Keys for arthritis recovery

A very dear friend of mine is utterly convinced that her arthritis is incurable – because a doctor told her so…

She is convinced that the active side of her life as she knew it is over, that she’ll never be well again, that she won’t run, kneel, romp and play with her grandkids with the same ease that she had before she developed arthritis.

How do I show her that this is simply not true?  How do I show her that just because modern medical practice doesn’t have an answer to curing arthritis, that it doesn’t mean that there isn’t a relatively easy answer available?

So for her …  and she’ll know who she is when she reads this …  and if she ever reads this…

Nothing could be further from the truth than that arthritis is not fixable. 

Things have changed a lot since I started working in alternative therapy, but arthritis in both humans and horses  and working by distance has always played a big part in my journey.

Over the years, we’ve developed some techniques and discovered others – sped things up and got better at helping people. I have seen it over and over and over again – our bodies are capable of the most phenomenal healing. Sometimes it even astounds me who has seen so much of it.

I have spent my working life as an alternative therapist constantly helping to reverse arthritis for both people and horses. The VERY first alternative thing I ever did, way back nearly 20 years ago, was to bring my 16 year old horse Carlos back from the brink of being put down because of arthritis.

I had actually rung the vet and booked him for the next morning to come and put my beautiful Carlos to a peaceful death. His joints were swollen and his eyes were wracked with pain and the massage treatments that we had been doing were no longer working to alleviate it.

That afternoon, I heard about a Bowen muscle therapy clinic for horses happening that weekend.  I rang the vet back and said “Don’t come, I’ve got one more thing to try”. At that clinic, as a complete beginner doing this muscle therapy for the very first time, I watched the pain melt from his eyes and his withered muscles start to plump back up again. (Read on to find out how we do this aspect of releasing muscles and bones in an online program now.)

He still had swollen joints and stiffness and no doubt still had some pain under some circumstances, but he was no longer in pain all the time. This change in his quality of life made it possible for Carlos to be a retired companion to my new horse Bobby.

A short time later, I was in a kinesiology class when the teacher spoke about curing someone’s arthritis.

I still laugh when I think about my reaction, I was sooo pig headed. “You can’t fix arthritis!” I said.  “Everyone knows that.” And she told me that she spent almost every day of HER working life in her healing clinic, successfully helping people to reverse arthritis.

I loved my horse, so it wasn’t rocket science to give it a go. We started that week on a program to slowly reverse Carlos’s arthritis, first with my teacher (thank you Rhonda Hall!) doing the healing sessions and then later as I got more training under my belt, with me completing the work.

Just over a year later, after some time of pushing Bobby out of the way at the gate saying “pick me, pick me”  Carlos came out of retirement and he was the first horse I ever danced with. Bless him, he retired for the second time at about 26 years old and lived happily into his 30th year and he still didn’t have any more arthritis.

We’ve learned an awful lot more since then – I have learned an awful lot more since back then – and it’s MUCH faster now, to help people improve, to bring both horses and people too, back to good health and well being. (See Kristina’s story below about how much faster it is with more effective techniques these days.)

Kristina’s Story

Kristina, my working student, arrived here earlier this year, crippled with the arthritis that she has had since she was a young teenager.  Her knee was quite a lot swollen and the leg below the knee was withered.  You can see that withering quite clearly in the photo at the top of this page.

Every now and again Kristina still gets a little bit of discomfort that she needs to pay attention to and figure out what to do about – but the bulk of her arthritis has been gone for quite a long time now.

Back about six months ago, she did a 19km hike down at Wilson’s Promontory on a weekend off and she has even been running a couple of times a week for about the same length of time.

Right from the very beginning, just about every session she did reduced her pain, with her most dramatic changes happening in the first couple of months.

ALL her healing work has been done in the inner awareness of her body, with the same posture work that I teach in our Fast Track program, with the additions that I describe below.  Although she has been living here, she has not had a single healing session from me – she didn’t need it.

Everyone is starting from a different place with different factors drawing into the development of their arthritis and there is more to fixing arthritis than just good posture.

Keys for Arthritis Recovery

There are four common aspects to fixing everyone’s arthritis that jump into my mind as I am writing this:

1.  Emotional stress causes muscular tension.  That tension if left untreated, will put those muscles under enough physical stress that they will eventually pull the bones out of alignment.  The bones out of alignment will rub on each other in such a way that the body will make bony changes in an attempt to repair and support what’s happening.  So you can see that understanding and releasing the emotional stress BEHIND the muscle and bone problems is one of the things that we need to do if we want to really get to the bottom of arthritis.

2.  Getting the body – muscles and bones – back into alignment in good posture is part of it too.  Please God, I wish that posture didn’t sound so boring!  The words “good posture”  doesn’t begin to describe what it feels like to experience the sheer joy of swinging along down the street, walking with freedom and strength in your body when you haven’t had that for a long while.  (Can you tell that I have experienced this for myself too?)

And good posture has NOTHING in common with that “stand up and sit up straight” stuff that we were taught at school.

3.  Mineral deficiencies – We need to get enough of the right kind of minerals into our bodies to support the regeneration of the bones.  Those mineral and trace element needs will vary from district to district and country to country depending on your diet and the way that your food is grown.

We’re going to help you to figure out what you need to support your recovery.

4. Inflammation and the immune system are tied in together.  We boost the immune system and reduce inflammation by  attending to digestion issues, food sensitivities and food allergies and adding a BROAD RANGE of additional foods and food herbs to speed up the recovery process. Using a broad range is very important. When we focus on just one way of boosting the immune system, then it will often back fire and REDUCE the immune system instead.