When science meets intuition: Our body’s own intelligence
When I qualified as a physiotherapist in 2011, my mind was alive with scientific knowledge, ready to change the world. I reveled in the details of the science, the nitty gritty of why exactly a treatment technique worked the way it did. It was extremely exciting at first, but the deeper I searched for these underlying mechanics, the more I came upon disappointment: the underlying theories as to exactly how something worked were simply that – theories. People developed new methods of treatment, based on the experience of them working, not based on having figured out exactly why they are working. The overwhelming impression I got was: “this seems to work, it works on many patients, there’s one small study that validates one part of that theory, so let’s do it and call it an official method.” At first, this frustrated my scientific mind. The lack of detailed proof in a system of healthcare that advertised itself as ‘evidence-based medicine’ was unacceptable to me.
Over the years, and much more study, I have learnt two important lessons.
First: there are some things that are unknowable, simply because the human body (and the human being) is such a vastly complex phenomenon that we need at least 1000 more years of in-depth research before we can even begin to say “we know how some of this stuff works.” We are trying to understand the ocean by analyzing a single drop of ocean water. Yes – it will teach us a lot, but by no means can it provide the whole picture.
Second: most of the types of treatments I am interested in – manual therapy, movement therapy and mind-body interventions – cannot be tested by traditional methods. The gold standard for evidence-based medicine – the double-blind randomized controlled trial – simply does not work for these methods. We cannot judge a treatment method as lacking in evidence when the standard testing procedures – the only ones accepted as producing good quality evidence – don’t work.
These are exciting times we live in, because, parallel to the recent exponential growth in scientific research about health, a deeper level of health knowledge is starting to reveal itself in the science and in the experience of health care professionals: the intuitive intelligence of the human being. And, to the great dismay of my analytical mind, and to the great joy of my intuitive heart, I discovered that this kind of intelligence has been guiding my treatments all along.
Our bodies have an inner wisdom – an intuitive intelligence that lives within is. Depending on what your spiritual beliefs are, you can decide for yourself where you believe it comes from. The point is, that wisdom exists and it is alive.
When I treat a person, I communicate with their body’s inner wisdom. I hear it between the words they speak, I see it in the way their bodies move, I feel it in the way their fascia and muscles react under my hands. I hear it when people describe what they are feeling, or spontaneously connect to a memory when I touch a certain body part. I feel it when their bodies resist my touch or lead me in a specific direction with my pressure. And sometimes, I hear it in the spontaneous idea I get about which technique or exercise would be best for this person.
My traditional training taught me to evaluate all the physical evidence – the symptoms, the movement, the condition of the muscles or glide of a joint – and use my knowledge and clinical reasoning to decide what treatment plan would be most effective for this client. That is how I started. Over the years, I’ve received more and more information from my clients’ bodies about what they need, and I followed it, crediting my own clinical reasoning. The more I allowed myself to be led by it, the more detailed the information became, the more effective my treatments became, and the deeper their healing reached beyond the physical.
Now, I know that the treatment plan that my client’s body tells me it needs is much better than anything I could come up with on my own, no matter how much I study to deepen my knowledge or improve my clinical reasoning skills.
The greatest challenge to my analytical mind was when I started receiving energy healing treatments – remote energy healing treatments (the healer not being in the same room as me). I could feel it working physically in my body. Of course, the science is there – one need only read up about Quantum mechanics and Quantum field theory to find it, but still my mind resisted. Even after I did a Reiki course, and found that this felt so natural to me and I had been doing it already unknowingly, there were still doubts about my own ability to use it. It was only after years of receiving messages from my own intuitive intelligence, that I finally accepted the clear message: Do energy healing for your clients. Remotely.
Hesitantly at first, I started playing with this idea. Surprisingly, I got results. No matter how many doubts I had as I started the session, I would always receive information about what my client needed for healing, and it was always exactly what they needed. Some clients could feel me working in the exact body part I worked on without knowing I was doing so. It was only after I did my first healing session for someone I had never met before, and received detailed information that made sense to her and her family, that I truly started believing that this stuff works.
I now understand that when I do energy healing sessions, I connect with the same innate body wisdom that guides my physical treatments. Even at a distance, I can energetically connect to a person’s intuitive intelligence and receive information about what they need for healing right now – on a physical or non-physical level. I wouldn’t have believed it if it wasn’t so effective, or if it didn’t feel so right and natural.
This innate wisdom exists within all of us. The most value I can give, I believe, comes from helping people connect to it on their own. A person can connect to their own body’s intuitive intelligence at any moment, and can draw on this wisdom whenever they need, for whatever challenge they have. The trick is to remove all the things that block this connection – our beliefs and conditioning about our own powerlessness, and our own avoidance of our sensations and emotions out of fear and anger and self-judgement.
This can be a process, and sometimes it helps to have another person connect to your body’s wisdom for you and show you how intelligent it is, and how it can be a well-spring of information to guide your healing in the way that is best for you. This is what I do in a session, though ultimately, I want to help people connect to their own wisdom more and more, helping them become their own healers, and their own source of wisdom for their lives.
Most great scientists and change-makers in history have followed their own intuitive wisdom to create what they did. Even Albert Einstein is quoted as saying “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant.” The biggest growth in my work happened when I allowed my intuition to guide my rational mind, and the biggest growth in my personal life happened when I allowed my intuition to guide my healing and my biggest life choices. Perhaps the medical science of the future will allow itself to be guided by the patient’s own intuitive intelligence. When this happens, we will truly start curing disease and eradicating chronic illness. We will truly start healing the depth of pain in the world. I can’t wait to see it.
