Modern Options for the Healing Process

By Barbara Inglis, LMT, CST

Whether you are working to maintain or recover good health, you will be dealing with a process. The process may be as simple as going to your doctor and getting a prescription or as complex and involved as navigating through belief systems, health practitioners, new skills to learn and discovering which factors are responsible for generating the condition and keeping it in place.

Regardless, the most important factors will be your attitude, your commitment and your ability to understand and control your own attention.

Let’s take an injury. It may be keeping you from sleeping, performing at work or participating in your favorite type of activity. You will need to see one or more doctors, get some diagnostic imagery, a diagnosis and a treatment plan. Your treatment plan may or may not include a study of perpetuating factors (i.e. the things you do or expose yourself to, that have caused the issue in the first place) and being educated in the best self-help techniques you can use to keep the problem from reoccurring.

In an optimal scenario, this is when the healing process is handed back to you.

As a massage therapist, I am always hunting for the best, fastest ways to help my clients make lasting changes with whatever physical or emotional challenge they may be dealing with. My main focus is on empowering the client in their self-directed healing journey rather than simply “make” them better and hope the rest takes care of itself.

During the last 30 years, I have been privileged to study a number of techniques that lend themselves to this approach. I started with Dr. John Upledger’s CranioSacral therapy, which greatly increases the nervous system’s ability to self-correct.

Recently, neuroscience has opened new doors for the treatment of pain conditions. Prof Lorimer Moseley, from the University of South Australia, said, “The more we learn about pain, the more it becomes apparent that tissue damage is neither necessary nor sufficient to cause it.”

In other words, pain is a sensation that is produced by the central nervous system, not by the tissues where actual damage may have occurred.

The vast and exciting scenario opened by this statement spans from incredibly fast and effective bodywork protocols and power tools such as the ones developed by Chuck Duff and his team at Coaching the Body® (where pain syndromes and postural issues can start resolving in the course of a single session, even in the presence of imagery documented degeneration) to the many techniques for the exploration of the body-mind connection.

Every successful treatment needs to end with an evaluation of what we call “perpetuating factors” which include lifestyle, ergonomics, stress factors, emotional and mental health factors.

In my experience, the most important perpetuating factors are found within our own minds. There are hundreds of uninspected beliefs that greatly impact our ability to heal or stay healthy disseminated throughout our mental blueprint.

My favorite “go to” for this kind of fascinating and transforming work are the Avatar® tools developed by Harry Palmer (theavatarcourse.com). They provide an effective, experiential and very fast way to uncover and change those beliefs that are causing you to attract your least preferred experiences. (Avatar® is a registered trademark of Star’s Edge, Inc. All rights reserved.)

Barbara Inglis

Without ever giving any guidelines on what to believe, the Avatar course walks a person through the maze of their own mental blueprint where an undesired experience can be matched with the beliefs, conscious or unconscious, that are creating/attracting it.

Great surprises are found, and miraculous healings occur as you explore your own mental blueprint.

It happens all the time!

• Barbara Inglis is a Certified Upledger CranioSacral practitioner, Coaching the Body trainee and Licensed Avatar Master, offering bodywork and personal growth courses in Kalaheo, (808) 635-1989 inglislmt@gmail.com