Issue link: https://www.massageandbodyworkdigital.com/i/77424
animating and coordinating organisms before the first neurons arrived on the scene. The matrix continues to supply an exquisitely sensitive (responding to vibrations below neural thresholds of stimulation) and rapid (traveling at the speed of electron streams, not action potentials) source of vitality and organization, both within us and between us. THE LANGUAGE OF NEUROPEPTIDES Science has long known about our many hormones, which are synthesized and released by our endocrine glands, and then circulated through our waters to their target organs to stimulate much of our biochemical communications and responses. What has been more lately discovered and begun to be explored is the enormous significance of another, much larger class of biochemical messengers: our neuropeptides. Researcher and pharmacologist Candice Pert, PhD, calls neuropeptides the "molecules of emotion." They are synthesized, released, and received by most (possibly all?) of our body's tissues, and trigger their cells to respond in a wide variety of ways. One of the principal areas of production and reception appears to be our limbic system in the brain, associated with our feeling states. Through these neuropeptides, the limbic system is not only a modulator of our consciously perceived emotions, but also of the many ways that our emotional lives are translated into cellular responses throughout our bodies, orchestrating innumerable reactions to our current feeling states, to our long-term habituated and dominant feeling states, and to changes introduced to those feeling states. They are the molecular players that are the means of our emotions impacting our bodies. Among the highly receptive cell populations to neuropeptides are our immune cells, which can be either depressed or stimulated by our thoughts, our emotional reactions to those thoughts, and the abiding beliefs that these thoughts and feelings generate. These chemical choreographies unite our brains, endocrine systems, immune systems, and many other cells within us in a highly interdependent molecular dance that can powerfully serve, or just as powerfully undermine, our well-being. Perhaps this is what we are referring to when we speak of some emotions as being negative and others as positive. These discoveries are pregnant with the possibilities of the ways that the language of healing touch can mobilize the body's wisdoms and resources on many levels. As a therapist effectively speaking the language of touch, might these processes be prominent among the means by which you can help clients/ pupils enter into a teaching with you, and through which they can be brought into the same state or principle in which you are, precipitating a lasting teaching, the benefits of which can never be quite lost? I think so. THE LANGUAGE OF NERVES AND MUSCLES Nerves and muscles share a common language in their communications and responses—the rhythms of action potentials that ripple along their membranes and orchestrate their collective activities. All these cells are tightly linked at many levels of our neuromuscular systems and are constantly interacting with one another. It is impossible to experience a sensation, a feeling, or a thought without stimulating a muscular reaction—large or small, conscious or unconscious. And it is equally impossible to experience a movement without changing the landscapes of our perceptions, sensations, feelings, and thoughts. No muscle can create any movement without neural stimulations, and no movement can occur without consequent changes in the stream of these stimulations. Further, all of these stimulations and movements are ultimately nothing less than the summary of the totality of all of our 60 trillion cells' activities and their myriad and complex interactions—the activities of our entire landscape of perceptions and responses that are translated into our behaviors of all kinds and on all levels. Mind is vastly more extensive than brain. Mind involves the whole of our landscape and all of the internal and external ecological processes that are fused into those mysteries and miracles that we call life and consciousness. We are moved by all levels of our feelings, ideas, and beliefs; our current assessments; needs and intentions; and by all of the countless processes that underlie them. These are the dimensions of the language of sensations, feelings, thoughts, and movements in our lives. The vocabulary, grammar, and syntax of this language are the stuff of all of our motor experience and development—all functional skills and all dysfunctional blocks, all successful adaptations and all persistent limitations, all habituated repetitions and all new possibilities. This is another earn CE hours at your convenience: abmp's online education center, www.abmp.com 63