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Headache and
Autoregulation
From the book
What Do Lions Know About Stress?
Some personal experiences and
observations have profoundly influenced my thinking about self-regulation and healing,
leading to the evolution of my concepts of the principles and practice of autoregulation.
Below, I briefly describe some of those experiences.
MY MIGRAINE HEADACHE ATTACKS
I suffered migraine headache attacks from my
childhood until the age of 47 when I learned to dissolve them with autoregulation. My
migraine attacks were fairly consistent in pattern. The attacks began with a sense of
heaviness in my head. Within an hour or so, the heaviness would turn into a dull headache
that I felt all over. Sometime later, the headache localized to my forehead and temple
regions and progressively worsened until it caused eye discomfort and nausea. An hour or
so later, my nausea culminated in projectile vomiting. Eventually the headache became
severe, unrelenting and disabling. Oral painkillers never helped since the pain always
returned with vomiting. Finally, I would inject myself with Demerol (a potent narcotic and
powerfully addictive drug) to obtain some relief. Demerol usually increased my vomiting
until I would doze for several hours. On the day after the injection, I usually felt
lethargic and hated the effects.
I suffered such migraine headache attacks
all through my years of high school, college and medical school in Pakistan; emergency
medicine and surgical training in England; pathology residency and practice of surgical
and clinical pathology in the United States. During this time, I taught at medical and
dental schools. Yet, no one ever mentioned that there may indeed be an end to my periods
of misery with the simple method of self-regulation. The subjects of self-regulation and
energy work are taboo in the practice of drug and scalpel medicines.
During the early 1980s, I suffered a
headache on a flight to Denver from Jackson Hole, Wyoming. By the time, I reached Denver
to change to my flight for Newark, the headache grew into a severe migraine attack. I
decided to obtain relief with a Demerol injection. To my horror, I found that, rather than
keeping the drug in my briefcase as I always do, I had mistakenly put it in my luggage
checked for Newark. I knew of no physician at the airport clinic, if there were any, who
would give a Demerol shot without conducting various laboratory tests. Furthermore, I
would miss my flight to Newark. I was terrified at the prospect of suffering a severe
migraine headache all the way from Denver to Newark, but I saw no way around it. And that
is what happened. I suffered severe pain, vomiting and retching all through the
insufferably long flight. At Newark airport I didn't care who saw me at the luggage area.
As soon as I found my luggage, I pulled out the Demerol ampule and shot myself with the
full amount—although half that amount usually suffices. Fortunately, an associate who
had accompanied me to Jackson Hole drove me home.
Until I returned to clinical medicine in
1986, I did not encounter serious difficulties in managing my work, since there were
always other residents or pathology associates to assume my work when I became disabled.
This situation changed when I began private practice in immunology, environmental medicine
and nutrition in 1986. Since then, a migraine attack would force me to cancel office
hours, even if some patients had traveled long distances to see me.
Early one afternoon, I felt a heaviness in
my head begin. I knew this would become a full-blown migraine, and I was worried because
my schedule was packed until midnight. I wondered what it would mean for my staff and
patients if I had to cancel my hours. My discomfort grew into anxiety. It was then that
the thought of trying autoregulation for brief periods with high frequency crossed my
mind. Frightened by the prospect of almost twelve hours of work with a migraine, I did
pulses and
Limbic Breathing frequently and earnestly.
The heaviness in my head didn't let up;
instead, it turned into a headache. I vacillated about whether to call the office staff
and ask them to cancel my appointments or whether I should take a chance. In the past
taking a chance meant keeping the early appointments and canceling the later ones as my
migraine progressed. I remember many an occasion when I drove home late at night, stopping
a few times on the highway because I couldn't hold back the vomiting.
