Dr. Chris Browne's Blog

Become Your Body

2011-01-27T12:58:00.000-08:00

It's impossible to miss the slew of factors that can keep us living in our heads instead of our bodies, but it's also easy to ignore them if we choose. Sedentary lifestyles, stressful demands at work and at home, unrealistic standards for body image and poisonous convenience foods are just a few factors that can herd us away from a direct connection with what it feels like to inhabit a human frame. Let's look at some simple (but not always easy) ways to reverse that trend and integrate mind and body.

1) Be with your breath
We know intellectually that we'd be in poor shape without an abundant supply of air, but this exercise helps bring that knowledge to our guts, where it counts. Start by lying on your back with hands resting (palms down) on your stomach so that your thumbs are just above your belly-button. Feel your hands gently rise as you breathe in; feel them fall as you release the breath. This helps train the diaphragm - the muscle we should all be using to breathe - to do its job and lets other muscle groups we overuse for breathing start to relax. It also helps us really connect with one of our most essential and frequent bodily activities.

2) Flop those arms
This one feels silly at first to many folks but has a great effect with a bit of diligent practice. Stand with your feet shoulder-width apart and just feel the weight of gravity pulling your arms down. Let yourself notice the heavy feeling and remember it for the next step. Then begin to twist, slowly and gently, using your knees and hips (but not your low back unless cleared by your physician) letting your arms come along for the ride. It's surprisingly hard to let go of your arm muscles and let them swing freely but just return to that feeling of gravity pulling down and let your body's motion do the work.

3) Be where you are
Especially when exercising or doing any movements (washing dishes, walking to the car, taking a shower), try committing all of your awareness to the task at hand. A beneficial side-effect is fewer incidental bumps, bruises, and broken dishes, but the real prize is a closer relationship with all the moving parts we need to live our lives.

4) Sit quietly
This is the best, simplest, but least easy of all. Take time each day (starting with just a few minutes, working up from there) to sit upright and just experience the feelings and sensations that come naturally. There will also be many thoughts; most of our brains are working overtime going over past events, speculating about what the future might be, daydreaming about our desires, worrying about our fears. Just try to observe all of that - this is the basis for a huge variety of meditative and self-improvement systems, learning to pay attention and observe what's happening right now, this moment. It can be helpful to consult with a more experienced sitter or read a book to focus your goals; my personal favorite is called "Everyday Zen: Love and Work" by Charlotte Joko Beck - it's emphatic without being preachy and precise without being dogmatic or sectarian. However you choose to pursue a sharper awareness, the fruits of practice are usually increased compassion and generosity - for yourself and others.

Befriend Your Body

2010-07-15T15:25:00.000-07:00

Most of us take our bodies for granted in everyday life. After all, if we’re not in pain or impaired in some way, what is there to notice? Turns out, there’s plenty. Business as usual for our bodies actually represents the combined functioning of some of the most intricate and adaptive systems in the known universe, which are all tied together and organized by your nervous system.

Why does this matter? Here’s an example: moving into a new home typically involves lots of heavy lifting and carrying. For most folks, this is not a recreational activity – they’d like to get it over with ASAP. This perspective gets carried through into the way they use their bodies to lift: mainly impatient, hasty motions with all their focus on being done and little on the process itself. All too often the way we clean the house, carry groceries, mow the lawn, and do other physical activity follows such a pattern. By rushing a task or performing it with our minds elsewhere, we turn down the volume on all the self-correcting, self-protecting signals that keep our movements coordinated and balanced (part of the dizzying array of functions our nervous system does for us at no charge!). It’s not hard to see the drawbacks of this strategy: increased likelihood of accidents, overuse injuries, and painful stiffness in muscles and joints after the job is done. Beyond those negative consequences, something positive is also lost – the joy of using our bodies skillfully, with intention.

