…Back then, I used to think about the starting point of the disease. Did some cause of my RA slip my attention? What went wrong? I dug into my memories and found – nothing. Nothing besides the memory of the feeling of a slight hollowness: “What do I live for – and why? “ — a question swallowed by the everyday turmoil that demanded my attention from dawn till dusk. And if someone had asked: “What do you want? What do you miss? “I couldn’t have given a proper answer. But a sensation ensembled the feeling, a certain feebleness within my hand. But that alone did not give me sufficient evidence for an explanation of my RA.
However, due to the discontinuation of my treatment, I was now alone with my “rheumatism-matter”. I was entirely on my own and wanted to make the most of my situation. But about my body, I hadn’t thought more than necessary before, especially about all that is soft and gibbering beneath the skin.
So what could I do?
Arthritic pain, a lot of it, forced me to think.
Fritz Perls described the function of pain as a waywiser to its causes and their relief with: “The pain will lead the way!”. Following Perl’s words, I pursued the pain in my body and realized that it was the pain that really made me aware of the existence of different regions of my body.
To me, that was an important experience, as the RA had until then seemed like something independent of me, that came and went as it pleased, “flowing” freely throughout my whole body. As if something strange I didn’t know and had no impact on had its own life inside me. That was why back then I thought that my illness was not related to how I lived but to a sheer failure of my body.
Despite this “something” making itself known to me by sensations ranging from slight tingling and dull throbbing to sharp tearing, burning and excruciatingly seeming, stinging pain, swelling and restricted movement, I still found myself unable to explain it. And I realized that I had only an imprecise picture of my physical inner life, which resulted in me only perceiving my body to be me up to the degree of the knowledge I had about it.
Illnesses such as colds or injuries such as broken arms or legs had always occurred in my life in clearly defined “normal” situations. The cause was openly apparent and a remedy within reach. Apart from that, I wasn’t used to feeling my body that intense at all.
So, to get to know me better, I continued to investigate my condition.
My pain and physical decline made me very sad. My condition gave me anxiety and worry; I felt shame and anger. And this mental effort also physically invalidated me. Mostly I was exhausted, freezing hard. From freezing, the goosebumps on my arms, and the chill that rushed through my entire diseased body, I first noticed how I felt emotionally could be found as a physical expression in my muscles, nerves, and skin. My sadness sat like a pillow-sized, oppressive drop on my chest, hung heavily on my head and shoulders and pulled them down. My head was sore with worry and started to ache; fear cut my breath short and laced my chest.
My rheumatoid arthritis and its consequences triggered emotions to directly observe how my physical sensations were reflecting on my soul!
And vice versa:
How my emotions found their expression in my physical sensations!
Physical and psychological sentiences correlate – not only when one is blushing, freezing in agony or starting to shiver from excitement. That’s why I thought there would have to be access to an understanding of my RA from my thoughts and feelings.
During my pain covered nightly waking times, I read a book by Anne-Marie Tausch¹ about her life with cancer. She described how she had intensively imagined the diseased regions of her own body, the processes in it and then the successful fight against cancer cells. So she wanted to stimulate her body to heal.
I liked the idea of recovery through the idea of a healing body, even if my problem was not cancer but rheumatoid arthritis.
In any case, I wanted to do something for myself, even though I wasn’t a physician.
And so, I deliberately directed loving, caring thoughts and good feelings at myself, letting them create pleasant and comforting images in me. Often I couldn’t bear warming blankets or thicker clothes because of the pressure sensitivity of my body and froze so much. That’s why I first imagined my body surrounded by a warm yet feather-light, fluffy soft blanket as a gentle, comforting protective cover.
That gave me what the goal of this idea was: a sense of protection and comfort. I started to relax, which meant that after a while I got warmer!
So I learned from the experience with myself:
Feelings and thoughts provoke a physical reaction!
My sentiences are real for both my body and my soul!
Consciously using good feelings and ideas of health should now help me to get out of the RA.
I was looking for clear goals for my conscious emotional-imagination images and therefore began to imagine my body with healthy joints and muscles.
I looked at many images of the physical inner human life of a healthy person. I looked at the bones and joints and everything related to them: tendons, muscles, connective tissue, nerve cells … and soon realized that I usually felt more comfortable with graphics than with photographs. So I specifically chose pictures that best matched my imagination and well-being and gave me a good overview of my body interior. And that put another complexion on things. I got more specific ideas about what it looked like within the areas where I felt the arthritis pain. Over time, I became better and better at explaining the different processes in my body.