I persisted with autoregulation. Every 10
to 15 minutes, I breathed limbically or tried doing pulses a minute or two at a time. Such
autoregulation seemed to have no impact on my headache at all. Still, I persisted. At
about 5 p.m., I left the hospital and drove to the Institute, doing autoregulation all the
way. As the migraine intensified, my anxiety grew. Within an hour or two, I realized the
minute-reg made no difference and that the migraine would soon disable me. Close to
despair, I decided to test my limit at both suffering from severe headaches and enduring
autoreg. Somehow I managed to see my last patient and drove back home. It was close to
midnight. My experiment with autoregulation, done frequently but mostly for brief periods
of time, had obviously failed. That failure created new doubts about the very notion of
autoregulation.
Once in my bedroom, I pulled out a Demerol
vial and withdrew 2 ml of the drug into a syringe. At the last minute, something stopped
me from shooting the narcotic into my vein. Instead, I lay down on my bed in the darkness
and began limbic breathing for the nth time. The migraine slowly decreased in intensity,
and several minutes later it was completely gone. This was the very first time in my
memory that a full-blown migraine cleared without a Demerol injection.
I wondered why my migraine had cleared
without the Demerol injection. Then, like a flash, came the idea that it must have been
the brief but frequent autoregs. I hadn't recognized this aspect of autoregulation until
then.
The essential insight that experience gave
me was this: The benefits of self-regulation may be delayed, but they are there.
Autoregulation, done for a minute or two at a time, may not yield perceptible rewards
immediately, but the cumulative energy responses and physiologic benefits that follow from
them do add up.
MINUTE-REG AT WORK
"Minute-reg" is the term I use
to describe a minute or two of autoregulation. The idea behind minute-reg is simple. It is
to use some method of self-regulation for brief periods of time but with high frequency.
It was through personal experiences like the one described above that I developed a deep
sense of the great value of minute-reg in my autoregulation program.
It then seemed necessary to experiment
further with minute-reg myself and to define some aspects of its clinical usefulness
before I could prescribe it to my patients.
Minute-reg gives the body tissues a
respite from the unending demands of the cortical monkey. Even when minute-reg is as short
as one to two minutes, this successfully breaks interrupts the continual waves of biologic
stress response that most of us face at work and at home every day.
After some time, I became
proficient at minute-reg. I was able to feel clear pulses in my fingertips almost
instantaneously, whenever I so desired.
ESCAPING INTO THE LIMBIC
In December, 1986, I finished serving two terms
as the elected president of the Holy Name Hospital Medical Staff. The medical staff
graciously decided to honor me for my service at a formal dinner scheduled for 7 p.m. I
was expected to make some remarks after the dinner. I knew that my predecessors delivered
prepared speeches in expressing their gratitude for the support they received during their
terms of office and for the graciousness of the staff in honoring their work. I wondered
about what I might prepare, but couldn't come up with anything appropriate. I knew there
were to be other speakers, that many of them would roast me. So I decided to go along with
whatever they might say and limit myself to responding in kind.
The day of the occasion was my day to
examine all surgical specimens and perform frozen section biopsies for patients undergoing
surgery. I planned to finish my work by 5 p.m., then go home to shower and leave for the
dinner. My morning work with surgical tissues was repeatedly interrupted by some problems
in the laboratory. At about noon I became aware of a heaviness in my head that usually
serves as an aura for my migraine attacks. The thought of suffering from a migraine attack
on the evening I was to be the guest of honor horrified me. I fervently hoped that if I
did minute-reg frequently all day long, perhaps I could abort the migraine attack. It
turned out to be wishful thinking and the heaviness turned into a dull headache within an
hour. I thought about exchanging my daytime responsibilities with one of my associate
pathologists, but decided against it. I realized it was a mistake when by 3 p.m., my dull
ache grew in intensity. Still, I persisted with the hope that I would finish my surgical
work within an hour and have an hour to rest.
