October 15 – November 13

This is the 10th consecutive year of the One Month Body Harmony® Retreat. The dates have changed slightly, we are running from mid October to mid November this year. Recent developments in the practice of Body Harmony® from our international event in New Orleans produced some wonderful outcomes. ‘Ease, Efficiency & Enjoyment’ – these qualities applied to our bodywork practices lead to easier ways of achieving better results. This is a unique opportunity – 150 years of bodywork experience shared between Don, Linda, Duncan & Gina – a wealth of support to assist your learning and realization.

The 2011 program is an opportunity that we think appeals equally in merit to the practitioner (or would be practitioner) and to the individual seeking growth and personal realization. As in past years, our program is available in smaller segments and these options can be viewed in the e-brochure. If you would to benefit from participation in some or all of this event, email Duncan duncan@healthinperspective.org to express your interest. To download the pdf brochure for this event, – follow this link to our downloads page.

Some helpful suggestions – from Gina Carruthers

Getting to know your physical self is subtle but really very simple and one of the greatest things to focus on to bring ease, health and joy. Here are a few suggestions and their benefits:

1) Quiet yourself Down – Get on the ground, in constructive rest, and just be quiet. The benefits include: calming the nervous system, aligning with gravity, synchronizing internal harmony, and releasing your core to something greater than itself – the earth beneath you. Emptying yourself allows for new thoughts and behaviors to take hold.

>2) Centering your Pelvis – Sit, Stand and Sleep with a centered pelvis. The benefits include: calming the nervous system, aligning with gravity, eliminating muscular compensations, and being more aware of what takes you away from ease in your life.

3) Hydrate your Spine – Keep your spine hydrated through micro movements in every direction including curling, arching, and lateral fish movements. The benefits include: efficient nervous system, supportive bones, eliminating tension, and a juicy experience of yourself and life.

4) Support your body with adequate water and minerals. The benefits include having muscles that CAN relax, and reducing the amount of time your body has to revert to a ‘survival response’ leading to physical compensations that reduce your overall efficiency.

Your Basal What?

Have you heard about your ‘basal ganglia’? Most likely not. It happens to be the name for the place in your brain where embedded behaviors are organised, – these are behaviors you don’t have to think about to engage in. Examples include writing perhaps, or walking, or typing, or driving – and also things like how you approach a problem, a relationship, a new possibility.

Imagine, all those things learned and embodied, – your behavioral repertoire ready to engage given the right stimulus. Sometimes that automated response is perfectly matched to the circumstances, and sometimes it is not. At times a behavioral tendency can itself become a burden, a form of self-sabotage, – an unwelcome input. Here is one area where Body Harmony® can be very useful to you.

This is our area of expertise. Body Harmony® is a set of transformational tools to help you make the corrections when a behavior no longer matches your intentions. Body Harmony® is a form of body processing that helps to make a possibility more probable by making the process of becoming aware much easier. The hands-on element of the work brings fluidity to the rigidity of over-used behaviors, that take the form of your physical grievances. Body Harmony helps you to make a self directed change, – the change of your choosing. A life supportive change. Sometimes you have to change your Body to change your Mind.

Finding Realization In The Body…

A newly released book we came across, ‘Touching Enlightenment, Finding Realization in The Body‘ by Reginald Ray, suggests that ‘to abandon discursive thinking – disembodiment – as our primary way of orienting ourselves…. and more than that, that a wave of alternatives to engage where we are living out of the full, unique embodiment that is possible for us all are now becoming more compelling to counter our dissociation.’ We tend to agree. In his 1967 book, ‘Betrayal of the Body‘ Alexander Lowan MD writes that, “To know who one is, an individual must be aware of what he feels. He should know the expression on his face, how he holds himself, and the way he moves. Without this awareness of bodily feeling and attitude, a person becomes split into a disembodied spirit and a disenchanted body.” Becoming acquainted with your first order experience provides you with direct and very useful information. All of the principles expressed through our work aim at realigning your mind and consciousness within bodily sensation and immediate experience. This can be very useful indeed.

And finally a few updates

We would like to thank Sydney based photographer Andre Martin for his assistance in photographing our retreat/B&B.

Check out ‘Your Brain at Work’ by David Rock. Available as an audio download from Audible.com.