We don’t need to preoccupy our minds with each little component of every movement – “bend right knee 33 degrees”, “straighten big toe”, “turn left foot a tiny bit outward” but we should put some effort into learning good habits and the basic sensory awareness to use them. A leisurely walk down the street, seemingly simple, is really a symphony of coordinated activity in your muscles, joints, skin, nerves, eyes, spinal cord, and brain (to name a few key players). From this perspective, your conscious mind isn’t just another player, it’s the conductor. And just like in an elaborate orchestral performance, the conductor’s job isn’t to tell the players each note they should play – it’s to unify their contributions into a balanced, rhythmic whole.

Developing this skill comes more easily to some than others, like how learning to read or talk happens more quickly in some youngsters. Fortunately, anybody with the commitment to do so can learn how to use their body with greater fluidity and skill – saving muscles and joints from needless pain and damage. A good plan for most people is to use the same basic strategy as experienced athletes: they intensively learn a new movement pattern, do repeated drills and practice to solidify the new body-knowledge and refine their performance, then “forget” about the details as they gain mastery, keeping their awareness open and responsive. In the next installment of this topic, I’ll outline some simple steps you can take to strengthen your mind-body connection and improve overall coordination.

Who’s in the Driver’s Seat?

2010-06-25T14:38:00.000-07:00

In ancient China and many other cultures, the practice of alchemy was among the most prestigious disciplines, dealing with healing, chemistry, metallurgy, and cosmology all at once. Its goals were highly ambitious: turning cheaper metals into gold and developing an elixir of immortality are two famous examples. That tends to sound a bit far-fetched to the modern reader, but we owe a debt of gratitude to those experimenters for advancing early science and for exploring a variety of theories for health and disease – even if some didn’t work out so well.

Few people today would expect any chemist to change lead into gold, yet a surprising number of us seem to expect that one day soon a potion will be discovered to cure our every ailment, making our bodies indestructible no matter what we choose do to them. This deep-seated belief that a single, effortless treatment can truly solve a complex health issue is at odds with the reality of how our bodies work. The vast majority of health problems modern humans face are either caused or are strongly influenced by the choices we make every day: what to eat, how to entertain ourselves, how to use our bodies when we move, whether to exercise, and how to relate to each other and ourselves. Even infectious diseases, which have an external cause (the bug!), can be better prevented and more effectively cured when the host is strong and healthy.

It can be tempting to pass off the responsibility for our health to somebody else so we don’t have to think about the (often scary) problems we might have to face later on. But sadly, just as a babysitter can’t care for your child as well as you can, no doctor or treatment can make you as healthy as you can make yourself. Of course we sometimes need expert help to resolve an acute or long-standing problem, but for that help to really work in the long term we have to work with it – we have to do our part. The doctor’s real job is to make us aware of what we must do to be healthy and then take responsibility for any needed steps that we can’t do ourselves.

But this is actually great news: it’s affordable and relatively simple to make dietary and lifestyle changes that fight disease, reducing your risk of painful health problems or premature death and giving you the best chance at a long life with less pain and suffering. Furthermore, this approach is often more effective than conventional drug therapies for a variety of conditions, costs less (you had to buy food anyway, right?), feels better (increased sense of well-being for well-nourished people), and has collateral benefits (drastically lower risk of heart attack, stroke, cancer, diabetes, and many others) instead of the potentially life-threatening side effects caused by prescription drugs. The challenge for each of us is to learn how to create exceptional health for ourselves; it will never be given to us.

Ironically, the old alchemical immortality cures often contained high doses of heavy metals which would cause poisoning and shorten the lifespan rather than increasing longevity – modern medical attempts to stave off disease all too often meet with a similar result, killing nearly 500 Americans per day. This isn’t to say we should throw out all our meds and refuse necessary surgeries, but it’s always best to use the safest effective treatments first, always under the supervision of a qualified physician with knowledge of your conditions and the expertise to manage them creatively. For most people and for the most common problems, the solution is in your hands – not the pharmacist’s.

References:
Holland EG, Degruy FV. Drug-induced disorders. Am Fam Physician. 1997;56(7):1781-8, 1791-2