Grounding Psychology Through The Body

I wanted to talk today about grounding psychology through the body. I was involved in an automobile accident and in the process of rehabilitating my body, I discovered that when I naturally stretched different parts of my body it affected me psychologically. Let's back up.

 

So what happened was that I had studied for a number of years at the Harvard Medical Library in order to find out how muscles actually contract and become flexible. And what I discovered was that people didn't really know that yet. And so then I went on a search to try to figure that out because my body was very damaged from the automobile accident. And then what I discovered was that animals naturally contract muscles when they stretch whereas most humans think you actually have to relax the muscle when you stretch it. Any time you lengthen a muscle it naturally starts tensing and resisting. The fascia resists when you stretch and, when you do that, you get a change in your flexibility and a change in the fascial material and regeneration of other muscle tissue.

 

But the next thing that I discovered was that when I stretched different muscle groups, it also affected me in very predictable ways psychologically. And that discovery happened because as I continued to stretch the same muscle group, the same benefit kept happening over and over again. And then after awhile I would give that stretch to other people to do, not telling them what it was for, and they would come up with the same psychological kinds of effects. So I think it'd be really good for people to know in terms of the whole concept that your body is medicine that one of the forms of medicine is psychological. The other form that I talked about in my interview with James Williamson was about the body as medicine and how you can physically affect your biomechanics by stretching naturally, what we call resistance flexibility.

 

So my first discovery happened when I was stretching out my lateral hamstring. You have three hamstrings on the back of your leg. Looking at the back of your leg, you have hamstrings on the outside, center and the inside medial aspects of your leg. But the one on the outside when I stretched it, my bladder started contracting more and it also took tension out of my bladder. And then I found out that in traditional Chinese medicine, what they call the bladder energy channel goes right through that muscle group. I found that very hard to believe because I had a very Western approach to living and to my studies and so energetic medicine was not something that I was really kind of in favor of. I didn't believe that was possible. But then I stretched my lateral quad on the outside of my leg and my stomach organ contracted. And I found out that was the same muscle group in TCM that the Chinese call the Stomach Meridian. I did one more; I stretched muscle groups on the back inside of my leg and my pancreas organ contracted in my body. So I concluded I didn't know how the Chinese actually figured this out, but I knew that by stretching my own body to rehabilitate myself from a tragic automobile accident that my organs were starting to improve in their functioning. I don't think most people in general ever imagine they could stretch a muscle group and specifically target a physiological health in their body, but that's what I discovered.

 

And then I made a presentation to the symposium for the traditional Chinese medicine school in San Diego on exactly what I had discovered, and the president of the college said, "Oh this is the man that rediscovered traditional Chinese medicine" because I had never studied it. I had actually discovered it through my own body. I did go to the traditional Chinese medicine college in Watertown, Massachusetts after I made these several muscle group and organ concomitances. And I bought all the books they used for their certification program and started devouring that just like I had devoured information on muscles, the nervous system and how the body works biomechanically.

 

So it's a good thing to know that if a person can't digest their proteins and as a result their body is depressed structurally and emotionally, that if they stretch muscle groups on the back of their shoulders, that could facilitate them digesting their proteins and increase the cerebrospinal fluid pressure inside their spine. They would then become more upright and more creative. So there's a psychological effect for changing these physiological organs. So when people come to any of the three centers, we have the center in Santa Barbara, California, one in Boston, Massachusetts, one in Los Angeles, they come for different reasons. Somebody might come because they have a distress in their knee. Somebody might have distress in their lower back. Somebody might have a shoulder distress, but other people come because they're having elimination problems with their large intestine. Or they're having energy issues with their pancreas not working to help them digest their food. Or they're having circulation issues; a lack of circulation in the hands or feet. And because each one of those things is concomitant in traditional Chinese medicine with specific muscle groups, we go after a particular muscle group and assist the person stretching that muscle group and teach them how to self-stretch that muscle group. And then we see if we get a change in that particular symptom. So of course, that's all results based on people's testimonials. That's not hard-core proving anything. We're not trying to prove this yet. We're just trying to show you what happens when you do this, and you're the authority on your body and you find out if it works or not. So that's how that really works.

