Health, your ability to respond

Jefferson Breland

(9/2024) Last month, I shared with you a basic method of "checking in" with your body.

How do you use this body scan or "check in" to help you improve your health?

Well, most simply it allows you to become a better observer of your body and mind. With practice, you will begin to notice more subtle shifts and develop more awareness of who or what influences your health.

I suggest doing a body scan daily. Now I am talking about doing a full body scan, not just a daily noticing of what hurts. Getting up off the couch, and noticing your knees or back hurts, doesn’t count.

When all you do is focus on "problems," you will separate your body into the good parts and the bad parts. Looking at your body this way, you reinforce a "problem" or disease-based approach to assessing your state of being. This habit of observation has a bias which reinforces the idea of pathology.

I had a patient who had polio as a child. The musculature of her right leg was less developed than her left leg. For over 60 years, she had called her right leg, her "bad leg." Now she was experiencing pain in her right knee. Now she said her "bad leg" was worse.

She never considered that her right leg was doing the best it could. She compared it to her other leg which had a higher level of function.

I suggest this is akin to judging your children. You have the smarter one, the more athletic one, the more creative one, and so on. Children will believe the stories that are told about them even to their detriment for the rest of their lives.

The same is true about your body. It believes the stories you tell about it. It doesn’t have a choice independent from your mind. I have talked about this in terms of the medical field of epigenetics in previous Complementary Corners. Please refer to the issues of August 2021, December 2021, May 2024 on the archive page of the website.

The goal of the body scan is to practice paying attention without judgment. A regular body scan helps us create a context for the health of our body and mind which is independent of an urgent or immediate health concern.

You may notice your back doesn’t hurt as much as the day before. This offers you the opportunity to think about what you did differently the week, the day, the hours before you noticed that you are experiencing less discomfort. You hopefully will begin to notice the effect emotions, big and subtle, have on how you feel.

As I have said before, emotions play a huge role in your health. Emotions are contagious, even more contagious than a virus or bacteria. You don’t even have to be in the room with someone for them to affect your emotions as you do with those aforementioned germs.

It could be the emotions of someone you are on the phone with. It could be someone in a different car yelling at you because they disagree with how you drive. You could be watching something like a scary movie and the emotions of the actors create emotions in you.

When you get emotionally charged, it affects your biology. It affects your neurochemistry and therefore it affects every cell in your body.

The body scan is not specific to any one health care system or set of beliefs. It is a helpful way to access how you are doing and what you might shift. You might even become aware that you choose your emotions. You might even learn to choose different emotions than you did before. This, my friend, is called emotional freedom.

When I was in junior high school, I watched the television show, Kolchak: The Night Stalker starring Darren McGavin. He was a newspaper reporter who investigated mysterious crimes that were invariably linked to monsters, demons, and the like.

I would watch each episode for about the first 45-50 minutes. I would became so scared by what happened in the climactic last 10 minutes of the show, I would turn the tv off.

All of this happened in the presence of some moving, black and white images on a television screen.

I chose every step of this event. I chose the tv show. I chose to watch the build up of the story. I chose how long to watch. I chose to anticipate what I would see in the last 10 minutes. I chose when to turn the television off.

What I did not have was an awareness of how I knew when to turn the television off. I thought my mind did the choosing. How did my mind know?

What I know now is that I, using my imagination, my mind, created the emotion of fear.

What I know now is that my body communicated to my mind it was time to turn off the television after my mind created the emotions that affected my body.

My heart beat increased. My thoughts raced. My body might even have tremored from the adrenaline released in the presence of the fear I created to scare myself. I chose to manipulate my body’s neurochemistry by watching a fictional television program. I chose to create a form of physical and emotional suffering in the guise of entertainment. When my body did not want to tolerate effects of the emotions, it signaled my mind to turn off the television.

I got something out of it surely. I did this week after week. I must have enjoyed the fear on some level. I don’t know for sure.

To make sense of this example of my adolescence, I offer that we do this unconsciously daily. We choose to whip ourselves up about all manner of things. Social media is simply the latest cauldron for our emotional stewing.

My responsibility as an acupuncturist is to observe how energy moves in your body and help you by suggesting lifestyle changes and using the tools of acupuncture to help your body heal itself.

Your health is your responsibility. The body scan is a tool to empower you to make your own observations of yourself and be more responsible. Only you can fully understand what it is like to be you or what you feel physically or emotionally. Responsibility is simply the ability to respond.

The body scan offers you the opportunity to take a few moments for you pause during your day. During this pause, you can tend yourself. As I mentioned in last month's column, you may feel more peaceful after doing a body scan. Your breath may slow down and become deeper.

When you begin to practice taking time to pay attention to yourself, you practice taking care of yourself.

As a better observer of all aspects of yourself, you can take earlier, perhaps more effective, steps to improve your health. It may be as simple as going to bed an hour earlier. It may be as simple as turning your phone off an hour or so before going to bed.

I find it curious we continue to outsource our awareness of our own body to electronic devices like smart watches, smartphones, apps for our smart phones, Fitbits, and the like.

It may seem like we are paying more attention to our health, but we only pay attention to the data of the watch when we look at it.

"Ha!" you may say, "We are not doing the body scan constantly. So, we pay attention to our body when we do the body scan. Ha! Got you!"

To this I reply, our bodies are highly sensitive and give us information we can use to help ourselves every moment of every day. The body scan is a practice of paying attention to this continual feedback so that we can become more aware, more often.

As we begin to participate more fully in our health before issues arise, we are able to enjoy life more fully because we are more present to everything in our life and respond accordingly.

Jefferson Breland is a board-certified acupuncturists licensed in Pennsylvania and Maryland with offices in Gettysburg and Towson, respectively.
He can be reached at 410-336-5876.

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