensation of pain in the thumb-heel-of-hand region and expanded it from there with increasing success. To do this, I now always consciously combined my relaxation exercises with my mental images (now level 2 of the HeilÜben exercises).

Using these HeilÜben exercises, I also mastered more intense pain, whereupon I experienced the complete decay of the respective inflammation and later the entire chronic reaction chain.

Properly constructed, clearly and persistently imagined and repeated, clearly felt with every breath, my exercises evolved their efficacy, while I developed a sense of myself as a whole, in which everything influences everything.

My inner conviction changed from: “I will (someday, somehow) heal.”, into my concrete experience: “I am healing (right now).”

From this point in my HeilÜben exercises on, I directly put my skills to use against pain, inflammation, and chronic course. My pain and my new knowledge about where it came from allowed me to detect previously unnoticed tension.

So over time, I started to know better by my own experience, how and why my body felt how it felt:

increasing pain – increasing tension,

decreasing pain – decreasing tension,

no pain, no inflammation – I am below my upper-stress limit.

In doing so I experienced

  1. how under overload stemming from excessive tension (partly caused by poor postures) inflammation evolved and this inflammation could be influenced by purposeful relaxation,
  2. how through easing off tension in muscles and tendons the inflammation in the joints connected to them was reduced and ultimately stopped and
  3. how correspondingly tension and the propensity for inflammation decreased in general.

I became aware of my tension as the cause of the inflammatory and painful process in my joints in everyday situations and relaxed purposefully to reduce this tension. Thus I experienced how my RA had emerged and was maintained during excessive small-scale tension and poor posture and movement as a result of mechanical joint overload.

Beginning from my fingers, hands and arms overloading tension and inflammation of my joints had spread over other parts of the body, and could be restrained from there as well.

Within a few weeks, I managed to respond to the pain signals in my hands, arms and feet immediately after their commencement.

So I tried in various situations, whether and how relaxation, which I deliberately used, helped against inflammatory pain. It was not about getting into undiscovered depths of relaxation and doing something complicated. It was simply about using my everyday skills. Just by trying, giving myself the necessary opportunities and time and peace, I trained and relaxed more intensively than before.

I experienced that pain and inflammation in the area with which I practised subsided and eventually disappeared.

The individual exercises lasted only a few minutes in the subsequent period and became increasingly habitual. Additionally, the distance of time between the sudden pain attacks widened.

But still, the following situations still were painful exceptions:

  • when more than one body part would hurt simultaneously;
  • when I was still asleep and therefore not conscious at all, my body would still “function” how it used to: sickening;
  • when some situations that needed my full attention stopped me from exercising;
  • when my back and shoulders would sometimes hurt in my nightly sleep or shortly after I woke up. I then assumed that I had poorly bent in my sleep and looked to eliminate the problem with various mattresses and pillows. It was not until months later that I realized in shock that these pains could also have occurred due to rheumatism and could have been symptoms indicating the onset of rheumatic spinal inflammation.
  • When at first, I couldn’t think of any knee- or elbow exercises.

Early 1997 until the end of 1998:

While I was thinking and trying, my back, shoulders, and knees benefited from the sharp decline in inflammatory tendencies in general. Different inflammatory sites didn’t occur anymore at the same time, and I trained my elbows with my forearm/upper arm exercise.

I found excessive tension in more and more everyday situations as I continue to relate my thoughts and emotions to my posture and movement. With my considerations, I started with my hands because they were where my RA had started:

Our hands are essential companions. They can help us coordinate and control to express ourselves through body language, our expression of feelings and needs. We are taking matters into our own hands. This is evidenced by our need to reach and shape the things around us, to give them meaning, the need to prevail, to communicate. And this influences the position of our arms and legs, our hands and feet to each other.

In the case of misperceptions, I still sometimes spontaneously tried to achieve expression by tensing my body. With what’s today’s Level 3, I consciously and deliberately reduced this habit by using relaxation instead of tension.

Thus, I could reduce this tension permanently below my tension upper limit.

With the HeilÜben exercises it is as it is with everything else: If one understand less about it than necessary, the results will not be sufficient. And that despite a lot of suffering that nobody wanted and deserved. So I rolled up my sleeves and learned how to manage stress-related rheumatoid arthritis.

In doing so my body consciousness, psyche and rational mind helped me. So I could grasp the challenges at hand as best as possible. My body “told “me when I felt pain, my psyche whenever I was sad, angry or anxious, and my rational mind helped me to put all the experiences together. I could then try what would help best in the individual situation. From time to time I came to more apt insights into my situation, to further convictions. It also happened that I discovered that although I had believed to know something, then realized things were yet different. And I find even more, even more apt, more precise explanations and also new insights into tension in myself. These were automatically added to my experience about what is and isn’t good for me.

Through the HeilÜben exercises, I brought back dealing with my stress-related rheumatoid arthritis in an area of my rational mind, into an area where my problem became comprehensible and I could logically explain it. I realized that I could understand the overload of my body better and better. This facilitated a significant stress factor such a disease can bring: the fear of what seems to be inexplicable and uncontrollable.

  • That I had understood individual coherences and made use of them properly, made itself noticeable in immediate pain reduction.
  • When I successfully carried out a HeilÜben exercise, I noticed that by the end of the inflammatory pain.
  • The less pain emerges, and the shorter it stays, the less inflammation and destruction are going on.
  • No pain means no inflammation.
  • No inflammation means: the destruction is stopped until the next overload occurs.

Besides, during the HeilÜben exercises, my disease-sustaining tension habit, the chronic course, was reduced.

And from there, I went on until I healed: I felt inflammation pain and used the HÜ exercises, working on improving its elements if necessary.

I gained experience and got more confident as I became convinced that I did something right and effective. So I was able to react sooner, quicker and purposefully. And this after a while of exercise even if, for example, I was distracted or still half asleep.

My body would tell me:

no pain – done right

pain – there is still a problem there

In this manner, I could detect overload, tension, and stress factors and relieve them gradually.

With my approach, I simultaneously relieved musculature and connective tissues and, consequently, my joints. According to the release, the inflammatory and destructive operations declined.

With the now expanded exercises, I learned how to divide my attention so that, for example, I could imperceptibly practice amid a lively conversation without interrupting it.

I had learned that I reacted to unpleasant sensations with tension. I continued practising to prevent, end or handle unfavourable circumstances to regularise my emotional response to be less strained. I could find my inner peace when the stressful situation was over. Even if a specific event, which I found unpleasant, stressful, annoying or scary, did not change at all. When I get rid of my tensions, I feel relieved as a whole. My sensations become less uncomfortable; I lose less energy and stay healthier.

I got to know the effect of tension, which either influenced me for a long time or fast and excessive, as a trigger and maintainer of my RA.

The constant practice now fulfilled the purpose of detraining the unhealthy habit of responding to stimuli and overloading with unresolved tension and confirmed: With attention and conscious movement, I could change my physical and mental condition to the turning point! Within the following months, my HeilÜben exercises grew with my findings and became more and more a strong, healthy habit that eventually would allow me to sleep without inflammation.

Pain and movement restrictions decreased step by step. My hands, arms and feet became slim and agile again. My rheumatoid arthritis healed.

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Manja and the HeilÜben team

Allg. Produktbild en Luis Quintero two women doing push ups 1671218

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¹,² List of references

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