 

I've been very happy to have enough people help me, stretch me, assist me in resistance flexibility besides my own self-stretching to radically affect my physiological health. I had heart palpitations, elimination, digestion, bladder issues, kidney issues, pancreas issues, pericardium issues, etc. Many different organs of my body have been upgraded through resistance flexibility training. So you can go on our webpage, www.thegeniusofflexibility.com and you can get stretches for different organs or whatever your concerns are. And, even more importantly, you can just blog right into us and tell us what your concern is and we'll tell you from our experience what kinds of things we've done that we think help that. And then you, being the authority on your body, not a medical institution or anything else, can test things out and decide for yourself what works for you. And then if things work for you, you can tell your friends and then you have communities of people all sharing their personal experiences of what they did to make their health better. And that health can be better physiologically and also psychologically.

 

So in this talk, I gave you that background again because it is not commonly known that somebody's ability to be knowledgeable comes from them handling their fears. Or that their ability to become socially mature is based on their ability to handle their anxieties. And the concept psychologically that I'm trying to offer here is that flowers don't grow out of flowers; they grow out of compost. And so if you know how to process your fears, you become knowledgeable. If you know how to process your anxieties then you know how to become excited and satisfied. If you know how to process you anger then you know how to be more loving. And if you know how to process your fright then you can become more peaceful and more spiritual. And the way to do that is very simple. You can go into the muscle groups that are associated with processing different kinds of fears or different kinds of anxieties or different kinds of anger or different kinds of frights. And as you change that myofascial material by naturally stretching, you'll get an upgrade in your capacity to process what most people call negative instincts or negative emotions.

 

So then instead of thinking of them as negative things you don't want to have, of course you don't want have them, but what you don't know is that the person that's highly creative is much more depressed than you are. But they know how to process their depression. And the person that's physically healthy is much better at handling their anger than a person that isn't. And somebody that's really spiritually and energetically empathetic and peaceful is handling much more fright than a person that isn't. And so you can do different muscle groups and different stretches in order to develop these four aspects of yourself psychologically. An example for myself is that I'm a type of person, I'm a genetic personality type that's associated with sobriety and concomitant thinking and quality, high speculation. But the down side of that is that I'm a fear-based type and the unconscious part of my personality is a fright-based type. And so for me, I don't mind handling fear that I don't know something because, I figure, "Oh I don't know something. When I learn that, I now won't be afraid. I'll get to know how to do something. I'll get to know something I don't know." So my type doesn't mind handling the fear. But the fright is my balancing unconscious quality and that is not processed the same as fear. And so I identified that in order to process fear, I allow my attention to stay inside. My attention stays in while my fear happens and then in the process, I process my fear and then I know something that I've always wanted to know. But for fright, which is an outside phenomena when there's some pernicious external negative thing occurring outside that's frightening, that you have to allow yourself to stay out with your attention and keep looking at or hearing or interfacing with while you have your fright. And then you process your fright and get practical solutions to things, whether that's how to fix your computer or how to deal with a spiritual issue in your life. That's how those different things work.

 

I'm really looking forward to people hearing these short videos and then immediately on YouTube and on our webpage linking right into us. You can always get to me at bobcooley@thegeniusofflexibility.com and send me your questions or whatever you have and I'll answer those questions. And I would love to do that. And we have a lot of trainers in the three centers that are equally authorities on all kinds of information that I don't know about because they're different types of people. They have different experiences, and so if you come to me and I think the best person is Eric in Boston or Josh in Boston or Alex in Los Angeles or Nick or Luther in California, I'll link you to them. And then if they don't know, they'll link you to friends of theirs that they think know even better. And then you start linking everybody together so that people can start sharing what they know about and how to use their own body for their own medicine physically, psychologically, emotionally and spiritually. That's what I'd like to see happen. Okay, I'll talk to you another time, had a great time. See you next time.