Posts Tagged ‘Spinal Injury’

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Graduation

December 2, 2022

Five years ago I realised that the work I was doing with Leonid Blyum couldn’t just roll on forever. I was still making good progress, in fact more progress than ever, but it was important to work towards a new phase of both rehabilitation and life, so I set Easter 2022 as the date for graduation from the school of Advanced Bio-Mechanical Rehabilitation. At the time I had no idea what graduation would be and early this year, as the date rapidly approached, I still had no idea. I was however planning for change. I planned a public talk to both talk about all that I’d learnt and to see if somehow I could find inspiration or inspire people to help me launch a new way.

Interestingly, Leonid Blyum arranged to come and visit at Easter; the first time I’d seen him in England since 2003 and the only time he’s ever been to my house. I organised a graduation dinner at the pub with past and present therapists, my fund raising manager and a good mate who supports me. Leonid is certainly not a socialite and it took some persuading for him to come to the dinner, but all went well and it was a good way to celebrate our achievements and bring an era to a close. The venue was booked for my talk and flyers printed so it was also an occasion to announce my next move, not that I knew at the time where it was leading. Twenty one years of working under Leonid’s guidance and twenty one years of my front room as a therapy studio had come to an end.

The day of the talk came and it was a little nerve racking, although I was well prepared and so pleased with how it went. I managed to capture the audiences attention and there was good interest with questions and discussion afterwards. Out of the talk came a few good connections and possibilities including an osteopath who offered to treat me. He was obviously interested in what I had to say and his input in the questions and discussion that followed intrigued me so I decided to take him up on his offer, having little idea of what he could do for me.

My first treatment was at the end of May and I was shocked at the result. The feeling of euphoria was incredible. It was as though I could feel every articulation in the spine. So much had been unlocked and opened up. By the evening of the following day my spine was feeling terribly weak and fragile. So much had been exposed that now had to strengthen. I couldn’t resist getting my vibration massage gun out and working along the spine. It helped enormously. After a few days when things started to strengthen there were obvious improvements after only one treatment. I started seeing the osteopath every two weeks, each time with great results.

It took twenty one years working under Leonid Blyum’s guidance to rebuild sufficient underlying structure for me to move onto a new phase. Without all that we had achieved I don’t think the osteopath could have worked his magic. There is little he could have done when the spine was still a column floating around in the body playing little functional role whatsoever. In rebuilding the underlying structure we brought the spine back into play, transforming it from a flat plant like form to the primary curve of the animal and eventually to the super curve of the human. My body was beginning to look and feel normal and my functional ability had improved enormously. By the early part of this year, although I was still slowly improving through Leonid’s techniques, I was beginning to feel like the work was coming to a natural conclusion and that I was hitting a brick wall that I couldn’t move beyond. Unbeknown to me my spine was still off the rails and the vertebrae needed bringing into alignment and there was much more development to come in improving the curves.

Osteopathy has brought my spine back on track and the curves have improved beyond measure. To start with it felt really strange having such a curve to the lumbar spine, almost unnatural, but as I continue to improve it feels more and more normal. What is more my body has become integrated and I have truly come into my limbs. By unlocking the spine my limbs have become integrated with the underlying structure. I am becoming more and more upright and more naturally in that form rather than having to hold myself through my will. There is profound change taking place in the pelvis and hips with both structural and neurological improvements.

Some of the osteopathic treatments have provoked dramatic reactions while with others the reactions were more subtle, but all have created incredible improvements. Six months later my body is still absorbing his inputs and transforming week by week. The latest improvement is in the curve of the back, the dorsal (or thoracic) spine. The defining characteristic of paraplegia is the missing back and although we massively improved the depth there through the years of pursuing Advanced Bio-Mechanical Rehabilitation there was still more to come. There was too much of a curve at the top of the spine and then it fell away. We are slowly improving this and after the last treatment I felt for the first time like I really have a back to me. I can’t describe how exciting this is.

With the integration of my body I can now work into the system through movement exercises. For all these years it was not possible, or at least extremely difficult, to create formative inputs through the functional use of the body. All of a sudden I have the ability to continue to improve the form of the body through my own conscious effort in the form of movements. I’m not talking high intensity exercise through muscular effort, I’m talking Bothmer style exercises with slow controlled movements capable of being formative, capable of working into, and continuing to reform, the structure of the body.

