A Time-Honored Alternative: Mayan Abdominal Massage
by Jill DeDominicis
Spring offers us the perfect natural metaphor for birth and renewal. As flowers, insects and animals around us begin to bloom and show vibrant signs of life after the dormancy of winter, it can be an inspiring time in which to lay new plans, discover a new appreciation and respect for our bodies, and look forward to new beginnings and promises. But for the woman or couple struggling with infertility, spring can be a painful reminder of the sometimes harsh realities of life--that things do not always unfold as nature intended.
Typically women and men who struggled with issues of infertility and impotency were given few alternatives--mostly invasive and expensive solutions such as hormone injections, prescription drugs, in vitro fertilization or other surgeries. But, from the remote little village of San Antonio, located not far from the Guatemalan border in Western Belize, comes a more natural alternative Mayan Abdominal Massage (MAM).
An ancient modality practiced by bush doctor and shaman Don Elijio Panti, Mayan Abdominal Massage--or simply called la sobada (literally "the massage") by the natives--was administered to numerous women for relief not only from infertility, but also to address painful menstrual periods, tired legs and varicose veins, headaches and digestive ailments. In the '80s, a Chicago doctor named Rosita Arvigo traveled to Central America to learn this almost lost art of abdominal massage from Panti. Although he was already 90 years old at the time, Panti's healing touch was still being sought by many of the village's women.
The technique is based around the notion that the uterus is the spiritual center of a woman's body--if it is out of balance, the entire body will also be so. Yet, having a misplaced or tipped uterus is not an uncommon occurrence in women, a condition which Western medicine often leaves largely unaddressed. The uterus can fall out of place from ordinary factors such as falls to the sacrum, aerobics or high impact dancing and sports, wearing high-heeled shoes or working on cement surfaces with poor foot support, to more intense events like difficult labor, rape and sexual abuse, or surgeries that damage uterine ligaments.
In recognition of this common, yet sometimes debilitating disorder, Arvigo has imparted knowledge gained through a decade spent researching the ancient system to some 200 practitioners in the U.S. and other countries. Malinda Gibbons, a San Diego practitioner and acupuncturist, has found that the method offers a perfect balance to the women's health modalities she already employed. "I was already doing acupuncture and herbs and stretching for women, and what I really liked about [MAM] was that it included the structural aspect of a treatment," Gibbons says. "It completes the circle of what I'm doing and I'm really enjoying that."
For the last eight or so months, Gibbons has been treating fertility patients and women struggling with uncomfortable or unregulated periods to much success. "I've also treated some women who are post partum and it really helps them with their healing process after giving birth. Patients have told me they feel they've gotten back in touch with that part of their body following childbirth, and it also can help heal trauma from Cesarean sections."
The slow and penetrating manner of Mayan Abdominal Massage releases deep tissue spasms and helps the uterus reposition itself, facilitating better blood and lymph flow to the area, thereby speeding up the healing process after birth. A tilted or misplaced uterus can put undue pressure on surrounding organs, arteries, nerves and lymph vessels, causing other health complications. For example, a retro (backward leaning) uterus can press against the colon; an antero (forward leaning) uterus may lean on top of the bladder. Gibbons explains that, like acupuncture, MAM helps infertility and other issues by addressing and removing blockages in the abdominal area for better chi flow throughout the body. "It does reposition the uterus and therefore there's more blood flow the area, but it also opens up circulation to other parts of the pelvis--the ovaries, the fallopian tubes. If there's any blockage there, it can be hard to clear and sometimes the uterus will lean on the bladder and colon, [disrupting] what these organs need to do to help the body detox."
It is not a technique provided solely for women; many men can benefit from the treatment as well, as it addresses larger issues such as a swollen or congested prostate, impotence, back aches, or digestive and elimination upsets that are typically treated by drugs, surgeries, or sometimes not addressed at all. Once balance is restored in the abdomen, toxins are flushed, hormones return to normal order, and nutrients can better flow to their necessary destinations.
There are little to no side effects, save some potential tenderness of the area following the treatment, which only means the amount of pressure should be lightened a bit. Once the proper amount of pressure is found for each individual, Gibbons can go to work, and she also instructs patients on how to self-administer the technique to maintain the benefits. She does point out that it is not recommended for women during menstruation or for those who have an IUD.