I finished my laboratory work by 5 p.m. in
the midst of a raging migraine accompanied by severe nausea. I was infuriated at myself
for not having recognized the futility of my wishful thinking and for not having asked an
associate to finish my work earlier that afternoon, when I might have had a chance of
resting and abating my severe pain. What a silly mistake! What an embarrassment! I tried
to control the surge of anger within me. I knew it would only make matters worse. Perhaps
it was intense pain that clouded my judgment. I tried to reason with myself and mitigate
my anger.
I became nauseous, and my anxiety turned
into panic as I realized I had to somehow contact Mahmood Bangash, M.D.—then chief of
thoracic surgery who was moderating the occasion—and explain why I couldn't join them
for this evening in my honor. I realized he was in no position to call off the dinner. Dr.
Bangash would simply have to announce that I had been disabled by a migraine attack. What
a way to end my two terms as president of the medical staff! Could I swing it with a
Demerol injection, I wondered? No chance, the answer came readily. In the past, a Demerol
injection had totally disabled me and confined me to bed for several hours. I picked up
the phone to call Dr. Bangash, but put it back, afraid that my nausea might erupt into
explosive vomiting during the call.
Desperate for some relief of pain and a
way to save the evening, I locked my office, pulled out the telephone plug, laid down on
the sofa, closed my eyes and started limbic breathing. The throbbing pain became more
acute as I closed my eyes. Relaxation with slow breathing evidently was producing an
effect opposite to what I had hoped. I thought about the day when I succeeded in
dissolving my migraine attack without a Demerol injection. Why couldn't that day be today?
I wailed. Sometime later, I looked at my watch. It was about 5:30 p.m., yet there was no
sign of relief.
I have no memory of what happened during
the next hour. What I do remember vividly is that I suddenly sat up on the sofa, my hands
trembling, my face flushed, my forehead sweating. Frightened and disoriented, I shook my
head and tried to put in order very distressing sensations I experienced moments earlier.
Before sitting up, I felt as if I was being dismembered. There was no blood to be seen or
any gaping wounds. But I felt a clear and extremely frightening sense of my arms and legs
moving away from my torso. With my eyes, I saw myself fragmented.
Moments later, I felt sudden relief as I
reassured myself that I was only experiencing a nightmare. Several moments later, I
suddenly realized that my headache had completely disappeared. I touched my forehead in
confusion, then moved my fingers through my hair—not certain whether the relief was
real or imagined. Slowly, I realized that my migraine attack indeed had abated, that I
could stand and move about the room to gather some strength. I stood up, stretched, and
slowly took some steps to make certain that I didn't become dizzy as I had done on
numerous previous occasions after a migraine attack. I felt neither weak nor dizzy. I
looked at the watch. It was a few minutes to 7 p.m. Encouraged by my ability to walk
around without any symptoms, I prepared to leave my office. Not enough time to go home to
shower, I washed my face in the office sink, picked up my briefcase and went to the
dinner.
There were the expected speeches of some
friends. They roasted my vagrant ideas about the impact of the environment on human
biology and poked fun at a pathologist who tried to play a doctor in the evening. In the
end, I was expected to thank them for their kindness and grace, and find a way to make
them laugh. I did that. (No, I didn't say anything about N2D2 medicine. There is a time
and a place for everything, I told myself.) If anyone noticed anything different in me
that evening, they didn't tell me.
The following day, I decided to call
whatever I had experienced a limbic break. In autoregulation lingo, it meant a sudden
escape from the relentless terror of the thinking mind—an entry into limbic openness
where the arteries have no reason to stay tightened. The muscles have no cause to be in
spasm. Body tension simply melts away. The cortical monkey is banished. There is no reason
for a headache anymore.
During the period of disorientation when I
had experienced dismemberment, I had no sense that such an experience might be called an
out-of-body experience by others. Or, more precisely, it may be considered a form of what
has been called kundilini in India for millennia. What name to give it didn't seem
important. Now, almost nine years after it happened, I see clearly that what I experienced
that day was what millions of others have experienced in their lives. These are moments of
sudden and merciful withdrawal from the unremitting agony of the thinking mind—times
when the cortical monkey is stopped dead in his tracks and can no longer beat up on
injured tissues mercilessly. Whatever anyone chooses to call it is okay with me.