What I really developed through Leonid Blyum’s work is the passive structure of the body. That structure defined by the cavities of the head, neck, chest, abdomen and pelvis. A structure that is essentially pneumatic and worked through the breath. Through the development of the underlying form we brought the skeletal structure back into its proper alignments, or at least its basic form even if the alignment of the vertebrae left much to be desired. We worked directly into the skeletal structure improving the hydraulic capacity of the joints, but again we did this in a passive sense. The improvements created better functional ability, but never did we work into the body through function.

With the osteopathy, and the movement exercises I am doing myself, we are working with an entirely different structure, the active structure. This structure is not defined by those passive divisions but by the active form. A form in which the head and neck are one unit rooted at the fourth dorsal (thoracic) vertebrae, D4 or T4 and the legs ascend to the waist at the third lumbar vertebrae, L3.

The more we bring the spine into alignment the more this active structure really comes into play. We are unleashing a whole new realm within me. Building upon all those years of painstaking work to claw my body back from its terribly depleted and deformed condition, revolutionary work that transformed my body, I am now, through osteopathy, sky-rocketing to a new future.

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Concepts of the Human Form

May 5, 2022

I’ve been so preoccupied this year in taking life forward that I’ve neglected to blog about what’s been going on. I’m currently engrossed in preparing for a talk I’m giving next Wednesday, a talk based upon twenty one years experience of rebuilding my damaged body. Much of what I will talk about I have learn’t from Leonid Blyum, although, there is also much that comes from my own inner experience, my own thoughts and observations. For more information on what the talk’s about go to spinalroots.uk.

Back in January I promised to talk about graduation. Five years ago I set Easter, this year, as graduation from Leonid Blyum’s school of Advanced Bio-Mechanical Rehabilitation. It’s by no means the end of my rehabilitation work, nor is it the end of my association with Leonid Blyum, however, after twenty one years it is time to move onto a new phase. It’s time to take my work out into the world and start sharing all that I’ve learnt. I have lots of ideas while, at the same time, I’m still not sure where life will end up heading. The first step is to give this talk, next week, to inspire local people to helping me on my journey. I’ll keep you posted.

If you live in the area and are interested in coming to my talk, please message me to book a place.

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Able Bodied

January 3, 2022

I have one term left at the school of Advanced Bio-Mechanical Rehabilitation. I will write about graduation soon; for now I wish to talk about the difference between being disabled and able bodied. This is, essentially, a transition that I must make at graduation and I will talk of the bio-mechanical aspects of this. I spent the first 28 years of my life in an able bodied body and then, all of a sudden, found myself without so much function that I lost comprehension of what it is to be able bodied. I am then confronted with the question as to what makes one able bodied. Most consider this as the ability to walk, with the ability to perform bodily functions as a second thought, while, in my experience, bodily functions are the first that must be regained. They are intrinsic and it is within intrinsic structure that we must seek the answers to what makes us able bodied.

I am so far from walking and yet feel so close to being able bodied. For too long I lived with catastrophic collapse of the entire body while, at the same time, suffering paralysis from the waist down. Not only was there no hope of regaining the use of my muscles, while in such a condition, I also had little understanding of where hope lay. For nearly five years I wandered in the darkness until I met a gentleman who taught me various eternal truths of the body. I learnt to understand that the structure of my body is not dependent upon the lack of ability to use muscles and so I came to see that the structure of my body could be dramatically improved …..and that’s what I’ve done, over approaching 21 years!

Whereas once I was dead weight, from the waist down, now I have so much levity, from the transformed structure of my head, neck, shoulder girdle, chest and even pelvis, that my entire body has life in it to some degree. Now I can hold my head high, in a purely structural sense, and have so much capacity down to the chest that I’m working on the finishing touches to the structure from the waist up. A little more drawing out of the back, a little more strengthening under the shoulder blades and a little more stitching under the rib cage and I’m pretty much there. The waist down has always been a different story, and in some respects that has not changed, although, even there I have engineered such structural improvement that I truly feel connection through the hip joints and have flow right down into the feet. I no longer live with worry that the flesh of a little toe may start breaking down.