My RA hadn’t occurred evenly during all the days, weeks, and months in the previous years. There were times when it had been more imperceptible, slower, less inflammatory and less painful. This was always the case when I could relax more intensively than usual during the illness and thus also relieve enough stress to get closer to or even from time to time below the critical limit, where stress becomes overloading. I realized this in the situations in which I had found myself being less tormented by pain, such as beautiful and harmonious family reunions, for example, activities with my friends, pleasant walks, fun and joy, an exciting film or a captivating read. All in all, not in everyday life.
However, I wasn’t really able to become aware of how tense I was in normal, everyday situations. I was only able to compare my experiences and the inflammation and pain that accompanied them, and afterwards, I used this to draw conclusions about the level of my tension in these specific situations. So I trained myself to relax more quickly in all sorts of normal situations and to adopt a more relaxed posture. I recalled the previously viewed images of healthy and strong hands, arms, elbows, etc. over and over again until they were completely familiar. In doing so, I imagined my own body as healthy in this way, combined these ideas with relaxation and happy memories, and found that I could also empathize with unrestricted and carefree body movements and postures (of myself and others)!
By the use of relaxing body techniques (such as Autogenic Training, the Feldenkrais-Method, and Progressive Muscle Relaxation), we can improve body perception. By doing that, we’ll learn how to detect and eliminate tension with relaxation.
This was precisely what I needed to heal my rheumatoid arthritis.
In my first HeilÜben exercises (now level 1) I used the fact that health, as already described in detail above, can begin through the mind, with thoughts and emotions, even if an illness restricts the body.
This helped me to experience more consciously again, despite illness-related limitations, which at the start made purely body-therapeutic interventions very difficult or even impossible.
In doing so, I found that, in contrast to my sensations of pain and unhappiness, i.e. the sensation of strong stimuli, I no longer noticed many finer physical stimuli due to various effects of my RA, or at least only perceived them physically to a greatly reduced extent.
The fact that my feelings had changed during the RA was already noticeable to me when the fine hairs on the backs of my fingers and hands broke off. I found that because of this I was touching things a little more than was necessary and good for my body, otherwise, I couldn’t feel them accurately enough. Also, through other experiences with RA, I understood that the effects of the disease influenced my perception of my altered feelings. It became clear to me that RA changed my body in such a way that I was less able to help myself because I was then less able to perceive things and connections and my senses no longer recognized certain physical changes or no longer sufficiently indicated them.
The more inaccurate the sense of touch in my hands became, the deafer they were, and the more they hurt, the less adequate I exerted force when I grabbed something. The more swollen my feet and legs were, the worse the condition of my knees was, and the worse my walk became. Not just once, but often, too often, I couldn’t walk like my joints would have needed it. My restricted senses, therefore, also led to restricted body movement and poor posture.
In my worst times, I would sometimes slam my crooked hands desperately at my desk and hated them for how crippled they were. It was like they were against me. I wanted to feel with them, I wanted and needed them to be completely mobile, and above all, painless again. At the same time, however, I knew very well that by using force, that wouldn’t happen.
I now realized that I had to consider two conditions. The first were my, more or less, restricted sentiences. The second was that I moved accordingly limited due to the restriction of my sentiences and to the consequences of relieving postures and lack of training, which in turn led to shortened tendons, weakened muscles, damaged blood circulation and overfatigue, as my limited sense of touch had an effect not only on my movement and posture but on my overall perception.
My senses and sentiences, which constitute my perception, were modified by my RA (takes to mean: inflammation, pain, swellings, numbness, limitation of motion, energy loss and overfatigue). I was inevitably less able to access finer information about myself and my environment through myself, through my own sensation and perception. For me, these diminished subtle perceptions meant that I had information about myself and my environment that was affected by the disease. From this, my own RA reality developed automatically and spontaneously, in which I almost completely forgot what I was less able to perceive through my sense of touch: How I could move more freely and how it felt. It was no longer just about being less able to move because of RA, having pain and the prospect of joint destruction, it was about unlearning my healthier movement.
Accordingly, restricted was the motion and posture of my body. On the one hand, this worsened the course of my RA and, on the other, caused other restrictions and health implications. All of which befell the same already ill musculoskeletal system.