For those of you who don’t know our son Kim is continuing to expand his education in all aspects of natural health and healing (check out Kimmana.com for info). As of September 2012 we intend to add cleansing and detox programs to what we offer at Alaya Verde. Also, Alaya Verde is on Facebook. We would be pleased if you ‘Like’ our page…

The next Body Harmony International Conference is anticipated to be held in June of 2012. Granada, Spain is shaping up as the destination and we are currently deciding on venues to host the event. Many thanks to Andrea and Esperanza for helping with the research.

Congratulations to Robyn Barraclough for producing an excellent website for the Canberra Body Harmony School. Click the link to see the site.

Also, Body Harmony® is on Facebook. Click this link and get the updates by choosing to ‘Like’ the Body Harmony® page.

Thanks to Paul Barraclough for reading New Scientist and forwarding us a remarkably interesting article. It, along with a short reference from the ABC’s program ‘Catalyst’ conveys information directly relevant to the significance of receiving good bodywork. It is certainly very validating and inspiring information and forms the basis of this month’s article. I would also like to thank the ATO. The Australian Tax Office has booked me to present a class on posture next month as part of their well-being program. Please contact us if you would like to take advantage of a presentation in your work-place or area. Educating people in effectively developing and utilising their awareness of posture and movement is part of our area of expertise.

This month’s Body Harmony® update has five items:

A reminder about New Orleans in May. The time is drawing closer and you can still enroll . Call me 0n +61 (0)7 5485 3099 and check out the post at http://healthinperspective.org/general/neworleans2011/

Body Harmony®  – the Gold Coast Sunday March 27 Upper Beechmont – afternoon information session and private sessions with Duncan Hogg. Contact Scott Quilliam for details.

Private treatments with Duncan Hogg for one day on the Gold Coast, Queensland. Monday, March 28. To book, email Duncan.

The One Month Program - is now open to your enrollment. To download the brochure please – follow this link. The event runs from October 15 – November 13 with Dr Don McFarland - the founder of Body Harmony® and a bona-fide legend of manual medicine. Read the article below and find out why this event will be of tremendous benefit.

Genes, Behavior, Movement & Body Harmony®

This article helps to convey a little more light on the value of Body Harmony® and it comes from a brief viewing of an Australian science television program called ‘Catalyst’, broadcast on the ABC network in Australia. This program aired in 2005. It was a study of the link between genes and behavior. In the study psychologist Dr Richie Poulton of Otago University in New Zealand asked the question, “Could there be behavior genes that were triggered by the environment?”

Well the answer to that question is yes. The concurrent study of life experience and genetics has been remarkably revealing. Genes were found for predisposition to anger and depression in times of stress. The findings, based on what is considered to be one of the best studies of it’s kind in the world, found that, put simply, if you have the violence gene and a traumatic childhood you become prone to violence as a behavioral expression. If you have the gene, but not the upbringing, the violent behavioral expression is absent.

For me, the logical question is how. How do these traumatic life experiences engage the ‘anger’ gene or other such behavioral predispositions? A likely contender from my point of view is posture. Yes, posture. Posture is the physical expression or embodiment of these events – the unresolved adaptations if you like. Perpetuated physical survival responses change the stresses acting upon and within your cells and cellular matrix. It changes the movement and energetic patterns of the individual. Let us consider the revelations of the ‘New Scientist’ article entitled “The healing touch – The secret to repairing our bodies and growing new organs is getting all touchy-feely”. The article is written by Bob Holmes.

Our sense of touch, it appears, is also experienced by our cells, – they have a sense of touch also. And it seems that this sense of touch, which can also be considered as the way the surrounding environment is being received by the cell, is having remarkably deterministic effects on the activities of each cell. In recent years the tools to register such tiny forces acting upon our cells has come in the form of devices such as Atomic Force Microscopes (AFM). To quote Wikipedia, “The AFM is one of the foremost tools for imaging, measuring, and manipulating matter at the nanoscale.” Denis Discher, a biophysical engineer from the university of Pennsylvania conducted some experiments with an AFM using ‘mesenchymal stem cells’ – which become or evolve into various cell types including muscle and bone. In the experiment they manipulated levels of stiffness -  “the resistance of an elastic body to deformation by an applied force…”* each resulting in a different type of cell evolving from the stem cells. Essentially the direction the stem cell takes is influenced by it’s recognition of the environment in which it finds itself and this communication of ‘isometric pressure’ is effected through the cell membrane. And now my favourite quote from the New Scientist article,
“in practice, this means changes in external tension – such as differences in the stiffness of the matrix, or the everyday stresses and strains of normal muscle movement – can be transmitted into the cell and ultimately to the nucleus, where they can direct the cell’s eventual fate.”

