A Different Lens

em>I've been absent these past few days, not because I don't have anything to say, but rather because there is so much I want to say that I wasn't really sure where to begin! I'm going to just dive in and hope that you will ask questions and check out the references if I am unclear. This will certainly be ground I will cover repeatedly and in different ways as this blog unfolds. So here we go!

I decided to begin exploring the concept of worldview in this missive. Largely because it begins to create a different platform from which to think about our medical models. Right now, we are conditioned to looking at our health and, in fact our world, through a particular set of lens. Its like wearing your sunglasses all day at the beach. It can become quite easy to forget that you are seeing through a lens. When you remove your sunglasses, you see the same things quite differently. Its not as though either way of seeing was incorrect, they were simply different.

Different perspectives are available depending on what lens you are looking through. Staying with the sunglasses analogy, my husband had a strange experience when he put his sunglasses on in the car last summer and realized that he could no longer see the display on the radio of his new vehicle. Thoroughly annoyed thinking that the display was malfunctioning, he was nearly ready to turn around and head back to the dealership, when I pointed out that I could see the display just fine and I wasn't wearing sunglasses. Different set of lens, different "realities".

The lens of our current worldview is so pervasive that it becomes difficult to imagine that any other possible way of "seeing" exists. I believe this is further compounded if we are participating in any kind of scientific, medical or paramedical field as these aspects of our culture have been in many ways untouchable. When we begin to poke at the underpinnings of these parts of our worldview, we are in jeopardy of bringing down the whole house of cards that constitutes our sense of reality. And yet, reluctance to change does mean that change isn't already occurring. We can only put our heads in the sand for so long before we either suffocate or come up for air and come face to face with another way of seeing.

Having said that, it doesn't mean that one version of reality, one version of a worldview is inherently right. Just like my husband's experience when wearing sunglasses, there may be aspects of our reality that are not visible when seeing through the lens of our current worldview. It doesn't mean the alternative possibility isn't there, its simply beyond our perception until someone points it out to us.

For ease of reference, I will call the current worldview our "familiar worldview". The alternative I am presenting, I will call an "autopoietic worldview". Let me say right up front that there are few references available to explore this so I will direct you to the links section where you will see WEL-Systems Institute listed. This information comes directly from experiences and education I acquired through the programs I have taken with WEL-Systems. My quest for an alternative to our familiar worldview had taken me far and wide when I discovered the elegant simplicity available through a WEL-Systems perspective. It simply made sense to me and so I am sharing it with you here.

I have made one minor change in that I am referring to a "familiar worldview" as I have found that the moniker of "therapy model worldview" used in the WEL-Systems body of knowledge invariably confuses therapists and those in the medical community and diverts attention from the more important point, that being the potential for looking beyond the lens of the familiar and recognizing that there is actually a continuum of perspectives on "reality" available - with our familiar worldview at one end and an autopoietic worldview at the other end. In between, the possibilities are endless.

Confused yet? Lets start with what has been familiar to us and through simply familiarity has gained our unquestioning allegiance. Our notions of reality are firmly based on Newtonian Science and the early medical concepts put forth by Des Cartes. We have been taught to believe that what really matters is matter. Its not real if you can't see it or touch it. We treat and refer to our bodies as mechanical devices from the cellular membrane to the heart as a "pump". These analogies of how body systems work steadily reinforces our mechanistic point of view. We rarely engage the concepts of energy and information in traditional medicine, with the exception of diagnostic tests.

Our familiar worldview tells us that we ARE our bodies. That all individual responses are judged against an external measure called "normal" - the state we strive for whether it is our blood chemistry or the opinion of our colleagues. Existing outside the range of "normal" signals that we are in dangerous territory. Normal is reinforced with rigor in the cultural realm where there is tremendous pressure to meet the expectations of society, family systems, governments and peer groups.

It even extends to how we are manipulated by the pharmaceutical industry. Recently reading , Selling Sickness, I was shocked to discover that the pharmaceutical industry has manipulated the "normal" values of cholesterol blood tests to ensure high volume of sales of its key medications. The range of "acceptable normal" for cholesterol has been altered at least once in the last decade without any significant research findings other than a panel review of "experts" who receive financial endorsements from the very companies who stand to profit from their recommendations.

This brings me to yet another key tenant of our familiar worldview and that is that an "expert" is someone other than you. The expert can look at your experience as though he/she is reading a guide or a map and tell you exactly what you are experiencing and what must be done. It is as if by reading a Michelin tourist guide about Italy, an expert can tell an Italian citizen what life in Italy is like with more conviction and have that interpretation become the "truth" regardless of what the Italian citizen might know from their personal experience. Sound familiar? I think the very fact that opinion based on case study becomes irrefutable truth is a big contributor to the problems in our medical system. There is no room for conversation or personal experience. That, accompanied by a strict adherence to "normal", forms the sides of an impenetrable box leaving little room for discovery and lots of latitude for error.

This is particularly troubling if you are considered one of the "experts" because of your field of practice. There are times when we wear this cloak with ease but far more often in my own experience, the mantle of expert doesn't rest easily when a case doesn't conform to expectations. When a patient doesn't get better in spite of your best efforts any number of things scoot through our minds. We question our skills, we blame the patient for somehow not conforming to our recommendations and we begin to seek solutions shot gun style from more tests to pharmaceuticals, all in an effort to resolve the situation. How often do we actually listen? Why do we assume something is wrong - what if this is a very intelligent response? What tools do we have to guide our patients into their own unique experience - not as an expert but as someone accompanying them on a journey of discovery. Curiosity is a valuable trait when accompanying someone into discovery and not one always associated with the an expert expected to already know all the answers.

