Resetting Homeostasis for Healing
By Tania O’Neill McGowan
Co-author, along with Dr Charles Krebs, of Energetic Kinesiology: Principles and Practice (Handspring Publishing).
Maintaining a state of balance in the body is essential for optimal health and longevity – and that means lowering stress, eating well and ensuring we get enough exercise.
Most of us already know this, but what does ‘staying in balance’ actually mean within
the body?
Homeostasis: the body in balance
To survive, our bodies are constantly working towards homeostasis – a state of balance among all the body systems.
Renowned kinesiology master Dr Charles Krebs describes homeostasis as “the maintenance of relatively constant internal physiological conditions in the face of constantly varying external factors”.
Each bodily function – from our body temperature to the pH and oxygen levels of the blood and our blood pressure and blood sugar levels – has an optimum value, which is the most energetically efficient way to maintain that function.
Our bodies work in an integrated way to stay around these optimum values (which have an upper and lower limit) and when faced with any type of stressor, the body does what’s necessary to bring any impacted functions back within these limits.
Distress in the body
When stress is short-term, our bodies can quickly return to homeostasis and the compensations the body introduced to get back into balance are turned off.
During longer term stress, the body’s homeostatic limits can get ‘reset’ to a ‘new normal’, which can be either above or below the optimum value or level of function.
This resetting results in less efficient physiological function and places more stress
on related systems that are called on to supply the energy to compensate for the stressor/s.This compensation caused by the long-term unresolved stress has created what kinesiology calls a state of “balanced/imbalance”.
If the ‘new normal’ isn’t too far from the optimum level, the “balanced/imbalance” state can continue for a long time without symptoms showing up – or with some symptoms but without actual illness.
However, if this reset function falls too far outside the homeostatic limits, the body can’t successfully compensate.
We eventually become exhausted, leading to sickness or disease.
Says Krebs, “When any physiological function exceeds the upper or lower limit for homeostasis for that function, it results in Distress, a chaotic state where the control of that function breaks down”.
Bringing the body back into balance
By embracing muscle monitoring – which can be used as a biofeedback tool indicating stress or a stressor in the body and/or mind – kinesiology can successfully
identify these “balanced/imbalance” states of function.
Once identified, kinesiologists use proven energetic balancing techniques to support these states to be released – and eliminated.
This elimination paves the way for the body to respond once again, this time resetting the homeostatic limits back within the normal range by actually resolving the stress underlying the issue.
“Re-establishing these normal homeostatic limits reduces the amount of energy needed to support this function,” explains Krebs, stopping the process of “one physiological or organ system ‘borrowing’ energy from another, which was needed to sustain the compensated state.”
Energetic healing techniques are also based on the premise that every physiological disturbance is associated with an energetic pattern of disharmony resulting from “blocked” flows of energy, states Krebs.
Eliminating these energetic blockages, he shares, results in a spontaneous return to a state of harmony within the energy systems, allowing the resumption of normal homeostatic function and a return toward optimum homeostatic values.
The big picture
Preventing disease developing and assisting the body to heal itself is, therefore, twofold from the perspective of kinesiology.
First, energy blockages need to be removed. Doing this allows for the second part of the process – getting the information carried by these energetic flows to re-establish coherent physiological function – otherwise known as healing.
As well as embracing energy healing modalities to lower stress, eating a well- balanced diet and ensuring we get enough exercise are essential for good health and ensuring our bodies can always return to homeostasis.
