Dave Woodward
Previously published: In Touch #7, Spring 1988 when I was practising at Centrepoint Community. Still one of my proudest wins. (Names of clients in all instances have been changed.)
Marjorie came to see me about a check up. She was six months pregnant and beginning to change shape with dramatic swiftness after the gradualness of the preceding months.
More to the point, her bedroom was at the top of the hill – about eighty brick and railway sleeper steps to climb to get there. The winter has been wet and the steps are often slippery, as are other steps and decks around the community sleeping, living, and working areas.
She felt fine, she said, but no longer felt confident of keeping her balance. Her changing centre of gravity and changed posture had left her uncertain and fearful of falling. Her worst days were those which she described as when she “felt really pregnant all day”.
I did a brief Touch for Health balance which confirmed her visible good health. I then carried out a full Hyperton-X balance, following each correction with a re-test, thumb and ring finger joined, to isolate any emotional content. Most of the corrections were free of emotional content, and those that weren’t related mainly to the anxieties surrounding a first pregnancy.
I was left with the feeling that I still hadn’t addressed the original problem. These tend to disappear in the course of a session as other stuff gets dealt with, but this time my doubt remained.
I asked her to imagine herself in one of the places she felt unsafe, and check out how she felt. I tested a double anterior deltoid IM, which collapsed. I carried out an alarm point check, which came up HEART. Subscapularis stayed strong through an “I feel angry/scared” affirmation (ex John Diamond – Life Energy). Not emotional.
At this point, as I neared the end of what I knew that I knew, I had a picture of myself walking a slippery surface with my arms out to help my balance – with the subscapularis contracted, arms abducted, bent forward at the elbows. Reactivity??
Sure enough, subscapularis turned off gluteus medeus and a number of other major walking muscles.
I stretched subscapularis and activated the walking muscles. The HEART alarm point was no longer active, but the visualisation still tested weak.
This time the alarm point test came up KIDNEY. Psoas was the villain this time. Correction as for subscapularis. Visualisation still weak. Recheck alarm points.
CIRCULATION-SEX and piriformis this time. Correction as before, and this time the visualisation tested strong.
I checked visualisations of several other areas in the community which she had said made her feel uneasy, and all of these now tested strong.
When I asked her to walk about a bit, her comment was that “she didn’t feel pregnant at all.” Success! (I shall have to do some more work next time reframing the word pregnant to have pleasant associations, or she may unwittingly set herself up for a very small family.)
I saw her the next day, after she and her husband had hiked two miles across muddy farmland. He, she remarked with satisfaction, had fallen over three times. She hadn’t slipped once