This post is a commentary on the audio text “Introductory Overview” by Dr. James Jealous.
The Introductory Overview is packed with pearls and insights into the biodynamic model and some of the great evolutions in osteopathic medicine. You can listen to it to learn a little osteopathy, and we could spend days discussing the content. But I want to direct you to one of the great gifts that Dr. Jealous gave us, in his more than 60 years of being an osteopath, which you can find in this audio file, as well as all the others, and that is his gift of language. When you listen to this audio file, and all the other CD’s, listen with more than just your ears and your interpreting, analytic mind. Listen for how it moves your spirit, listen with your thinking-feeling-knowing fingers. Listen for the echoes of time…both past, present and future.
There was a time in the course of Jim’s career when he questioned his role as a teacher. He told us he wasn’t one, he didn’t want to be one and he had, in no uncertain terms, made this known to God. I scoffed at him. He was a brilliant teacher, and he could say that he wasn’t. He also used to call himself country bumpkin… but his words, teachings, writings and audio text will make clear those are both not truths.
This denial of the teacher role, however, helped him recognize that his love of language was a gift. He actively sought out the right words to describe the experiences he was having and the results he was getting – both as a clinician and a teacher. Then he shared those words with us and worlds opened up.
This audio CD is a phenomenal example of his use of language as well as the skill in how he speaks those words. When he describes the functional model, listen closely… you can actually feel the experience of this kind of treatment. He says:
“in this functional approach, then, to osteopathy in the cranial field, we start in the direction of ease and we keep that liquid sense of freedom in a crescendo so that there’s no zone around the edges of our hands where we hold and stop. That’s the key. And then we slowly will feel the rocking, tidal motion of thoracic respiration. And then we feel beyond that, slowly, slowly, slowly waiting while there is motion in our hands until we feel an even bigger tide, and as the liquid motion in our hands merges with both the thoracic tide and then deeply into primary respiration, we start to feel the presence of the whole, unpartitioned, and its effect not only locally but simultaneously systemically. And the crescendo of the therapeutic process moves beyond the neuromuscular skeletal system, so that the end point of the therapeutic process is not this freedom that we feel in the whole spine as it responds just like a piece of wet spaghetti to thoracic respiration, but we feel the whole body in a very steady state, where it’s very quiet, and the whole body comes to rest upon a point of dynamic equilibrium that we call a still point.”
It’s not only the words, it’s also how he embodies them, speaks them as story and experience. So reading this quote is just a taste.
Listen deeply to this audio text over and over again. And try to approach osteopathy in this way. Approach it gently, with humility. Find the truth in it for you. Enjoy this gift of language left to us by Dr. Jealous and dig on!
Osteopathic Health Access 