Applying Healing Occupations to Practice

The only difference between an Activity of Daily Living and a Healing Ritual is mindfulness. 

[See the previous blog for references and graphic of the healing occupations.]

Eating connects us to food, the earth and the wider community of people who provided us with something to eat. Think of all the people involved. No wonder sometimes we have trouble receiving such gifts. Instead of obsessing anxiously over what to eat, get a massage, lift weights, plant a garden, or go to the spa. Sweeten your life with a bit of honey from time to time!

Playing keeps us flexible – body, mind, emotions and spirit. With these in balance, we can process foods, emotions and thoughts. When out of sync, look for problems with sprains and strains of all types – in the body and in relationships. Restore clearer vision of the situation through active movement and competition (including losing!). Put a plant on your desk and take time to connect with nature!

Love binds us in social groupings and rules through the mindful heart by helping us digest food, emotions and thoughts. Our joyful heart attends to our social attachments even when we’re not aware of it.  Does bitterness take away your joy? Try spinning on the dance floor, tasting some gourmet food, or sharing a joke. Definitely include red underwear in your wardrobe!

Once upon a time work meant attending to simple tasks like chopping wood and carrying water. Our lives have gotten more complicated. What do we do first? And where will we find the time? Don’t break out in a rash. Make a list. Use a scheduler. Take a deep breath and smell the roses. Spice up your life with something fun!

To sleep, perchance to dream…Ah, who can? Worries become fears and sleepless nights turn into the dark grind of perpetual fatigue. Memory slips. Teeth fall out. Joints ache. Hair goes gray. Turn down the lights. Queue up some soft music. Take a warm bath. Slip into your black, silk PJs and sail off to dreamland. Don’t even get up to pee!

Methodology

A practitioner intent on helping a client integrate and balance all aspects of life needs to understand how they and their body respond to stress. How does the mind interpret the physical environment and emotional responses? What stories does it tell? Each elemental occupation resonates with a host of related physical, mental, emotional, and social processes. Can the practitioner connect intuitively with the underlying metaphors and messages?

Once a pattern emerges, intervention requires adjusting and manipulating environmental and occupational areas to stimulate and feed deficiency, or calm and guide excess.  Each occupation resonates with one of Traditional Chinese Medicine’s five elements (earth, wood, fire, metal, water) which will guide us to an intervention strategy. Understanding natural laws governing the five elements helps inform our choice of action.

Case Study #1

A 4 year old boy diagnosed with cortical blindness arrived at the clinic for an evaluation. TCM associates visual problems with wood qi because of the eye’s inherent flexibility adjustments made for near and far acuity.  Developmental and neurological problems generally associate with water qi, so we begin with deficiency of wood and water qi. We interviewed the child’s mother while he rolled from side to side in supine, stimulating his own water qi, via oscillating movement, to self-regulate. When placed prone he could barely lift or turn his head to breathe. In addition to confirming deficiency of water qi (related to low muscle tone) this would indicate deficient earth qi (lack of muscle strength), and deficient metal qi (which resonates with coordination and praxis). He did not respond to his name, or orient to sound and lights. He had no obvious affectionate connection with his mother (deficient fire qi). Lack of visual or auditory responses confirms deficient wood and water qi.

Diagnosis: Deficient water qi (the neurological root cause) due to inherent developmental and neurological conditions as well as constant drain from deficiencies among all other elemental systems.

Plan: Use play (wood qi) to boost neurological development (water qi) by reducing stress load and introducing flexibility (i.e. providing a more varied sensory environment than rolling back and forth in supine) and fuel social participation within a peer-group setting (fire qi)

Our intervention used a weekly two-hour preschool play group that consisted of a 60 minutes of highly supervised/supported unstructured outdoor/active play, a 30-minute snack and 30 minutes of quiet indoor/fine-motor play while watching It’s Potty Time video and taking turns sitting on the toilet (ADL work). He attended the clinic once a week for nine months. During the entire time he attended, he received a continuous variety of sensory and neuromuscular facilitation to support his ability to participate. These facilitation consisted of: tapping which feeds & stimulates both muscle spindles (earth qi) and free nerve endings (water qi); brushing which feeds and stimulates dermal end organs (metal qi); joint compression which feeds and stimulates joints (water qi), TAMO²⁵ which feeds and stimulates responses to gravity (earth qi). During snack he sat at the table with the other children and received physical support to try the foods the other children ate. Eating stimulates earth qi and sharing food with others stimulates social participation (fire qi).   The fine-motor play provided another opportunity to facilitate movement stimulating through the previously mentioned sensory channels. Social participation with the typical and atypical children in the group gave purpose to these movements and stimulated a drive for mastery/praxis. We used fire qi to stimulate (heat up) metal qi.  After about 6 months his mother reported that her son would vocalize during the entire car ride to the clinic. He also spontaneously reached out to touch another boy in the sandbox on his last day at the clinic.

By the end of 9 months of treatment he could maintain balance for several minutes by sitting astride a wheeled toy with very close supervision, as he lacked the muscle tone to right himself once his vertebrae went out of alignment. He used awareness of his body in space coupled with co-contraction of vertebral muscles to participate in play with other children. From a Five Element perspective, play (wood qi) stimulated the use of vestibular and proprioceptive inputs (earth, water, and metal qi) to support social connection (fire qi), giving an improvement in neuro-musculoskeletal development (water, earth qi) and communication (fire qi).

Next week I’ll post an application for an adult client concerned with an upcoming medical procedure.

I’ll be giving seminars on Self-Regulation in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Iowa, and New York City during the next month. In June I’ll be giving a two-day seminar on Mealtimes in Danbury, CT.
Check out my schedule.