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Fibromyalgia: removing the blocks

by Joel Whitehead

It seems as if I am compelled to write an article about Fibromyalgia about once a year. I give lots of talks on this subject and it seems that people want to hear a lot more. As an increasing number of patients with the syndrome come to our clinic, the reality that a large part of the problems stem from stored emotional blocks becomes apparent. This is not to say that we have branched off into the field of psychoanalysis, but because I spend a lot of time with our serious patients, emotional blocks are revealed and there is often a release of the spirit, through the opening in the portals of the body's energy pathways where they are blocked.

A case in point is a woman who ventured cautiously into treatment and on day five, just as we were wrapping up that treatment, she started shaking as if a great chill came through her. It was the first time for my assistants to see this, but I smiled to see the effects. This is called 'myochonic shaking', which is a shuddening of energy.

She, as I said, was a cautious, in-control-at-all-times woman, which we find to be a common thread in our fibromyalgia victims. Her list of accomplishments and the extent of her responsibilities makes most of us look like docile couch potatoes in comparison.

She shook that day for about 25 minutes and came out drained, worried, and bewildered—I just smiled. When she came back the next day she pronounced the previous day as the best one of her adult life, but announced that she was scared of having that same experience. She did, however, but this time for only l5 minutes. The next day during the treatment when the shaking started, she said, "Oh boy," and kind of smiled, but it only lasted for 5 minutes and that was the last time.

In 'Nesshi'; therapy we work on the whole body to relieve energy blocks. We have always known in Chinese medicine that where energy is blocked, there is pain. In this patient's case it happened when we had opened all the energies and focused on the lungs once again.

In Chinese medicine the lungs react to and suffer from forces of grief. Let me expand on this a bit and venture a common thread in so-called 'type A' individuals. While few of us wants to dwell on why we need to push ourselves so hard, familiar rationales could be to impress someone (a parent), deny an association or likeness to someone (a parent) or reprove the possible existence of someone, namely our inner self. Anyway, after a long road of running through life and separating ourselves from past associations, we can subconsciously start grieving for the lost relationship or for the person we might have been had things been different.

When fear sets in, it is a weakening of kidney energy. In treating another patient recently, she couldn't even begin to be treated because she couldn't be touched. It was almost involuntary, as her will to do things was great, but fear was locked into almost every muscle fibre of her body. Her muscles were held tight under the skin and caused her to lash out involuntarily in an attempt to free the blocked energy within herself. Her will won the day. She brought in a friend to hold her hand through the treatment. Her headaches left first, and the rest of her problems extricated themselves as if layers were being peeled away. When we finished, she seemed like a genuine, more open person.

These are just a few cases in point. When we hit strong liver lines we find backgrounds of anger or frustration. For stomachs and pancreas we find people deep in introspection and worry. Occasionally we see strong kidney people who seemed to be startled easily, scared, and in pain. When we separate the mind and the body as we tend to do in the west, we have no understanding of emotional blocks and physical pain.

Of course we would be making a bigger mistake if we were to say that it was all emotional. Diet, enviroment, etc. all could play predominant roles or at least contribute to patterns of pain that seem to have overtaken our lives.

The important thing is that we don't get fibromyalgia as if it were some sort of flu bug that befalls us from nowhere, but is more often than not an accumulation of blocks that lead to pain. To leave you with a final thought: "We don't get fibromyalgia... we are fibromyalgia."

Copyright © Joel Whitehead. This document may only be modified for technical reasons (e.g., compatibility with other platforms), but the actual content of this page may not be changed. One electronic copy and one paper copy may be made for personal use, but this document may not be distributed under any form, in whole or in part.

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