My pelvis has woken up to such a deep level that I’ve embarked on a new phase of regrowing my damaged pelvic floor and left bum cheek. I still want a cushion, but the increased flesh on my bum and the massive improvement in the strength of the lumbar sacral junction, together with greater volume to the pelvis, has resulted in being able to sit so comfortably. To be able to relax, in stature, with no regard for consequences, as those consequences will never be too great, is much of what it is to be able bodied.

Understanding how much disabled people struggle, with the ability to simply be in this world, goes a long way to understanding disability. I’m so flourishing in my ability, to simply be, that I hope, soon, to leave the world of disability behind.

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Chakras

December 1, 2021

In Jan 2019 I joined Gatwick Communicators, my local Toastmasters club. Toastmasters is an international organisation that promotes public speaking through a network of clubs. I joined to learn to become a confident speaker with a view to going beyond my blog to speak in public about my work and the journey I’ve taken. Unfortunately everything went online with lockdown and, although I tried it, I don’t care much for Zoom meetings and so had an eighteen month break. We’ve recently returned to meeting in person and below you will find a speech I gave about the ‘Chakras in relation to spinal injury and the work that I do to heal my body’.

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James Bond

November 7, 2021

I went to see the new Bond film last week. I wasn’t impressed. It was too long, too slow, too serious. I was impressed, though, with my pelvis. I’ve never sat so comfortably in the cinema. I did get fidgety by the end, but who wouldn’t with a three hour film that had none of the excitement and humour of the Bond films of old. My pelvis has really come to life lately and, when I look back to the early days, the change is phenomenal. There was a time when my pelvis simply didn’t have life. It was crushed under that section of my body above that still had life to it. It was disconnected from higher regions of the trunk at the lumbar sacral junction, so to speak. My trunk above the pelvis had enormous structural deficiencies, but nonetheless had a certain integrity to it. That integrity did not extend below the lumbar sacral junction so, in a structural, bio-mechanical, sense, that was a point of disconnection. The pelvis used to be devoid of feeling, all normal feeling at any rate, although I could feel the lumbar sacral junction and the severe weakness, at that point in the spine, was a cause of great discomfort, particularly when sitting through a long film. It is hard to describe the feeling of well being that has returned to my pelvis lately as it is something you tend to take for granted when able bodied, while the lack of pain at the lumbar sacral junction is something we can all relate to more, especially when a significant number of able bodied people succumb to a weakness there. The feeling of well being is simply that of life and it has to be considered here that your body can exist without life and without the feeling of comfort that life brings.

The pelvis is home to the lower intestines, bladder and bowels and it is these organs that are the foundation for the pelvic structure. It is there pressure, density and so volume they occupy, accordingly, that give the pelvis its volume. Without that inner quality the pelvic skeletal structure will collapse in upon itself, in turn denying capacity for the proper insertion of the legs at the hip joints. This is the scenario I was living with and the scenario I have now managed to move beyond. Bladder and bowel function, or rather lack thereof, are a major factor in spinal injury and in some ways can be more debilitating than the lack of function of the legs. They tend to be the unspoken side of paraplegia and I will not be going too far in breaking that trend; it is not a subject I am too comfortable talking about. I will say that there function has greatly improved, substantially raising my quality of life. There is a long way to go there, but I am no longer lifeless in that region and there is once again a structural foundation to the pelvis. This gives for far greater articulation of the skeletal structure, descending the structural integrity truly into the legs, whereas once that integrity stopped at the lumbar region.

With my upper body (the trunk above the level of paralysis that was by no means exempt from structural collapse) coming very close to full capacity, bringing full capacity back to the pelvis will be the next milestone and with the life I have now re-engaged in the pelvis, the real hurdle to achieving that has already been overcome. Who knows if I’ll ever overcome the paralysis in the lower legs or even regain good strength in the upper legs. I’m unlikely to ever be a James Bond, however, I do intend to engineer a great deal more improvement yet.

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Shed Building

October 17, 2021

A good mate of mine and I make a good team when it comes to shed building. I’m the architect, the project manager, the chief engineer and the skilled craftsman and he’s the dog’s body manhandling the timber, hammering the nails in and doing all I can’t reach, under close supervision. It was his log shed so he’s also been the bank balance and the one who buys the drinks in the pub afterwards. Considering how much I love a good project it’s been a fair deal, although a big job and a lot of work!