As with most natural healing modalities, Mayan Abdominal massage can reach beyond just the physical. The touch and attention can lead to emotional release for deep-seated anxiety, fear, guilt and other harmful emotions that are often tucked away and stored deep within the gut. Mayan Abdominal Massage is a beautiful and natural system that allows us yet another alternative to drugs and other invasive attempts to cure our discomforts. It can change the lives of men and women on a physical and spiritual level, bringing better health for a lifetime, and we have the magic hands of Don Elijio Panti and the determination of Rosita Arvigo to thank for bringing it to our world.
To learn more about Mayan Abdominal Massage, check Dr. Rosita Arvigo's Web site www.arvigomassage.com. Malinda Gibbons practices MAM and other healing techniques at the AcuSport Health Center in San Diego, www.acusporthealth.com, and can be reached at 619/243-5109.
We Can (and Do!) Heal Ourselves an excerpt by Thom Hartmann
Trauma is nothing new to the human race. We are certainly familiar with trauma in the modern world, from acts of war and terrorism to crime, child abuse, and the pain our dysfunctional, standards-driven schools cause so many of our children. And many of us don't handle trauma well: suicide is the third leading cause of death among Americans ages fifteen to twenty-four.
In the last decade over 51 million prescriptions were written in the United States just for the SSRI family of antidepressants (including Prozac, Paxil, and Zoloft), with sales topping $3.6 billion for the six most popular SSRIs, and the numbers have more than doubled since then.
Sociologists may argue about whether early human societies were comfortable and egalitarian, like many of the modern-day hunter-gatherer peoples living in the world's remaining rain forests, or whether our forebears instead lived in violent dominator cultures ruled by the members who were physically strongest (the fantasy of philosophers and scientists from Rousseau in the seventeenth century to Freud in the twentieth century). However, sociologists and anthropologists and other social thinkers do not disagree that trauma and death have always been part of human life.
So how has humankind historically dealt with trauma for the past two hundred thousand years, before the advent of psychotherapy? Humans experienced mental and emotional wounds in ancient times just as we do today. Family members became sick and died; friends and family were lost to battles with other tribes and with wild animals; after the introduction of agriculture, famine and plagues were periodically visited upon us.
In times past, if four of us set out as a hunting party every few days, odds are that over time at least one person in our party would get eaten by a predator or die in an accident. When that happened right in front of the other three of us, how would we deal with the psychological trauma that resulted from witnessing such an event? We would be in a state of trauma-induced shock. How would we cope with that? How would we deal with trauma from a near escape from death?
The answer that occurs to most people is that we'd engage in some sort of ritual when we returned to the village, a ritual that usually involved drumming and dancing, two forms of bilateral activity known to induce trance. But this ceremony may have been more to help the people back in the village, such as the family of our lost companion, to work through their grief.
The human body is a self-healing organism. When you cut your finger, it heals. If you break your leg, it heals. Even if part of you is cut out in surgery, the surgeon's wound heals. We heal from bacterial and viral invasions, from injuries, and from all variety of traumas. The mechanisms for healing are built into us. Five million years of evolution, or the grace of God, or both, have made our bodies automatic healing machines. So why wouldn't the same be true of our minds and emotions?
All of the traumas that we experience in life leave their wounds; if humankind hadn't had ways of healing from those emotional and psychological blows, over time society would have become progressively less functional. Instead, history shows us that people usually recover from even the most severe psychological wounds, often learning great lessons or gaining important insights in the recovery process.
The famous Kauai longitudinal study of children of children raised in stressful, disadvantaged conditions found that a higher percentage of the children grew up "highly resilient" than did a middle-class comparison group.3 The generation that survived the Great Depression and the Nazi Holocaust in Europe went on to create important social institutions, build nations, and offer comfort and hope to humankind. Elie Wiesel's experience specifically comes to mind: although he would never have wished on another the horrific experience of being in one of Hitler's death camps, through his writing of that experience he has given a particularly inspiring model of resilience and healing to the world.
The reality is that although adversity breaks some people, it strengthens others. And when people heal from adversity, the old clichÈ of "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" usually rings true.
But, just as with the production of scar tissue in the healing of a wound to the skin--a process involving millions of cells producing very specific compounds in response to the trauma in the tissue--there must be an inborn mechanism for healing the mind and the emotions. And just as healing from a cut can be speeded up by keeping the wound clean and dry or can be slowed down by letting the wound get wet or dirty or irritated, this emotional healing is also a process that can be either stimulated or thwarted by our interventions.
In [my] book I've identified a specific healing mechanism and process that nature has built into the human mind and body that enables us to process trauma in a way that is quick, functional, and permanent. Just like the skin's mechanism for forming scabs and scars and eventually even making the scars vanish, this mechanism is simple, fundamental, and elegant.