Dr Don McFarland DC, the founder of Body Harmony® has lectured for decades about posture and mindset. He has stated for many years that “The issue is in the tissue but it doesn’t have to stay there”. Environment, whether it be the environment of your childhood, or the environment of your (internal) cellular matrix, is having a determinant effect on your well-being. The internalising of your environment and experiences of life – your process of ‘embodiment’ – becomes a personally incorporated influence apparently on and within your cells, which inevitable determines the quality of your experience, ie your day-to-day experience. It may just be responsible for ‘turning on’ (or off) certain genes. This physical process of embodiment, expressing in posture(s) may also be accompanied by areas in your body of movement restriction and energetic inactivity. And this becomes a point of reference for the interpretation of your world. These movement restrictions may also ultimately determine the behavior of your stem cells, if indeed the stem cells rely on information from their environment to determine what they actually become.
This New Scientist article (Mag issue 2747 – can be purchased online) is particularly validating for anyone who has spent time in the Body Harmony® classroom, or as a client. Our focus on pulsation, consent, wave motion and other salient features of touch, which have been evolved from listening to the feedback offered by many different bodies, may well have arrested the development of many disease processes along with supporting desirable behavioral change. It has certainly changed the life and health of many participants. Movement may well become recognised as the true medicine of our bodies. Not chaotic, jarring movement but pulsating, rhythmical, innate and flowing movement. Movement that brings harmony back to the entire organism, unifying the fragmented aspects of our internal relationships.

And so the question arises, – how are you, within yourself. Could you become a more cohesive physical, functional whole? How are you breathing?  Do you need to bring some focus to your body? What new behaviors could you choose to make a difference. A new world awaits.

The 2011 One Month Program is open for enrollment. Early registration discounts apply. Payment plans available.

Health & Happiness

Duncan Hogg & Gina Carruthers

* Wikipedia definition

Just a little update for those who have checked in with us about the weather lately. Where we live we had approximately 650 mm of rain in December and 750 mm of rain in January. That’s a total of 1400 mm or 56 inches. Our ducks liked it. The devastation this caused in other parts of south east Queensland was massive and experiences like these are traumatic for all involved. It does bring out the best in people though. Friends of ours – Jon & Judy Durand from Beech Mountain Pottery – filled their van with the water purifiers they make, drove to the worst affected valley and started handing them out to people. Awesome. Now cyclone Yasi is bearing down on northern Queensland – a catagory 4 cyclone (5 is the highest) and the system is HUGE. Wind gusts are anticipated to be up to 240 klm or 150 miles an hour. Preparations are underway. It is well north of us on its current trajectory.

So this month’s Body Harmony® update has four items:

1. A reminder about New Orleans in May. People are enrolling now to receive the discount applicable to registrations prior to February 5. Call me if you are interested, +61 (0)7 5485 3099 and check out the post at http://healthinperspective.org/general/neworleans2011/

2. Body Harmony  – the Gold Coast Feb 15 – late afternoon/evening information session and private sessions with Duncan Hogg. Contact Scott Quilliam for details.

3. Bringing the principals of Body Harmony to your area, office, group etc If you are interested in hosting an educational event contact Duncan to discuss the options.

4. A short article of interest. I recently watched a very interesting program on SBS Mind Over Money that looked at emotional factors affecting financial decision-making. It certainly spiked my attention. Behavior is paramount in my mind. Understanding and appreciating the processes that underpin human functioning through behavioral choice is key to success. Posture – or more correctly posturing – refers to the way you organize the internal relationships of your physical body to meet incoming information or situations. This article looks at how decision-making is influenced by your posture. It draws on some of the revelations of Harvard trained social psychologist Karen S Lerner, whose research was sited in Mind Over Money along with my 25 years of studying posture, body language and bodywork through practicing Body Harmony®.

May I begin with this quote from the article The Emotional Decision Maker by Peter Zimmerman and Jennifer S. Lerner, Harvard University.

“To begin with, most human cognition is unconscious – that is, we lack awareness of our mental processes. We absorb millions of bits of data per second through our senses; we compress, screen, and process this data automatically through various shortcuts in the brain. What emerges in our conscious awareness are the snap judgments, instant recognition, the sense of certainty and the intuitions that we can’t fully explain. Though wondrously efficient, these processes generate cognitive biases and errors.”