The biggest log shed I’ve ever seen!

He wasn’t confident to do a straight saw cut so all the sawing fell to me. As a paraplegic most people think I must have good upper body strength, after all I spend a great deal of time pushing a wheelchair. This, however, is far from the truth. Good upper body strength requires good foundation, all that is badly damaged in the paraplegic. Without good foundation, well balanced function of the arms is impossible despite use of the muscles and the ability to build up muscular bulk. Wheelchair racers are a good example here. They build up enormous muscular bulk and on the surface look extremely strong. Look deeper, though, and another picture emerges. In order to effectively use their muscular power they have to crush themselves into a wheelchair to provide sufficient stability for the use the arms, as there is no true foundation for their function. Ask them to sit upright and saw a piece of wood and they would struggle. Good all round strength in the arms requires good inner capacity; volume to the chest, a broad shoulder girdle and just as importantly, strong foundation in the head and neck.

In a true paraplegic the inner capacity has collapsed leaving no foundation for the legs and only weak foundation for the arms. Interestingly, some wheelchair sportsmen these days are not true paraplegics and have managed to retain intrinsic capacity despite the spinal injury. This begs the question as to why they haven’t managed to walk again and the answer probably lies in the fact that doctors and physiotherapists don’t tend to recognise the inner capacity and from personal observation tend to steer everyone in a spinal unit towards wheelchair use despite the fact, that in one or two, the potential exists to walk out of hospital. If that potential isn’t developed then they will remain wheelchair users.

With all the sawing I have done building this woodshed I have been so impressed with how significantly I have developed the foundation in my body, particularly in the neck. Volume to the chest and broadness to the shoulder girdle are important, but a strong neck is the real foundation for the shoulder girdle and so for the use of the arms. My neck has really developed lately with an increased solidness to it and my head sat high above my chest. There is still work to do to fully draw the shoulder blades out of the body, and rebuild volume to the back, and so the foundation in the neck was really tested by all the sawing. I had to be careful and am certainly not strong enough yet to do a full weeks work; two days in a row and I needed a days rest. Impressive it is nonetheless and after twenty years, and many thousands of hours of work, the trunk is really coming to fruition and the upper body side of things, at least, is close to finalisation. That’s exciting!

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To Simply Be

August 3, 2021

A friend of mine is such a doer. He goes from work to the golf course, to the gym, to the pub in a never ending drive to fill each day. He doesn’t stop! I on the other hand am happy to sit in my rocking chair, outside the back door, gazing up the garden and listening to the birds. I admire my friends energy, and often wish I had more myself, but I can’t help thinking he’s somewhat lacking in the ability to ‘simply be’.

One of the toughest things about being disabled is living in a body that can deny you the ability to ‘be’. Being is not just a state of mind, it also requires sufficient structure to the body to physically be, without effort. These days I have little trouble in that respect, but that has not always been the case. Sitting used to take constant effort. Muscular involvement was necessary to make up for the lack of intrinsic capacity and the need for muscular involvement takes effort and so an inability to switch off and truly relax …and that was from the waist up. Below the waist I had no usable muscles and the structure was very collapsed, so although there was no conscious effort, that paralysed part of my body very much contributed to the struggles in what I could still consciously use. Even if there is no awareness of paralysed body, and no feeling of aches and pains, then the poor structural quality will still have a negative affect on your overall physical health and it is that wholeness of health that is so important for the ability to simply be.

These days my body is so much better that I can sit in my rocking chair and very much relax, with maybe just a slight tension in the lumbar sacral junction. Having lost the ability to be and having now very much regained it, I may have more appreciation than many of the importance of simply being. Western culture is such a culture of doing. Not only is there a constant drive to work to provide for living, there is then the tendency to find things to do to fill the rest of our time. As a society we have gone from earning money out of the work that needs doing to creating work for the sake of earning money. We find ourselves more and more embroiled in a reliance on manufactured goods and with less and less time to enjoy the simple pleasures of life. Is it any wonder that nature’s turning round and saying enough is enough. Maybe we all need to learn the art of being rather than doing and good physical structure plays it’s part in this.

