What is holistic kinesiology?

by The WellBeing Team July 5, 2010

He looks into my eyes, wondering if it worked. I hand him a book and he slowly opens it. He stares for just a moment then looks me straight in the eye with a startled expression. "I can see the page," he says, amazed. He then proceeds to read a paragraph out loud at about twice the speed and with four times the clarity of his reading just two hours before. His mother just looks on with astonishment. Robert had been diagnosed with scotopic vision. This meant that when he looked at a page he saw swirls and lines running down the page. Very little was clear, which made it very difficult to read. Now that has all changed with the help of the holistic medicine of kinesiology.

It’s difficult for me not to be passionate about holistic kinesiology. A few years ago my wife had a severe and potentially life-threatening illness that left her unable to speak or hear well. After nine months she seemed to be getting worse. Looking for answers, I read a book on kinesiology and thought it might help her. In the first session with the holistic kinesiologist, one of the questions he asked her was what was her favourite flower and she replied "yellow". She had been thinking of a "white daisy" but this was the best she was able to articulate. Within five one-hour sessions she was significantly better. Her fits had stopped and she could speak more fluently. Today she has fully recovered. For us it was a miracle. It gave us our life back.

After this experience I became so interested in holistic kinesiology that I went from my career as a chief economist to embark on one in holistic kinesiology. In my practice now, clients come in and start crying because they cannot believe they are free of pain. Others laugh as they feel like they are finally getting their life together; others write and say how grateful they are to be free of their chronic fatigue or depression or whatever condition they had.

These results come because of the effectiveness of holistic kinesiology. Anyone with the proper training and dedication can achieve the same results. I’m not claiming it’s the answer for everyone and every condition. No one type of natural or Western medicine can claim that. In many cases, particularly with chronic illnesses, a combination of different therapies serves the client best. However, holistic kinesiology in my experience is very effective for a wide range of conditions, particularly chronic pain, headaches, migraines, depression, learning difficulties (including attention deficit syndrome), back pain, chronic fatigue, bed wetting, sleep difficulties, asthma, and blood sugar disturbances. It can also help with relationship difficulties, stress, anxiety, fears, phobias, allergic reactions, and setting and achieving goals.

Origins of holistic kinesiology

Kinetics is the study of movement, and ‘kinesiology’ was originally used as a term to describe the study of movement dynamics of the human body. In the early 1960s a chiropractor named George Goodheart formed the science of applied kinesiology, now practised by many chiropractors around the world. This was a marriage of Eastern energy principles, muscle feedback and Western developments in structural and reflex sciences to monitor the body’s response to various stimuli.

Dr. John Thie, an American chiropractor, created Touch For Health, a kinesiology system for laypeople based on applied kinesiology research. This system was soon taught throughout the world to improve health and wellbeing in the community. Many forms of kinesiology have developed from there, so kinesiology became the generic term for this natural therapy. Holistic kinesiology has evolved from the integration of specialised forms of kinesiology with anatomy and physiology, nutrition, communication studies, counselling skills, energetic sciences, business and practice management training. Holistic kinesiology is a modality with great breadth and depth that uses feedback from your own body to gain greater understanding of your problem/s and to guide the practitioner to the best solution for you.

The limits of holistic kinesiology

As with all natural therapies, holistic kinesiology is limited by the body’s own ability to self heal. Holistic kinesiology addresses the causes of the issue and prepares the body-mind to begin the healing process. When a person is truly ready to heal, the results can be astounding. Thirty years of back pain gone in two to three hours of treatment is not uncommon. For some people improvements can come more slowly. They need to understand what generated their problem in order to resolve the outstanding issues and progress more rapidly towards healing.

This is where holistic kinesiology has a great advantage because it can provide a wealth of information about what is causing their problem, dramatically speeding up the process of real healing. Clients often have subconscious beliefs that limit their ability to heal, such as a fear of change. A great many of these beliefs are set from an early age when they seemed an appropriate response to what was happening at the time.

An example is a four-year-old boy who thinks "I don’t want things to change" when his dad leaves his family. That thought at such a crucial moment in his life can set a pattern that he may follow for most of his life. He may subconsciously avoid change wherever possible, fearing the hurt that comes with change. For this client to embrace change in his life, the stress from this initial incident will need to be identified and cleared first. In the process he will gain important insights into his life story and why he has made the choices he has. This process is very empowering and can often be far more important to the client than the initial issue.

This new understanding of his life story, together with the application of specific stimuli, stress reduction and integration techniques, culminates in the often astounding results achieved with the use of holistic kinesiology.

Benefits of holistic kinesiology

Like all natural therapies, holistic kinesiology aims to improve your health and wellbeing by stimulating your body’s own healing potential. Holistic kinesiology is a very broad form of complementary medicine, encompassing many aspects of both Western and traditional medicine. Holistic kinesiologists are trained in the structural, emotional, nutritional, electromagnetic, energetic, metaphysical, physiological and psycho-spiritual areas of natural holographic healthcare.

In holistic kinesiology, virtually every area of complementary medicine is used, including acupressure, nutrition, chiropractic, blood and lymph reflexes, various forms of counselling, homeopathy, traditional Tibetan and Indian medicine, reflexology, and aromatherapy. What is unique to kinesiology is the use of manual muscle-monitoring feedback to provide understanding and an appropriate solution to the client’s issue.

How does holistic kinesiology work?