Could I simply have dozed off? Could my
migraine attack have simply subsided in
sleep? I know that is not true. I have fallen
asleep with a headache and awakened with the same headache eight hours later on too many
occasions to believe that this one, simple dozing broke the hold of my migraine.
A TIME FOR TRUTH
Several months after the episode of the
limbic break I described above, I was to fly to Denver late one evening to speak at the
Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Environmental Medicine. I planned to finish my
laboratory work at the hospital, then see several patients at the Institute before leaving
for Newark Airport. At about 5 p.m., before I left the hospital, I began to feel that aura
of heaviness in my head. By then, I had dissolved my migraines on several occasions and
had become somewhat arrogant about my capacity for doing so. I thought I would do
minute-reg between seeing patients, breathe limbically frequently, and speed up my
schedule so as to have some time to dissolve my migraine before leaving for the airport.
Talat was flying with me, and that gave me some comfort. Under the worst circumstances, I
could ask her to drive, and I would do autoregulation myself during the ride to the
airport.
As is often the case with my schedule,
some patients required more time than I thought. Rather than speed up my schedule, I fell
behind. The intensity of my headache grew, and I developed nausea. Talat kept sending me
messages that we were getting very tight on time and that seemed to feed my headache
further. By the time we left the office, I had a full-blown migraine. I asked Talat to
drive. Even before we could get to the Garden State Parkway, I felt a strong vomiting
reflex and asked her to pull over. She did so, and offered me tissue paper to clean up
after I vomited on the roadside. She had done so on more occasions than she cared to
count.
During the ride, I breathed limbically and
thought about how many migraine attacks I had dissolved with autoregulation previously.
The intensity of the pain didn't let up any, however. Still, I felt certain that I would
be able to break this attack eventually, just as I had done on many prior occasions. I
continued to experience nausea and retching as we parked the car at the airport. Somehow I
managed to walk through the terminal without stopping to vomit again. At the airline
counter, I struggled to suppress my retching. Once seated at a window seat in the plane, I
felt secure in the knowledge that, if necessary, I could discreetly relieve my persistent
nausea by vomiting without making an ugly scene.
Minutes passed. The plane taxied to the
runway, then took off through thin clouds illuminated by a lowering sun. My migraine raged
on. I don't remember now how long it took before the intensity of suffering began to
weaken my resolve to dissolve the pain with autoregulation. It had been more than two
hours since I vomited by the roadside in Bloomfield. I tried limbic breathing, tissue
sensing, shrinking circles (a method I find useful for controlling headaches) and many
other techniques to control my pain. Nothing worked. I even tried directed
pulses—something I caution my patients not to do during a headache. The pulses only
made my pain more acute. Exhausted and dejected, I considered administering a Demerol
injection, then backed off. Many more minutes of agony passed. There was no relief in
sight. I asked Talat to take Demerol from my briefcase. (For years, I hadn't dared travel
without Demerol in my briefcase.) She prepared the syringe, taking precaution not to let
any passenger see it. I took the syringe from her and felt a tremendous relief simply
looking at it.
A thought hit me as I prepared to plunge
the needle into my flesh: Do it, but if you do, you will never teach autoregulation to
anyone. I stopped and lowered the hand holding the syringe. The thought continued: If you
take the shot now, you will discard the autoregulation equipment. Get out of this work.
You have no right to teach this practice to patients with multiple sclerosis, lupus,
crippling rheumatoid arthritis and cancer, if you cannot dissolve a mere migraine with it
yourself. If this is deception, it must end. And it must end today. Go on. Get your
Demerol fix. But don't live with this lie again.
I looked out the window. Everything looked
hazy through the pain in my eyes. I gave the syringe back to Talat, covered my face with
my hands and wondered whether crying would help.
