The main intent of my CoreWalking Program is to provide a guide for people to heal themselves. Patient heal thyself is an edict we all must embrace. As much as I believe in bodywork of all kinds, long-term healing from most injuries requires the active participation of the hurting party. My personal story revolves around three knee surgeries. After the first surgery I did nothing to change the way I walked, stood, or did yoga. I thought the operation would do its thing and I could continue on as before. Fast forward ten months to the second surgery and again I did nothing to change the way I walked, stood or did yoga. Finally seven months later, following the third operation on my knees I realized that something had to give if I was going to interrupt the cycle of surgeries and break out of the patterns that kept leading me to injury.
More than ten years later I am a completely different person in terms of the way I use my body. I did it with the help of numerous brilliant practitioners but I, and so many clients, can attest and to the fact that if you don’t work along with the rolfer, or chiropractor, or massage therapist to bring change to the organism, change will not last.
In the beginning of the CoreWalking Program when I was still finding my way I was particularly heartened by a massage therapist who regularly saw one of my early clients. She remarked that working on him every week for years she could go directly to his “stress” spots without even thinking about it. As this client made his way through the Walking Program and began to change some intrinsic patterns, she found herself having to work in different areas of his body. It didn’t mean he was fixed, it meant he was changing which was more than enough for me.
When you go to a chiropractor and they align your spine, you go back into the world to see how much your spine will hold the adjustment. If you leave that office and inhabit the same patterns that brought you there in the first place I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t eventually become misaligned again. The chiropractor adjusts you for about a half an hour—you should adjust yourself the rest of the time.
We resist change and hold on to long held patterns that don’t serve us for a host of reasons that range from structural to muscular to emotional. Changing those patterns requires nothing more than developing an understanding of what the correct patterns are. Knowing that you shouldn’t hyperextend your knee with every step (and acknowledging that you do) is the first step to changing.
Learn to partner with your doctors and other practitioners so that you can be the architect of your own journey towards healing. It is a highly empowering trip to take and one that will have powerful lasting effects.
Patient heal thyself.
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