Healing a Wave

I recently broke a rib. Unless there is damage to the lungs or heart, there is no treatment for a broken rib besides waiting – or so I’ve always told my clients. (Killing pain may be helpful, but remember, it’s not a treatment.)

I told my friend Paula Macali, bodyworker and Meditation/Qi Gong teacher extraordinaire, about the accident, and she told me that there is indeed a treatment for a broken rib – breathing. Breathing is hard with a fracture, but as some among you may have guessed, it must continue throughout the healing process.

Paula released muscles throughout the body that were tensing up due to pain, and she did very light force work on the ribcage. Throughout the session, she coached my breathing – not an aggressive breathing “exercise” – it wasn’t practicing breathing to strengthen muscles – but a moderately paced, patterned breathing cycle. It was the flow of the ribs through their range of motion that promoted healing.

You can’t repair a ship on the ocean by turning it off and putting it in drydock. So it is with the body. You have to change slowly while continuing to move. Even if you’re in traction or in a coma, you will be moving. You will be breathing (even if it’s with assistance), and the other physiological processes that constitute life will continue

As I healed under Paula’s hands and tutelage, I came to think that healing is like herding a flock of structures operating together. A sheepdog doesn’t run at a herd of sheep – they would scatter. Instead, the herder moves in the same direction as the flock and then gently guides them into a desired direction without interrupting their vital flow. This is what a bodyworker or healing arts professional does – and it’s what breath does, whether unconscious or directed.

It’s true that some interventions need to be more drastic. When that is necessary, the disjunctive action of the treatment often necessitates a second phase of healing – recovery from the treatment – on top of recovery from the injury. These are the types of procedures, if they are at all elective, that we have to ponder before we enter them. One way or the other, healing needs to involve integration, in which the person returns to their life with new movement and form. (You can’t step into the same river twice; the healing you has changed from the pre-injury you.) Integrative behaviors – walking, breathing, etc. – accustom the nervous system to a changed self.

And just this week, my thinking evolved again. I saw a client with a concussion. I did light movement on his head to make sure the small joints in the skull were moving freely and allowing fluid circulation and movement to the brain. Suddenly I got an image of healing as restoring a wave.

How would you heal a wave? It’s a great koan. You can’t stop it and fix it, and indeed, though we know what a wave is and can point at it and describe it, it’s constantly changing and infinite in its movement and form. Maybe healing the wave isn’t the right term. Maybe the wave is healing the particles of which it’s also constituted.

There are many wave-like motions in the body, more than the obvious ones: blood and breath. Of course, in the ribcage, the most powerful wave is by far the breath. Though a rib may be fractured, the many other structures around it – the other ribs, the muscles and ligaments, and so on – are still moving, still attached, and still exerting force on the healing tissue so that a fractured rib almost always returns to a functional and painless form.

Because the self is never static – even the insides of the bones are immensely active throughout the day and night – this healing doesn’t happen to something solid that you can point to because by the time you’ve pointed, it’s in a new configuration. Particle/wave theory articulates this, positing that matter and energy are one. It struck me while working on my concussed client that I would need to interact with the energetic waves more than the particles. For a moment, I saw my work as invoking a holographic blueprint of the person in which everything is potentially in perfect flow and relationship. A less highfalutin’ way to say it is that I’d be working on generating healthy movement in a structure more than on repositioning the structure.

Movement is what heals.

The next time you are working with a physical challenge – let’s use a headache for the sake of argument – think about restoring flow around the area – decreasing shoulder, facial, and scalp tension, promoting fluid metabolism by staying hydrated, and moving the head, neck, and shoulders in small ways that open ease and possibility. And, of course, breathe. These strategies won’t always take the headache away, but they will all be a part of the healing process at some point. Indeed, they are the healing process. Augment with aspirin if you choose to, but don’t take your attention away from the endlessly morphing wave that is you.