I was on the beach last week late in the day when few people were around. The water was too cold and rough to swim so I lay on my towel watching the world go by. Near me was a man who periodically got up to walk around to stretch his limbs and who was clearly in some kind of pain.
My assessment watching him was that he had some kind of lower back pain. His right side looked "locked up" and he was limping. Occasionally he even grimaced.
After a while I couldn't stand watching him any more, so I made myself decent (didn't want to pounce on him wearing only a bathing suit) and approached him to ask if he would permit me to give him an energy treatment.
After I explained what I proposed to do, he consented.
It needs to be said here that what I do involves no manipulation nor do I actually need to physically touch the person I am treating.
It turned out that he didn't have back pain. He explained that two years ago he had knee surgery to repair torn ligaments on his right side (the one that looked locked up), but his pain now was in his left hip. He surmised that the surgery left his right leg shorter than the left and that resulted in wear and tear and osteoarthritis in the opposite hip. He had had the pain for quite some time and had been told that he would only find relief if he had a hip replacement. Younger than me, he didn't look old enough for arthritis or the drastic step for a hip replacement.
So I did a discrete treatment right there on the beach, focusing on the painful hip. Occasionally I asked him to stand up and walk around to see if we were making progress. He reported less pain on each try, but the pain was still present. Then, ten minutes before I had to leave, it came to me that I should not be treating his left side but his right, which was the one that called my attention in the first place. Specifically, it came to me that I should be treating his right knee.
No, no, he protested. The surgeon told him that the surgery had been perfect and the knee, thought it would never be perfect, did not give him trouble.
I treated his knee anyway and told him to try walking around again.
This time, there was no hip pain and he moved with much greater ease. He was quite pleased.
How could working on his right knee help the pain in his left hip? Through the principle of "tensegrity". This is something an osteopath friend told me about many years ago. Osteopaths treat your connective tissue, without which you would be a formless puddle on the floor. Your connective tissue is, by definition, all connected. Pulling on it at one spot affects other spots in other areas of the body. My friend once successfully treated a frozen shoulder by treating adhesions caused by a hysterectomy. So essentially, if something is wrong in one area of the body, it affects other areas by causing misalignment. Physiotherapists would probably say it's all about compensation, the tendency to favour compromised areas of the body by shifting your weight to other areas.
A geodesic dome or a "Bucky ball" would be an example of tensegrity:
You can clearly see how pulling on any of the black balls would deform the entire structure. Pull hard enough, and it stops being viable.
Any kind of surgery is likely to interfere with the energetic integrity of the body by creating blockages through scar tissue. As I was treating this man's knee, he reported feeling pins and needles similar to when the sensation returns after your foot has fallen asleep. Once the energy blockage cleared, his right side no longer seemed "locked up" and he moved more freely, and the pain in his left hip magically disappeared.
