Student and Therapist Newsletter Archive
   - Arthritis

+ Arthritis. - May 2006 - plus follow up comment from Al Pelowski in South Africa

***QUESTION***

Hello John,

I'm always very happy to receive another newsletter from you to feed my craniosacral knowledge soul. I find many of your answers give me a different angle to work from and the more angles the more connections and the better the work. (That makes sense in my mind, hope it does to you too...)
I'm going to be working on some clients with arthritis. Do you know of any specific areas to work on for arthritis apart from releasing the actual joints, as the order to produce arthritis must be coming from somewhere else in the body?
One of my arthritic clients also has some strange phenomena: some of her arthritic fingers have been very bad in the past and are now well, but other fingers have gone bad instead. I have never encountered this before. Do you know if this is common with arthritis or not?
Best regards,
Eva
Central Coast
Australia

>>>MY COMMENTS:

The only thing I have found common in Arthritis is a rigidity in person's system. I've found I get the most results if I can help this rigidity to ease.

For that you can take up a contact anywhere but I generally work with the dural tube for that sort of core thing.

The symptoms transferring from one set of fingers to the other is a demonstration of what I'm talking about. I've seen it happen in lots of other conditions too.

I have found that arthritis is helped by gentle detoxification. For this I will work with another practitioner who is expert at this. A good naturopath or the like.

***FOLLOW ON COMMENT FROM AL PELOWSKI***
joburg
yes, john as you have found, in the acid arthritis picture there is a general or strong local musculoskeletal tension, the build up of lactic acid (accompanied by shallow breathing), synovial acidity, going on to the buffering of calcium phosphate into osteoarthritis.

with CST i work the dural tube, still points (ala Rollin Bekker), plus breath work & exercise, hoping to get to the underlying need for tension (the alarm imprint).

but i find that the shock types need adrenalin back in their lives, and they tend to have alkaline arthritis. the two types need different approaches.

the acid type needs to complete the alarm imprint, whilst the shock alkaline type needs to process the shock before reaching the original alarm.

so part of the work is to restore sympathetic / parasympathetic balance and cicadian cycles via the long tide. work that is too local will merely move the problem to the next least mobile element. the encapsulated alarm and/or shock needs completion (ala Levine).

breath work is important because the lung breathing tends to mirror the fluid breathing of CSF. the alarm acid type is holding the breath and CSF in the full inflated, flexed state and only reluctantly letting go into extension and out-breath. they breath off the top.

in contrast, the shock type is holding into extension and breathing off the bottom, not daring to really fill the lungs or the ventricles. so start by seeing how far the flexion will go in the alarm situation, and how far the extension will go in the shocked ones.

the acid type will appear red & flushed, puffed up and hyper. The alkaline shock type is pale, withdrawn and hypo. the alkaline situation may progress to gallstones and/or kidney gravel. enough. . comments from you & your readers more than welcome.
thanx again, John
Al

>>>MY COMMENTS:

Thanks Al. Great additional dimensions to working with arthritis. You'll have to forgive me breaking up your Joycean prose into paragraphs.
Your steam-of-consciousness writing style was kind of frying my brain.

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