In its simplest form, this mechanism involves rhythmic side-to-side stimulation of the body. This side-to-side motion, or bilateral movement, causes nerve impulses to cross the brain from the left hemisphere to the right hemisphere and back at a specific rate or frequency. This cross-patterning produces an organic integration of left-hemisphere "thinking" functions with right-hemisphere and brain-stem "feeling" functions. This integration is a necessary precursor to emotional and intellectual healing from trauma.
This steady movement of nerve impulses across the hemispheres of the brain is stimulated in the bilateral-movement processes of a variety of modern forms of psychotherapy, such as Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, Emotional Freedom Technique, and Thought Field Therapy. In it purest form, however, I've discovered that the natural and rhythmic left-right-left-right process of walking, while performing a simple mental exercise, can also stimulate this same internal integration process.
This, I posit, is the way humans have healed themselves from trauma for the hundreds of thousands of years of human history, and it is only because so few of us walk anymore that we have to resort to office-based psychotherapeutic processes to produce the same result.
And that result is impressive. When we stimulate the nervous system in this bilateral manner while calling to mind a persistent emotional distress, the emotional "charge" associated with that memory quickly and permanently dissipates. This isn't a process of producing amnesia or forgetting; instead, it's a way of reframing the past, a way of re-understanding, of putting into context that which has been so "unnerving" for us. When we perform this bilateral process correctly, the pictures of painful past events in our memory transform from stark, scary, sound-filled color movies into black-and-white still pictures that are flattened out and lose their sound. The internal dialogue we have about the events--the "tag line" that we tell ourselves, and actually hear in our own heads in our own voices--changes, usually from something like "That was a painful experience that still scares me" or "I was victimized in that relationship" to a more productive synopsis, such as "Yes, that happened to me, but it's well in the past now and I've learned some good lessons from the experience. I can let go of it."
Inciting the movement of nerve impulses across the brain hemispheres helps people to come to terms with their past. They stop being frightened by their imagined futures and feel comfortable and empowered in the present. Walking while holding a traumatic memory in mind in a particular way can produce this result in a very short time.
This is not new, as you'll discover in [my] book. Rhythmic bilateral activity as a healing agent has been known to aboriginal peoples for millennia, and in the past few hundred years the secret of using bilaterality to heal emotional and psychological wounds--particularly those that produced psychosomatic physical results--was most famously discovered by Franz Anton Mesmer in the 1700s (called "mesmerism"), refined by Dr. James Braid in the early 1800s (and renamed "hypnosis" by Braid), and brought into widespread and mainstream use in the late 1800s by Sigmund Freud.
However, in an odd historical event in the late 1890s, the growing power of yellow journalism (sensationalized "news" by publishers such as William Randolph Hearst) merged with European anti-Semitism, and the synergy of those forces compelled Freud to abandon these techniques. Freud spent the rest of his life searching in vain for a replacement for hypnosis that actually worked, experimenting with cocaine, developing his early concepts of penis envy and the Oedipal complex, and finally promulgating his largely unsuccessful "talk-therapy" systems. When Freud committed suicide in 1939 he still hadn't found anything that worked as well as the beloved bilateral therapies he'd been forced to abandon by the amazing synchronous and unusual events of the 1890s.
From the 1890s until the past few decades, hypnosis and the bilateral therapies on which it is based were for the most part ignored or shunned by medical and mental health professionals, in large part because of the uproar of the 1890s. Only with the development of NeuroLinguistic Programming (NLP) in the 1970s, the NLP development of eye-motion therapies, and the 1987 development of Eye Motion Desensitization and Reintegration (EMDR) by Francine Shapiro did bilateral therapies begin to make a comeback.
There is now a whole spectrum of variations on these systems for integrating brain function and thus encouraging healing from psychological and emotional trauma. They all involve stimulating one hemisphere of the brain, then the other, then back to the first, then back again, and repeating this bilateral stimulation over and over. In [my] book I will show you how you can accomplish this same kind of stimulation using the simple process of walking. This bilateral stimulation gives you access to healing powers, creative states, and emotional and psychological resilience beyond what you may have ever thought possible.
Excerpted from Walking Your Blues Away: How to Heal the Mind and Create Emotional Well-Being by Thom Hartmann, Healing Arts Press, Rochester, VT 05767. Copyright © 2006 by Thom Hartmann. www.InnerTraditions.com.