Progressive change and the longer duration of the disease increased not only the difference between me and my fellow human beings but also between the person I was and the person I used to be. Bigger and faster changes by RA were usually even better than slight, steady and unusual. The more notable the difference between the RA-normality and my former healthier normality, the clearer it became to me how much influence RA had on my life. I had to fight certain operational blindness, which lead to the habituation of my life with the RA.
I learned with my own body that information and thus also information coming from my sentiences change me. And just because something is changing, that doesn’t necessarily mean it is changing for the better.
My rheumatoid arthritis, a chronic inflammatory process with pain, swelling and deformation, was difficult to get out of with goodwill alone. In order to be able to assess myself and the world around me well, I need my senses. This is a normal process because we are in our own skin and experience ourselves and the world outside from within. So I needed information/perceptions from healthy impulses/sensations that I couldn’t get from a limited body alone. My perception was oriented primarily towards my more limited bodily sensations until I intentionally and consciously intervened using my own skills to exercise my sense of touch and agility.
Intervention now meant to treat my body more cautious and prudent. In doing so, I discovered that I could compensate for a lack of sense of touch, e.g. when my hands and feet were numb, swollen or aching, by observing my movements whilst simultaneously thinking about how I put force into them and how I held my body. So I could regulate both my movement and posture and thus relieve my body – despite my limited senses and motion. As I thought, tried and practised to activate my senses and combined my skills, I felt how much more comfortable I was with my body when I kept myself unencumbered and moving. Encouraged by that, I did everyday things this better and healthier way.
I decided to exercise using every situation and every single work and trained with everything I was dealing with: when I moved around, sat down, got up or ran when I opened a faucet and took my jacket off the hook. I combined my body movement and posture with emotions, with my imagination and with my sentiences. I realized how much all of them closely intertwined elements make up our dealings with ourselves. They direct our body movement and posture and, at the same time, are provoked by it again.
So I trained my prudence and improved my attention inside and out. My exercises changed me, made me more mindful of what I had done so far, and overwhelmed me. For example, I dismantled such harmful habits by no longer abusing my body as an impact and impact tool or beast of burden.
With my HeilÜben exercises, my finer, physical sensations became accessible to me again. A critical step because these more delicate sensations were my body’s warning signals before and while overloading by misusing it. And when, in addition to the clear sensations such as sharp pain, I also felt the finer and beginning discomfort, I also felt stress and my reaction to him so much more that I could break them down before they became so strong that I would fall ill. Such an internal early warning system against overload, inflammation and pain requires all senses.
I observed how my sensory perceptions, emotions, and ideas affect my physical expression because they are all direct-acting impulses for moving and holding my body. Depending on my possibilities and my daily form, I added exercises for posture and movement.
HeilÜben exercises Level 1
- address with words what we are aware of: our minds and the feelings that are accessible to us – it explains exactly what is practised.
- are aimed directly at body and soul with imagination and movement. So by working with more than just our minds alone, we get more power to change. At first, the body is addressed directly through intentional thoughts, relaxing ideas, images, feelings, and subsequent HÜ about body perceptions about sensations (through relaxation, gentle movement).
In the midst of my rheumatoid arthritis, I used my skills to create healthy impulses from pictorial images, a more conscious body-soul-feeling, concentrative relaxation, posture and movement.
All of this is based on the abilities I had in my healthy life, without ever paying any particular attention to them, and yet using them successfully.
Over time I got to know my skills better and strengthened my confidence, which in turn improved healing and thus pushed my motivation. I collected more and more concrete observations and insights that confirmed my endeavours.
All of this was unfamiliar to me while my body was “reeling out” and yet I experienced first-hand that nothing I had tried so far ended the RA, and healed it. I had the best intentions to help myself. However, my skills were not sufficiently developed from the outset and needed practice and training.
With the HeilÜben exercises, all healthy impulses worked alternately, strengthening and triggering more relaxation in my body. This enabled me to relieve my posture and movement in the midst of RA. During the healing process, it was important for me to deliberately break the habit of tensing up again and again by consciously relaxing in a wide variety of situations.
From a certain degree of their form, my skills enabled me to reach the necessary knowledge and relaxation skills for the next advanced HeilÜben exercises (Level 2).
While I was continually working on my exercises, pain offered me a sheer amount of new insights to think about.
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