Sickness and Health
Prelude
“… and know that we are in the world as much in our pain as in our happiness …”
DEADWOOD, Season Two Episode 11
Being and non-being produce each other;
Difficult and easy complete each other;
Long and short contrast each other;
High and low distinguish each other;
Sound and voice harmonize each other;
Front and back follow each other.
Lao Tzu (Lao Zi), Tao-te Ching (or Dao-de Jing)
I
Illness itself is one of those forms of experience by which man arrives at the knowledge of God.” As He says, “ Sicknesses themselves are My servants, and are attached to My chosen friends.
al-Ghazzali[1]
"Some, when suffering befalls, take it not as if it came from God, but resist it to the utmost, and, by not accepting it in the proper spirit, make it useless to them. On the other hand, some people take it as from God and send it back to God. Accepting suffering thus, a man will merit the the eternal kingdom."
Meister Eckhart Vol I:264
if you desire healing
let yourself fall ill
let yourself fall ill
Rumi
My job is to be ill
St. Bernadette Soubirous[2]
The death of the body in self-discipline is life:
the sufferings of the body
are the cause of everlastingness to the spirit.
Mathnawi III, 3363-5
In poison there is physic; and these news,
Having been well, that would have made be sick,
Being sick, have in some measure made me well:
Shakespeare Henry IV Part II, Act I, Scene I
II
There can be many diseases in the sense of being out of ease, but there is only one fundamental sickness and that is the sickness of sleep.[3]Here I speak of hypnotic or magnetic sleep, a state where there exists a gross lack of awareness, which by its nature places us in a state of ignorance.[4]
You can work on yourself for a long time and yet continue to be ill. The application of the Alexander Technique to learning the art of living does not necessarily mean that illness, should it be manifesting in you, will go away. Indeed, sometimes the more one is capable of bearing up, the greater the vibration of illness one has to bear or, for that matter, chooses to bear.
You can meet people who have no apparent illness, yet are anything but healthy. A person may have no manifestation of pain and apparently possess a good external posture,[5] but what is the sound of their internal posture? What is the poise of mind and feeling?[6]
If you are one who has suffered pain day after day, night after night, year upon year, you will have some knowledge how this has in the main affected you – how it can sometimes wear you down, leave you irritable, forlorn. You may have tried homeopathy, allopathy, Ayurveda, Chinese medicine, Unanni tib, psychotherapy and other forms of medicine and healing, yet the condition persists.
When you are alone in the night with pain, is it worth it to come back to the fundamentals, to begin yet again, to renew a search to be made whole, to regain the balance of health?
The Alexander Technique is about change. Change is fundamental. It is worth remembering that F.M.Alexander once said, “You cannot change and yet remain the same, though that is what most people want.” People often use the word change, when, in fact, they mean something entirely different.
There exists the mistaken belief that we can change ourselves. What is there within us capable of changing us from one level to another? We can practise and prepare, but change is only possible through the help of a force from above.[7] The preparation for change entails attentively following what is actually happening in our lives.
The Alexander Technique is a teaching method and not a therapy. By applying the principles of the Technique, there can be therapeutic[8]benefits.
One day, when I was working in Dr. Bill Barlow’s practice, he referred to me an elderly, elegant woman from Pakistan who was in a great deal of pain and was dying as a result of a rare illness. Bill advised me not to try and do anything other than apply the principles (of the Alexander Technique). That way, he said, something may pass through you to help her to die well.
When someone who is in pain or distress comes for help, it is understandable to try and “do” something for him or for her. However, when you are confronted with the fact that you cannot “do” anything, then the temptation is there to bring in other methods and therapies in an endeavour to bring about the required result. Thus the end starts to condition the means whereby, and even with decent, heartfelt intention, the Technique turns into its opposite.
Strange as it may for some to hear but there are times when it is better for the earthly body to die than to have the disease pattern removed. One means or another can eliminate an illness, which, in the process of elimination, also removes the vitality of your being. Thus you can be left apparently disease-free, only to be placed vulnerable to a force much more sinister and destructive, a force which deprives you of the possibility of returning to the source[9] of your essence.
This is not to decry efforts to regain or maintain good health; efforts to explore the laws and practicalities of different branches of medicine or healing; efforts either to grow or purchase wholesome food for consumption or to live whole. But in attempting to live whole, we often become too hard, closed, or we can open ourselves to the wrong influence. As Bill Barlow said to me on one occasion, “There is a lot of shit out there waiting to get in.” Is it this, which is referred to in Isaiah, as “the abundance of the sea shall be converted unto thee.”[10]
The Alexander Technique calls for non-doing and alignment. By learning to move out of the way, there is room for the manifestation in us of that which absolves disease.
By aligning ourselves upwards, we begin to perceive that we are not alone. We have allies who will meet us halfway, more than halfway to help to awaken us from the suction of sleep. However, we must do our bit in the work and not be passive. Mr Macdonald indicated that what he termed “the cult of passivity” was one of the biggest threats facing us today:
“The cult of passivity and so-called relaxation is one of the most dangerous developments of our times. Essentially it, too, may represent a camouflage pattern - the double wish not to see the dangers and challenges of life, and not to be seen.”
The Alexander Technique can contribute to the conditions necessary for the Naturae matrix to carry out its work in processing both the symptoms and the cause of illness. In hexagram 18, Ku, of the Book of Changes, we are counselled to “Work on What Has Been Spoilt.” The act of seeing our state opens us to the process, and in that honest, often painful journey we can reach the place in ourselves, which acknowledges the need to be healed. To heal also means to return to a sound state or to be made sound. St Francis asked the Lord to be made an instrument of His peace. Are we not an instrument, which can, by moments, even as we speak and go about our daily tasks, vibrate with the sacred sound of silence?