My next memory of the day is that of the
greatest "high" I have ever experienced in autoregulation. It was the most
intense energy experience ever in my life. The clouds near the sinking sun were crimson. I
had never seen that crimson before, nor have I seen it since. The pale blue sky was
luminous. I had never seen a sky so luminous before, nor since. The space where heaven
lifts up the earth was wide open, wider than I ever saw. The presence there was larger
than I had ever seen.
HEADACHES AND PULSES
Aside from chronic headaches caused by
musculoskeletal problems of the neck and shoulder, all chronic headaches—in my
view—are caused by sensitivity to molds, foods and chemicals. Stress exaggerates
headaches only in those who are vulnerable to the sensitivities in the first place. Brain
tumors and metabolic disorders do not cause the common types of chronic headaches and
migraines.
Optimal management of allergies and
chemical sensitivities can relieve headaches 80 to 90 percent of the time. My extensive
clinical experience as a doctor, as well as an ex-migraine patient, demonstrates that for
the complete control of chronic headaches, some effective methods of self-regulation are
essential.
TWO IMPORTANT POINTS
I want to make two important points here.
First, headaches almost always become worse when the sufferer begins to do any type of
self-regulation. Autoregulation is no exception. Countless patients have corroborated my
own earlier experience with the phenomenon that I describe above. It is easy to
understand. Closing one's eyes to do autoregulation cancels out many extraneous factors
that often detract from pain perception. So, temporarily the pain gains in intensity.
There is only one right thing to do in such a state: Hang on and persist with
autoregulation.
Second, pulses may not be a good method
for self-regulation in the control of headaches. The reason for this is simple. Headaches
almost always are associated with spasms, and in later stages, with persistent dilatation
of arteries. Such changes may indeed be worsened by the method of pulses. I do not
consider it advisable to direct pulses to the eyes or any part of the head for headache
control. The best autoregulation methods for the control of headache are limbic breathing
and limbic energy work.
JEFFERSON'S HEADACHE
When I first came to this country,
Thomas Jefferson fascinated me more than any other president. Talat, the children and I
visited Monticello on several occasions when our children were old enough to learn United
States history.
Jefferson suffered migraine headaches.
Sometimes his pain was so intense that he stayed holed up in a dark room at Monticello for
days. Thanks to Demerol and Vistaril injections, I never suffered from my migraine attacks
that long. But I remember thinking about Jefferson's misery when I stayed holed up in a
dark room trying to obtain some relief from a headache before I finally succumbed and used
the Demerol injection to put myself out. How did Jefferson cope with his headache for
days? I couldn't imagine.
Years later, with autoregulation I learned
to escape into a limbic state where there are no migraine attacks and no need for Demerol
or Vistaril shots. Then I proceeded to teach hundreds of migraine sufferers methods of
escaping the tyranny of the thinking mind—and that of migraine headaches. I have
often wondered whether I could have taught Thomas Jefferson to dissolve his headaches? Of
course, I have no way of knowing, but in my heart I a sure I would have succeeded. A man
of his towering intellect, I know, would have had no difficulty learning how to turn his
unrelenting mind off with limbic breathing and mitigate his suffering.
If only Jefferson could return, I could
prove myself right. (Huh!)
ACUTE BACKACHE AT THE MET
During my mid-thirties, I often suffered
from chronic neck pain and backache—a professional hazard for pathologists who are
not careful about their posture at the microscope. When I began my work with preventive
medicine, I did not want to preach anything that I didn't practice myself. During my
writing of The Ghoraa and Limbic Exercise, I experimented with many different exercises
for chronic neck pain and backache. I chose some that I found effective on a regular
basis. During that period I learned some stretching exercises that completely relieved my
neck and back pain.
Then one day my backache returned. First
it was intermittent, not severe enough to keep me from maintaining my regular schedule.