If you have used a mouse on a computer you’ll know it allows you to access a great deal of information about that computer. With two buttons and the use of menus you can find out a lot about the computer. Muscle feedback is similar. Holistic kinesiologists monitor muscles to access the body’s computer — the brain. Muscles are wired to the brain via the nervous system. The muscles act somewhat like the mouse on a computer. Certain muscles have been found to relate to specific acupuncture channels, organ and gland systems. For example, imbalances in certain muscles may indicate stress in liver function, others indicating stress in the digestive system.

It was discovered, for example, that clients who repeatedly had problems with the subscapularis, a muscle under the scapula in the back, often had a heart-related stress, such as heart disease or a heart channel-related stress. In the case of a heart channel stress, an acupoint on the heart channel may need to be stabilised or a heart-related emotion or issue may need to be addressed. Muscle feedback is also used to find the cause of imbalances. For example, the therapist may monitor muscle feedback with your arm in a particular position by applying a small amount of pressure and find that it holds without effort. The practitioner then seeks to find the possible stressor, such as a particular emotion, food, chemical, toxin, etc, by seeing what stressor changes the muscle function.

The body even has its own menu systems, just like a computer. Acupressure, blood and lymph reflex points are particularly useful. So, for example, in the case of chronic fatigue, you may check if acupoints relating to specific parts of the liver, digestive and immune systems are active for your condition. Homeopathic vials, aromatherapy oils, and flower essences may also be checked with muscle feedback to see if they are relevant for your particular condition. This natural feedback process allows a holistic kinesiologist to go underneath the conscious symptoms to isolate the causal factors. Muscle feedback is then used to guide the practitioner to the priority correction. There are literally hundreds of correction techniques from all areas of complementary medicine. Reflex zones or acupoints may be stimulated to correct an imbalance. For example, neuro-lymphatic reflexes may be rubbed to encourage the body’s natural garbage disposal system (lymphatic system) and vascular reflexes held to improve blood flow to specific regions, organs or glands.

Clearing emotional stress with holistic kinesiology

The vascular reflexes are based on research by Terrance Bennett DC at the Neurological Research Foundation in California between 1936 and 1950. Dr Bennett found that when certain points on the head, known as emotional release stress (ESR) points, are held, they stimulate vascular activity (blood flow) in certain organs. A number of these points also affect activity and blood flow in the brain. Some of them stimulate the front reasoning centres of the brain and reduce activity in the back emotion centres. This makes them particularly useful for resolving emotional stress. Just holding these points will eventually bring enough activity to the reasoning centres to bring some resolution to the stress.

For example, a young woman came to my clinic complaining of difficulty in feeling comfortable around men. We found these difficulties stemmed from an assault during her childhood. The memories of this incident were very vivid for this woman and she felt a lot of anger and resentment towards the perpetrator. I had her run through the memory while I held the ESR points. After 20 minutes we had covered all aspects of the memory and she felt completely different. The memory was no longer as vivid; it seemed much more like other memories, as if her mind had had the opportunity to process and integrate the event. Over the next week she found she began to see the situation differently, gaining power to move on. She no longer needed to hold onto her resentment and began the process of forgiving the perpetrator. Within two weeks she was comfortable enough with men to begin a relationship.

This is not an unusual case. These ESR points always work because they stimulate a physiological response that allows us to reason through stresses. There are many other points that are used at times to deal with emotional stress. A holistic kinesiologist will use the muscle feedback to determine which points are best to use. The client guides the session through his or her own muscle response. With the energy imbalances corrected, the ‘bodymind’ can then begin to repair and balance the system on all levels.

The answer within

Holistic kinesiology aims to provide understanding and solutions to the causes of your issue. The reason for your issue, however, always lies within you. For example, you may suffer from a sore and stiff neck and feel anxious and stressed. Is the stress due to the sore neck or is the sore neck due to stress? It can be either. In one case, muscle feedback may prompt the holistic kinesiologist to work to defuse the stress causing the sore neck. In another case the practitioner may work on the sore muscles that are causing you stress. The holistic kinesiologist would look for factors that are causing the muscles of the neck not to function well.

Holistic kinesiology does not diagnose or treat symptoms or conditions; rather it merely addresses relative underlying stress patterns associated with imbalances in the system. Once the stress has been corrected the indicator muscles will respond accordingly, confirming a positive change. This change in muscle response anchors the changes into the body, giving it conscious positive feedback. This also gives the body more information and better strategies if the same situation occurs again.

Depression and holistic kinesiology

Thomas, a 34-year-old tradesperson, had become depressed and suicidal over a number of months. His condition had become serious by the time I saw him in the clinic for the first time. He was already well into planning how he was going to die. In my experience, I have found depression to be a multifaceted condition with four main contributing factors:

Hormones are out of balance, particularly serotonin and dopamine.
Cranial structures are out of balance, particularly the sphenoid bone (a crucial bone in the centre of the skull).
Blood sugar regulation is out of balance, with the client often suffering wild swings in blood sugar, causing cravings for sweets, sugar, chips, etc, followed by tiredness and depression after they are digested.

In the first hour of our session, muscle feedback suggested his condition to be primarily a problem with his cranial structure and blood sugar regulation. We then spent time finding his true life purpose and ways of incorporating more of that purpose into his daily life. After three hours of treatment he felt immensely better and he has not felt depressed since (more than a year ago).

David Corby is the principal of the Australasian College of Complementary Medicine, a holistic kinesiology instructor and practitioner. For more information on holistic kinesiology, courses and/or practitioners, tel: NSW (02) 9482 3603, Vic (03) 9662 2378, WA (08) 9245 6032, or visit our website www.complementary.com.au

For further information on kinesiology, go to the WellBeing Directory.