Native Americans are the epitome of being rather than doing. Did we miss an opportunity to learn from them?

One of the things I love about the therapy work I do is that, not only does it build up the capacity to ‘be’, in it’s way of achieving improvements in structure it actually encourages the art of being. No pain no gain does not come into it. The work we do is about delivering gentle inputs into the body. It takes hours and hours of repetitive work to make the changes, but the work itself is really quite relaxing. Perhaps my friend would be wise to do a little less rushing around and give up the no pain no gain work down the gym, after all gyms are for building up strength in a well balanced body and not for getting into shape once your body has lapsed. If he’d allow me to show him how to rebuild that root of weakness in his neck and shoulder girdle and alter his ways to a more gentle therapeutic approach then maybe he’d find more pleasure in the art of simply being.

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Infection

June 19, 2021

I had trouble a couple of months ago with an infected testicle. The infection was savage and I was concerned enough to go to hospital for intravenous antibiotics. The doctor explained that because I’m catheterised this can cause infection in the bladder and bugs can work their way down to the testicles. I have a different explanation.

It hasn’t taken me two months to get around to writing this because I’ve been poorly. Quite the opposite. It was a very short stay in hospital and I bounced back quickly and have merely been absorbed with another project. Infection is often seen as bugs invading the body, and even doctors talk about it in such terms, when in reality the bugs are always in us and only get to work when encountering poor quality tissue. When living with a spinal injury much of the body is poor in quality. The underlying structure of the body collapses and the weaknesses get locked in leading parts of the body to exist in a semi dormant state. I have spent the last twenty years waking my body up from that dormancy and over the last few years there have been successive waves of development bringing the pelvic region back to life.

Bringing life back into a body where it hasn’t existed for many years is a fantastic experience, but not without its complications. In bringing back to life you expose the weakness that has been buried for many years. In the muscular skeletal system this is fairly straight forward. Reconfiguring the structure and exposing muscular skeletal weakness merely results in a strain if you’re not careful, a little like finding muscles you didn’t know you had. You can easily get over the strain and begin to enjoy new found strength. However organs of the body being woken up is a different scenario altogether.

Some years ago I brought my skin back to life. You may think of skin as nothing more than an outer covering, but in fact it is an organ. On waking it up I suffered from terrible rashes. The lymphatic system started working properly again and was ridding the skin of the toxins that had built up over many years of existing in a semi dormant state. A testicle may also build up toxins in it, but more importantly the structural quality is weak and in waking it up you expose that weakness, leading infectious agents to think that weak cells needs breaking down and disposing of. That is the job of infection. The accompanying fever will also help rid the body of toxins, but if the fever and infection get out of control they can cause more harm than good and such a situation may need managing through the use of antibiotics. I’ve paid the price in the past for not respecting the dangers enough.

Eighteen months ago, in previous wave of pelvic development the same thing happened to the right testicle, but nowhere near as savage. The left side of my body has always been weaker and more dormant and it took a deeper level of development to wake up my left testicle and resulted in a more serious infection. 72 hours after the first sign of a problem I was already starting to feel for that deeper level of life and articulation of the pelvic region. The testicles are better than ever now and I’m very much enjoying a more developed pelvis.

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Workout

April 5, 2021

I went for a walk with a friend the other day in the Nower in Dorking; it’s public woods and grassland. We used to go sledging there as kids so as you can imagine it’s on the side of a hill and not very wheelchair friendly. I enjoyed the walk (or wheel), enjoyed the company and it was great to be trekking around my old stomping ground again. At the end I was exhausted and it was remarked that I’d had a good workout, but was it really good for me?

Gazebo at the top of the Nower

If I did it too often it wouldn’t be good, but now and then does me no physical harm and worth it for the other benefits, although to think of it as a workout would be wrong. In terms of improving my physical condition there is absolutely nothing to be gained by struggling in a wheelchair. To overcome paraplegia you have to be a lot cleverer than that. When my body was terribly depleted, physical exertion was definitely counter productive in terms of ingraining the changes and further deforming the body. In the few years after injury (before the ABR years) I did much damage in taking my body in the wrong direction and much time and effort has been invested since to reverse this. These days I am much stronger, and more capable, while at the same time I am more sensitive and tuned in to the counter productive nature of using my body beyond its limits and I tend to shy away from such activity.