Within days it grew in intensity. Then Talat and I went to the Virgin Islands for a
vacation. My backache worsened with the travel. I realized I needed some X-rays and a CAT
scan of my back to make sure the pain was due to muscle spasms and pulled ligaments rather
than some structural damage to the disc, or worse, a growth in the spinal cord. On our
return, I delayed the MRI scan for a few days. The following weekend, while rambling along
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I was suddenly struck by a sharp pain. I froze at the
spot, as even the slightest movement caused excruciating pain in my back. I felt angry at
myself for having neglected the back problem and wondered how I would manage to get to the
hospital for an MRI scan without calling an ambulance. Nearly in panic, I thought of
relieving the acute muscle spasm in my back with autoregulation.
I do not recall how long it took, but I
was able to walk out of the museum and walk back to our apartment in the city. Once again,
as my back pain subsided, I deferred the MRI scan. I wanted to test if gentle limbic
exercise and autoregulation could resolve my back problem. That episode occurred more than
three years ago. I neither underwent the scans nor needed to see a physician.
Occasionally, I feel some muscle spasm and pain in my lower back. Some stretching
exercises and limbic breathing are all I need for relief.
CHEST PAIN ON BROADWAY
On another occasion, Talat and I went for a walk
on Broadway in New York City. I woke up fresh and well rested that morning. I did my usual
morning limbic stretch and limbic run. I didn't feel any muscular stress in the chest or
anywhere else. On Broadway, out of the blue, came a sense of discomfort in my chest. We
continued to walk and I decided not to say anything about it to Talat. Several minutes
later, I realized that the discomfort was turning into actual pain and it seemed to be
localizing in the left side of my chest. I stopped for a few moments on the pretense of
looking at books in the display windows of Barnes and Noble on 81st Street. The pain
seemed to ease. We resumed our walk, and the pain returned. This happened a few times
before I felt concern.
Several minutes later, my concern turned into
one of alarm. Even though I do not have any defined risk factors for heart disease, I had
performed too many autopsies on patients who died of a heart attack, yet had no definable
risk factors. Their heart attacks were mistaken for indigestion or a muscle spasm. I
suggested to Talat that we sit on one of the benches on the Broadway divider strip and
watch people. My real purpose was not to ignore the chest pain. I decided to either
dissolve it with autoregulation completely or tell Talat about it and return to Teaneck
for a cardiogram and other tests. If it was a muscle spasm in the chest wall or an
esophageal reflux, I reasoned, I should be able to terminate that with autoregulation. I
further thought that since most heart attacks are caused by spasm of the coronary arteries
in the beginning, autoregulation would most likely benefit that as well.
I do not recall how long it took me to
completely dissolve my chest pain. It may have been 15 minutes or more. The pain never
returned. I didn't require any cardiac evaluation, then nor since.
IRREVERSIBLE PULPITIS AT
DELPHI
Once while traveling in the countryside of
Greece, I developed an acute toothache. Rather than return to Athens for dental care, I
decided to wing it. The next day, when we reached Delphi, my pain grew in intensity and
made it impossible for me even to eat soup. I tapped a tooth on my right side with a
spoon—just as my endodontist had done on three previous occasions to diagnose a root
canal problem—and convulsed with sharp pain. "Irreversible pulpitis," I
recalled his words when I had experienced exactly the same type of pain in his office. I
felt panic as I realized that we were to travel for three more days before our scheduled
arrival in Athens where I could reach an endodontist. I thought about discussing the need
for terminating our trip with Talat, then changed my mind. Let's see what the next day
brings, I told myself. I began doing autoregulation and stayed with it almost without
interruption, except to briefly answer Talat's questions. Subsisting on fluids, I managed
the pain until we returned to Athens. Once secure in the knowledge that I could see an
endodontist at short notice, I decided to test an idea: Can irreversible pulpitis be
reversed?
It has been more than four years since
that time of irreversible pulpitis. I still have my tooth and I haven't had a root canal.
