The 5 Facilitators of Healing: Part 2

(My teacher and me in the early days of my training, 1995)

How to Build Mind-Body Trust

By Paul Cavel

See Part 1

My own journey to overcome a serious injury and the associated pain with internal arts training was in direct contrast to the fast relief experienced by the previous case. While practically stationary on my motorcycle, I was struck from the rear by a car travelling over 50 mph, which hurled me into completing four back flips — a feat even Olympic gymnasts do not attempt! Of course, most of the time they land on their feet, whereas I hit the tarmac with a crashing thud.

High-speed, Blunt-force Trauma: A Perfect Way to Trash Your Body!

My numerous injuries included a partially herniated left psoas muscle, tears in my diaphragm and adductor insertions in my left knee, dislocation of my right iliac-sacral joint from overstretched ligaments, a destabilised lower spine (lumbar), a compacted colon, as well as a plethora of minor tears, scrapes and deep bruising down to the bone.

Miraculously, I did not sustain any broken bones and, although everything in me hurt, I was told many times that I was lucky to be alive. (My retort to such statements is always the same: “Lucky” is not being hit in the first place!) In the aftermath of the accident, due to the extreme adrenaline-endorphin rush and concern for my pillion passenger, who had been knocked unconscious, I did not even accept being taken to the hospital! Suffice to say the protocols have changed since 1986...

The next morning, after the adrenaline-endorphin rush had subsided, I awoke to the severity of my injuries. Since I did not receive emergency aid, it took the hospital several days to book an appointment for me. When I finally saw the doctor, he delivered the final blow: that it would be six months until I could start treatment with a physiotherapist. By this point, I was experiencing intense pain when walking, trouble breathing and extremely restricted range of motion. I remember snapping back, “I need help now, not in six months”! But my protests would be in vain.

In the meantime, I tried various forms of bodywork, which sometimes helped and other times left me in a worse condition. In the course of a day, I found myself in pain that ranged from dull to agonising, and I eventually gave into depression. As I sat in a fog of pain and confusion as to how to climb out of this dark state, one thing led to another and I ended up starting Yang style tai chi classes with much hope.

Initially, my practice helped a lot as what I perceived then as a “soft-ish way to stretch” was much more gentle than anything else I knew to do, and it seemed to open up my body somewhat. However, I had developed a limp, and my skill level didn't allow me to go deep enough into my body to release the damaged and bound tissues.

Before too long, I had the good fortune to meet my teacher Bruce. Although neigong practices were able to penetrate much deeper than the Yang style tai chi alone had, they aggravated my bound and stuck soft tissues, intensifying the pain.

As time went by, the opportunity arose for me to live with my teacher for 15 months in California. I jumped at the chance. He taught me many simple neigong exercises, which helped me to develop my neigogn skil set and progressively go deeper into my body. I would systematically learn an exercise, stabilise it, then use it to release bound tissues and qi until he felt I was ready for the next piece. Exercises included ever-more finite alignments, weight shifts, kwa exercises, some Taoist yoga, sitting qigong and meditation. Together, each piece worked with others to root out layers of condensed and stuck soft tissue and qi.

In time, I stabilised enough to practise Wu style tai chi and bagua daily, where the game shifted completely. However, each micro-exercise up until that point had to be done with care and proper due diligence, or I would experience too much pain to continue and, essentially, re-damage affected areas, particularly to my knee and lower spine. I played this razor’s edge for about a year until finally the pain-free existence I had known before my accident returned once again.

Of all the techniques my teacher graciously and diligently taught me, the theme was always to reduce, reduce and continue to reduce my effort and range of motion. It took me many months to build up to practising qigong and tai chi for more than 30 minutes a session without re-injuring my body, which otherwise caused setbacks to my overall healing. On good days, when I became strong enough to practise bagua to a profound depth, my body opened up, which catapulted my progress.

The 5 Facilitators for Healing

Through my healing process and observing many students over the last 30 years navigate their own healing journeys, I have come to understand the five facilitators for restoring health in an injured or contracted body.

Best results are achieved by adhering to the following training progression:

1. Reduce the size of your form and effort until you can practise for at least 20 minutes without re-injuring your body, or causing any kind of contraction — in body, mind or qi.
2. Become comfortable with small, soft movements and accept your limitations.
3. Implement light stretching throughout your forms, which engages damaged or contracted tissues without over-straining them.
4. Practise soft enough to release your nervous system.
5. Through all the above, develop a relationship between your body and mind that allows the body to trust the mind, and therefore to let go; otherwise, the body will resist the training.

Once you progress through each of the five stages and can sustain practice on all five levels, the chance of re-injuring yourself greatly diminishes and long-lasting, exponential healing can occur.

The process of achieving this level of practice entails constantly uncovering tension, stuck and damaged tissues, contracted spaces, numb and dead areas from the past, and learning more about that which you were previously unaware.

A Holistic Healing Model

If you separate an injury or a body part from the rest of the body, you cannot take into account any of the highly relevant interconnections that create and sustain the environment for the injury or weak body part to persist in a compromised state.

In my healing process, all movements continued to pull on my knee until I finally opened up and released my psoas muscle, through my pelvis and back to my spine. This periodically led to overstraining my knee, which prevented me from training. Working within the framework of the Five Facilitators for Healing is what eventually allowed me to release all the surrounding tension and contractions that gave rise to healing in my knee. Since then, my body has only gotten stronger, and more flexible and efficient — far beyond the health I experienced in my twenties even before the accident.

In Part 3 I'll take you through the nuances of the Five Facilitators of Healing with a final case study of tremendous human triumph and inspiration!