When you live in a body with insufficient structure to support certain functions it is important to improve that underlying structure rather than struggle with function that abuses the already weak structure. The work we do is all about improving the underlying structure through external mechanical inputs, building it up to the point where function becomes possible. Only then, once the functional ability is achieved, does a workout become sensible. Such an approach should not only be adopted by the severely disabled, but also by the significant number of able bodied people who find themselves out of shape.

We get many joggers down our lane. The occasional one is in good shape and it’s a joy to see a body so capable of effortlessly moving at speed, although for most it is painful to watch their misguided attempts to improve their fitness. The other day there was a women with a distinct weakness at the lumbar sacral junction. Instead of a strong trunk supporting the pelvis and allowing true articulation at the hip joints, the hips were rigid and the body twisted at the waist with every step. The inputs into the body, from the reaction of each step against the ground, could ascend no further than that weakness and could only build up bulk around the already immobile hips. I see many joggers with hunched up shoulders, and head sunk down into the body, locking up the weakness in the neck and shoulder girdle in order to gain the stability to support the lower trunk and legs. Again no inputs can work up into the weakness, it’s too locked up.

One day I’ll teach people how to strengthen their structural weaknesses and get in shape to the point that they’re then in a position to jog with ease and have the capacity to build up their fitness.

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Cold

February 25, 2021

Fortitude is a word you rarely hear these days. Maybe we are all so mollycoddled by the wonders of our technological civilisation that we have little need to find the fortitude in us. Fortitude being ‘strength of mind that enables a person to encounter danger or bear pain or adversity with courage’. This winter I’ve been without a Rayburn which is normally the background heat throughout the cottage, that wonderful warmth when you enter through the back door into the kitchen, lashings of hot water and a great way of cooking. I’ve always enjoyed real log fires to keep me warm when sitting indoors, an open fire in the front room where I conduct my therapy sessions and a wood burner in my cosy living room. This year, though, that’s all I have. The Rayburn finally bit the dust at the beginning of winter and the reconditioned one that’s being made to order will not be delivered until 11th March. Last week was exceptionally cold, with temperatures barely rising above freezing, and it’s taken considerable fortitude to live comfortably, and a good store of well seasoned logs of course.

The great thing about living with the cold is that, not only does it take a strength of mind (or spirit), but in finding the fortitude to embrace the cold you find yourself imbued with a ‘strength of spirit’. My bathroom is a poorly insulated extension and although I am managing to maintain a slight background warmth throughout the rest of the cottage, the bathroom is absolutely freezing. Stripping off to take a wash takes fortitude and yet by rising to that fortitude I find myself all puffed up against the cold, easily attaining to a wonderful stature.

One of the most interesting things I have read about diet and nutrition was Rudolf Steiner’s lectures on the subject. He pointed out that if you eat meat your body is given the blueprint for manufacturing its own meat. If, however, you eat a vegetarian diet then your body does not have the luxury of the blueprint and so has to work harder to build and maintain your own meat. The interesting part was his statement that in working harder there is more strength to be gained, although he did point out that you have to be strong in the first place to live without the blueprint. Was he talking about gaining physical strength or a strength of spirit. Maybe the two are intrinsically connected, but either way I can draw parallels with living with the cold. It takes strength to live with the cold and if you can find that strength then you also find there is strength to be gained.

I grew up with central heating and never cared much for it, I always found that radiators gave a muggy kind of warmth, while many friends grew up with houses on the chilly side and a coal fire in the front room. You hear stories from people my age and older about how cold their houses were as a child and yet none of them seem to have suffered and maybe quite the opposite. These days people often sit in their houses in winter wearing no more than a t-shirt and I’ve good reason to think that, as a nation, we are getting softer. Not having a fire and a warm room to relax in would be unbearable and I’m looking forward to my new Rayburn for next winter. For the time being though I am rising to the challenge and enjoying the strength and vibrance that finding fortitude gives me. Even when I have my new Rayburn I won’t stop loving the great outdoors and will always embrace the cold and will never be too mollycoddled by the wonders of civilisation.

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