(I am much more careful with my dental care and am very grateful for the care I have
received from my excellent endodontist and periodontist since that time.) Several months
ago, my endodontist suggested that I have another tooth removed, one that she thought was
beyond salvation. I asked her if she would support me in my efforts to conserve the tooth.
She smiled and consented. (I still have that tooth.)
SPONTANEITY OF PULSES
Serendipity opened my eyes to the
enormous value of pulses for dissolving anger.
One day at the hospital, a technician
brought me an unlabelled frozen section surgical biopsy slide. A frozen section study of
the fresh biopsy specimen is undertaken so that the pathologist can render a definitive
diagnosis to the operating surgeon while the patient is still in the operating room. It
allows the surgeon to make a judgment about the type of operation to be performed and the
amount of healthy tissue which must be sacrificed to assure complete removal of the
cancer. Not uncommonly, two or more surgeons send their biopsies to the laboratory at the
same time. Thus, it is critically important that the biopsy specimens be processed
separately and the slides prepared with the biopsy materials be labelled accurately and
immediately. Errors in mislabelling slides—or not labelling them immediately—can
have disastrous consequences for the patient. Safety in this area is always a top priority
for surgical pathologists.
This had been a very busy morning. There
were several frozen section studies, and I had been distracted by staff in other areas of
the laboratory. (We pathologists repeatedly remind ourselves of the potential for serious
error when we are distracted during microscopic work.) I recognized the unlabelled frozen
section slide and suddenly became furious. I asked a staff member to immediately call that
technician and ask him to come to my office. The technician got wind of my anger and
disappeared for lunch. I felt the anger in full swing now. This is when it happened.
Suddenly, and certainly without a
conscious effort on my part, the pulses arrived at my fingertips. My hands felt flushed.
My neck muscles were limp, my legs and feet light. I sensed something move through my
entire body, with the speed of lightening, yet gently. The tension in my muscles melted
away, as if all the tightness wrung into my tissues by the surge of anger was simply swept
clean—as if, caught in cortical clutches as I was, an ethereal limbic wave set me
free. All of a sudden, I found myself in comforting limbic openness—and smiling at
myself. I was not angry anymore. I thought about the technician at lunch, and wondered how
his digestive juices might be working since he knew he couldn't stay away from the
laboratory—and me—forever.
How did the pulses know I needed them?
Where did they come from? Certainly, the subject of pulses couldn't have been further from
my mind in those moments of fury. Which part of my being sensed my predicament? How did
that part order the pulses around? Was it my thinking mind or some other dimension of the
mind that eludes the thinking mind? Or, was it not the doing of the mind at all? Did the
muscles in the arterial walls let go by themselves? Did the cells, lining the inside of
the blood vessels, suddenly feel some sympathy for me? Did they abruptly decide to splurge
their nitric oxide stores and endothelin stores—the simple molecules that endothelial
cells in the vessel walls produce to free the tightened vessels from the unrelenting
dictates of the thinking mind? I looked out the window and laughed out loud as I
acknowledged the volley of questions from my conscious mind. Of course, the conscious mind
had no answer for any of them.
Months later, I became curious to learn if
any of my patients who did autoregulation regularly ever experienced such limbic breaks.
Many of them did, but each did so in his own way. The limbic has his own sense of things.
************
In closing this chapter, I wish to emphasize
that facility with self-regulation, and energy work is a gift from God. It comes easily to
some and with considerable difficulty to others. Each of us must recognize this. Each of
us has some strengths and some weaknesses. What matters in work with self-regulation and
spirituality is this: Everyone eventually succeeds, at his own time, at his own pace. We
must accept this. Being goal-oriented, competitive or combative doesn't help.
Winning is not everything, it is the only
thing, the American guru of competitiveness, Vince Lombardi, exhorted his disciples. I'm
afraid, Lombardi's philosophy is utterly irrelevant in healing and spiritual work. |