For many people, the link between posture and behavior is not obviously apparent. This is beyond the popular ideology of ‘good posture – bad posture’. This is recognition that we have multiple postures – much like personalities. These organizational patterns – which are what postures are by definition – when engaged appear to have a one-to-one relationship to behavior.  The postures themselves appear to be considered necessary tools used to engage our world – although this is happening outside of our awareness.

The details are all important here. In a posture all sorts of internal adaptations can be made that determine the patterns of use (or disuse) of areas of our bodies. This is all about how you do what you do. For example how you do your posture of frustration, or your posture of rebellion, or happiness and so forth. One element is how you do it, and another element is when – under what circumstances. What circumstances arouse a particular postural response from within you?

A posture may be evaluated by recognition of its impact within you and there are basically two criteria here. Does it unify you or does it fragment you. Does it bring ease of function or does it restrict your freedom of movement. Dr Don McFarland, the founder of Body Harmony®, speaks of the internal dynamics of various postures, where the competing agendas appear to cause actual tearing in the tissue by virtue of being attracted and wanting to avoid something simultaneously, – a literal push/pull expressed in the mixed messages being played out in the fibers of your body.

In the article previously referenced by Zimmerman & Lerner a distinction is made as to two different kinds of emotion affecting decision-making. Integral emotion refers to the legitimate emotional considerations generated by the decision at hand. An example being you want to go swimming but the large waves and strong current generate a realistic fear that the conditions are not safe. This apprehension is an integral emotion.

The second type of emotion is called incidental emotions, – and these “arise from past events and carry over to influence subsequent judgments or choices”. Daniel Goleman in his book Emotional Intelligence writes informatively on the neuronal and physiological aspects of the influence of incidental emotions. The most striking aspect of this kind of processing is that irrelevant information is brought to bear on current circumstances without awareness! Once again, to quote the Zimmerman & Lerner article,

“countless studies conducted in the Harvard Decision Science Laboratory reveal that incidental emotions affect us all, whether or not we are aware of them.”

Incidental emotions seem most closely associated with fragmenting postures, or postures that compromise the flow of energy and information throughout our bodies. And under these circumstances very little of what is a person’s environment is being perceived. More accurately, and as is the case with our brains at times, we fill in our gaps of perception with our expectations, – we simply make things up to fill in the picture. Under such conditions our responses are not well matched to our circumstances. This represents a tremendous growth opportunity.

It is precisely in these gray areas of perception that Body Harmony® allows a new possibility to flourish. Artistically applied, Body Harmony® provides a transformational context for healing. Given the support of one’s personal intention, an opportunity becomes available to choose consciously a pathway of behavior that aligns one’s posture, perception and intentions. Your body, if you choose to pay attention to it, can become an ally in your travels. I am reminded of that simple piece of wisdom that states “Do what you always do, get what you always get.” Sometimes the most striking of experiences is realizing a choice or an option exists where assumption had taken the throne.

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If you would like to join the next main event for Body Harmony®, Dr Don McFarland, myself and a host of other teachers are participating in an International Event in New Orleans May 8 – 21. Discount tuition applies to registrations processed before February 5.

Web References

New Orleans Conference http://healthinperspective.org/general/neworleans2011/ Jennifer Lerner’s papers http://content.ksg.harvard.edu/lernerlab/papers/

Thank you for your involvement!

These events are open to you and your friends, family, spouse or clients. You can read more about Body Harmony® on this website.

To make it easier to have a first up experience, you can also book your first 30 minute treatment at no cost to you. It’s a great way to find out more and understand better what we actually offer you. See our contact details below.

The Free 1 Day Seminars are an opportunity to have more of an experience of Body Harmony® through breathing and awareness exercises and hands-on practice as both a practitioner and a client. No previous experience is necessary. Booking is essential. This is a 5 hour class that includes a lunch break. Please bring lunch.

• When:  Sunday April 26, Sunday May 31st, Sunday June 14
  
• 10 am – 3 pm (light refreshments available)
• Where: ‘Alaya Verde’ 355 Ringtail Creek Rd, Ringtail Creek (just 15 minutes north-west of Noosaville, 12 minutes from Cooroy)

To book, please call Gina or Duncan on 5485 3099 or email duncan@healthinperspective.org

Please wear loose, comfortable clothing. ALL treatments are taken clothed. All hands-on exercises in conscious touch occur without any oils etc and are easy on your body.