Illness is a process and an opportunity to awaken to the “call and the echo”[11] of the ‘self’ yearning to return to the Self. It is of no benefit to interfere with the process of another. The process is profoundly subtle and as one begins to shift within “many frailties and sufferings and weaknesses”[12] are experienced.
Each one has to make their own way, but we can support each other, and even come into a state where we can speak for each other. And as we begin to suffer to reveal ourselves to others and to work with our fear, we will be cared for and protected.
Above all, the Alexander Technique, applied with sensitivity and common sense, enables us little by little to awaken from ignorance. In this the shortest route is the longest [13] and the greatest medicine is communion.
III
There is a level of healing that can only be undertaken and carried though by one who is made whole and has the power of will. Wholeness as Jung aptly pointed out has nothing to do with perfection.[14] What most people now days call will power is an utter illusion. There is also a quality of healing that is not meant to occur solely upon this planet. Is it not appropriate to enquire where does illness and healing begin? How can we come to understand divine suffering and what of the words bestowed upon me one sheltering night in a snow filled forest in a wintry Finland —“ Deo est, but the holy spirit needs healing.”
It would be entirely remiss of me to speak of these matters, given the pain and suffering that so many endure, had I not experienced something of what I have written.
Afterword
And we'll walk down the avenue again
And we'll sing all the songs from way back when
And we'll walk down the avenue again and the healing has begun
Van Morrison: And the Healing Has Begun
(From the Album Into the Music Released 1979)
[1] The Alchemy of Happiness The Octagon Press edition (London) 2001. Ch II, P.37.
[2] In response to a colleague who reproached her for the amount of time she spent laid up in the infirmary St Bernadette replied, “Why, my dear Mother I’m doing my job. And what’s your job? Being ill.” Abbé François Trochu Saint Bernadette Soubirous Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., p.352
[3] “The seeming state of wakefulness of the ordinary man is perceived by a sage to be, in reality, a state of delusive sleep.” The Bhagavad Gita II.69. Leonardo da Vinci asks, “O thou that sleepest, what is sleep?”
[4] Tibetan Buddhism offers the view that “we compulsively reify ourselves as being inherently existent, and that is the root cause of illness”. See, Healing from the Source, The Science and Lore of Tibetan Medicine, Chapter V, The Distant Causes of Illness, by Dr. Yeshi Dhonden. Snow Line Publications 2000.
[5] Sun Tzu indicated that good posture is not necessarily inherent but “comes from excellent art of direction, rich experience, and thoughtfulness.”
[6] It has been reported that Stalin’s feline movements were “‘supple and graceful, he buzzed with sensitive energy. … ‘it was hard to imagine such a man could deceive you, his reactions were so natural without the slightest sense of him posing’…”Simon Sebag Montefiore Stalin The Court of the Red Tsar Phoenix London 2004, pps 49—50.
[7] “A man can receive nothing, except it be given him from above.” The New Testament, St.John 3.27.
[8] In this context I use the word therapeutic as it is more commonly used today rather than its more encompassing ancient meaning. The Therapeuts were members of a esoteric school dating from at least the first century A. D. of whom Philo of Alexandria wrote “The Therapeutae profess an art of healing superior to that in use in cities (for that only heals bodies, but the other heals souls…), or else because they have been instructed by nature and the sacred laws to serve the living God.” The Greek word therapeuein (‘to heal’) originally meant ‘service to the Gods.’
[9] ‘Listen to the reed. It is complaining.
It tells of separation, saying,
Ever since they tore me from my reed
bed
My lament has moved man and
woman to tears…
Everyone who is left far from his source
Wishes back the time of union.’
Jalal Al-Din Rumi opening lines of the Mathnawi
[10] Isaiah 60:5. Psychologically water can have a dual meaning of life and death. Here it may symbolise an inrush of powerful destructive forces which the pupil is not equipped to handle. St. Hilary speaks of it as forces “moved with the violence of diabolical rage.”
[11] Sensitivity is needed to respond to this call. For there also the call of self-love. This is aptly indicated in the tragic story from Greek mythology of Narcissus and Echo. The nymph Echo deprived of speech by Hera and condemned to repeat the last syllable of words spoken in her presence. She falls in love with Narcissus who rejects her. The Gods punish Narcissus for having spurned Echo by making him fall in love with his own image. Trapped by his reflection he dies of languor. See The Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology. John O’ Donohue Eternal Echoes, Exploring our Hunger To Belong, Prologue, Bantam Press 1998. Robert Graves, The Greek Myths. 2 Vols. Penguin Books.
[12] St. John of the Cross
[13] The work of the doctor/teacher as well as the patient/pupil are directed towards wholeness. The path towards this as yet unmanifested wholeness “is alongissma via, not straight but snakelike, a path that unites the opposites, reminding us of the guiding caduceus, a path whose labyrinthine twists and turns are not lacking in terrors. It is on this longissma via, that we meet with those experiences which are said to be “inaccessible.” Their inaccessibility really consists in the fact that they cost us an enormous amount of effort: they demand the very thing we most fear, namely the “wholeness” we talk about so glibly and which leads itself to endless theorizing, though in actual life we give it the widest possible berth.” C.G.Jung The Collected Works Volume 12, Psychology and Alchemy
[14] See C. G. Jung Answer to Job Ch 3., Routledge Classics (London & New York) 2002