I will share a very simple example of a young man I treated a few years back. He was a stellar baseball pitcher and well on his way to a scholarship and possible professional career in the sport. He had been groomed from age 3 to excel in the sport that his parent's felt he had an aptitude for. The entire family's social life was built around his sport. Then one spring, he developed terrible shoulder pain forcing him to sit out several games. He was seen by several top orthopaedic surgeons, received MRIs and CT scans, steroid injections and oral anti-inflammatory medication regularly throughout this course of treatment before he landed in my caseload for Physiotherapy treatment.

I took his history with his anxious parents present. All subjective and objective test findings indicated a rotator cuff impingement that was at risk of tearing if he returned to pitching without resolution. He began a typical course of physiotherapy with a colleague and got no better. A few weeks later I noticed he was in my schedule again. I re-tested him with the same results as a few weeks earlier.

This time his parents decided to stay in the waiting room and I decided that perhaps it was time to shift focus. I asked him, a 15 year old boy, why he thought he may not be getting better. Watching closely, I saw his breathing begin to change. He shrugged and told me he didn't know why. Not content to let this opportunity slip away when something was clearly happening below the surface, I playfully asked him, to imagine that he might know the answer, and what did his imagination have to say. He immediately began to have a body response. His breathing changed again, his arm began to subtly twitch and he suddenly felt like a furnace radiating heat. I gently encouraged him to just relax and breathe deeply, acknowledging that something was going on in his body and that was perfectly fine.

After a few short minutes, he looked quite comfortable, peaceful and somewhat surprised. He began to tell me that until that moment, he hadn't realized just how much he didn't enjoy baseball anymore. He wanted his summer off to spend with friends and to try out a summer job. Until that moment, he said, he didn't realize just how trapped he felt and how frightened he was to let his parents down. In the next breath, he let me know that he knew what he had to do and that it was going to be fine. I encouraged him to trust what he had just experienced and we carried on with his regular physio session. The whole interaction took less than 10 minutes.

He showed the first improvement after months of treatments at the end of that session and within 2 or 3 weeks was discharged with a pain free and fully functional shoulder and the prospect of a very different summer ahead of him.

As I write it down, it doesn't seem all the remarkable. The intuitive side of me recognizes exactly what went on here. However, what I do find remarkable is that after all the "experts", the tests, the medications a simple question about this young man's personal experience and a willingness to entertain the possibility that it was an intelligent response to have shoulder pain and to experience the subtle shifts in his body when asked about his experience - was the key to restoring his wellness on several levels. It was simple, easy and effective. All I had to do was step beyond my familiar lens and into another where I was no longer the expert, but he was.

There are many more points that define this familiar worldview we share and I will offer a few more that I think are particularly relevant in this conversation. Some of which are the need to figure out "why" as though once the mystery is solved intellectually or diagnosed, everything will get better or we will know exactly how to proceed. So far, in my own experience of working with clients, asking them about their experience and staying with them while encouraging them to relax into their bodies, I have discovered that there is often no clear answer to the mystery, or at least one that can be explained with language. The sensory information that moves through the body seems to carry its own answer for the individual. They experience an insight which often is difficult to express but they "know". That is sufficient.

We also tend to believe that the more intense the experience is in the body, the more serious it is. Furthermore, those intense sensory cues are not to be trusted because they signal danger. As a woman about to give birth to my second child, I can't begin to tell you how hard wired that message can be. Even in the throes of childbirth, a very healthy and natural body function, some women experience intense fear because of the deep unconscious messages we carry about not trusting our body, particularly when the sensory experience is intense. Intense experiences, whether they result in a newborn or not, are an indication of the amount of information moving through the body. If I tighten up my body as contractions occur, I will experience more physical discomfort than if I breathe, relax and let my body take the lead, trusting that it knows what comes next. And that dear reader, is based on more than my childbirth experience! It holds true for many life experiences - physical, emotional and spiritual.

There are many more tacit truths about our familiar worldview than I have engaged here so I will refer you to Phoenix Rising: The Freeing of Human Potential by Louise LeBrun (available through http://www.wel-systems.com/) for a complete and highly thought provoking overview.

You may have noticed the counterpoints of an autopoietic worldview shared above but let me make them abundantly clear here. I know that while they make sense, they are often not our default way of interacting with the world. I encourage you to ponder them, try them on for size and keep them in your awareness if only to see what doors they may open in your perception.

A partial overview of an Autopoietic worldview consists of the following:

• there is more than a Newtonian or Cartesian way of looking at the world and that is through the discoveries of Quantum Science where the unseen (energy, information) is just a real as matter


• we are MORE than our bodies. Call it what you will, but I am clear that the essence of me is much more than my physical package. I agree with the notion that we are spiritual beings having a human experience. What holds true for you?


• our bodies are not mechanical devices but function as an organic processor that process energy and information (more on this in upcoming entries)


• our body never lies, we can trust the truth of our own experiences


• each of us is an expert in our own right because we are the ones having the experience (remember the Italian having his experience of being Italian interpreted by an expert with no personal experience)


• the more intensely we feel or experience, the more energy and information that is moving through our body, an organic processor


• there is intelligence behind what goes on in our bodies that we can access by simply breathing , relaxing and allowing ourselves to claim what is true for us about our experience

I am not endeavoring to present these worldviews as either/or. Neither one is right or wrong. They are simply two different possibilities, two different perspectives. I will claim, however, that I have found that the range of possibility and potential that exists in an autopoietic framework to have made a tremendous difference in how I practice Physiotherapy and Personal Coaching as well as how I live.