Smoking
More Healing Tales
Humor has a way of bringing things back to normal, of restoring equilibrium. When you can laugh at something, you can take the sting out of it. In this, it is like medicine.
If a mugger could take your sense of humor, he would have robbed you of something valuable indeed. The physiological effects of levity include enhancement of breathing, increased numbers of immune cells, an increase in endorphins, and an increase in salivary immunoglobulin type A concentrations. Laughter can turn off the hypothalamic activity in the brain that triggers the "flight or fight" response, flooding your system with the stress hormone, cortisol. When you laugh, the body somehow knows that the danger is passed, or you wouldn't be laughing helplessly about it. If the saber-tooth tiger were after you, you would be geared for survival, not the enjoyment of life. Laughter can help restore the body's parasympathetic response that allows you to better digest your food and your food for thought, mulling things over in your own sweet way.
A mugger often takes more than your purse. He takes your psychic equilibrium, your everyday state of trust. He might rob you of sleep, of restfulness, of peace of mind.
"Vanessa," an attractive, vivacious woman in her early thirties, was standing in the middle of a densely populated city, speaking to her husband, Gary, on her cell phone, when it was snatched by a mugger. Late that evening, she had not gotten over the assault on her emotional equilibrium. Although she had never heard of Therapeutic Touch, she accepted the offer of a treatment, which was combined with questions directed to her conscious and unconscious self in order to help her regain the power of her ordinary perspective on things. It can be healing to consider a potentially traumatizing event from a different angle where, on the psychic/emotional landscape of one's experience, it can become considerably smaller in magnitude.
When asked to examine what she was feeling, she described anger and fear. When asked which was greater, she said that she was feeling more anger than fear.
"What sorts of things make you angry? Do you get angry at small things, like I do? I lose a pencil, and I flip out. I have a hundred other pencils and pens, but I can't let it go. I keep looking for the one I've lost, and I just flip out."
She smiled at this, bringing an unexpected change to her face, and said that losing things also made her angry.
When asked how many people were in our part of the city, she thought maybe a million. When asked how many had cell phones, she thought around fifty thousand.
When asked if she were experiencing any physical problems, she remarked on her neck and the area beneath the right shoulder. There was usually tension there. Her neck hurt, now, from the man grabbing the phone. She was quite upset and angry that he had hurt her.
The relaxation response induced by the Therapeutic Touch treatment was now combined with musings about what the mugger had really wanted. Was it the cell phone, or the kind of life he somehow sensed that she was connected to? "You have a full life, an exciting career, talent, a husband, friends, and maybe he had an emptiness there and wanted to take yours. But he can't take that, can he?"
"No," she said quietly.
"You still have all those things. You were soon able to call Gary back. You still have Gary, your talent, your life, your friends … you're part of a group of supportive people. You're a supportive person yourself. And how is your left shoulder, and the left side of your neck?"
"It's fine."
When asked if she liked to take risks in her career, she said "sometimes," and agreed that sometimes they worked out. The use of "neck" was now used in a natural way to shift her focus from the physical to the metaphorical context - "Sometimes you stick your neck out, and sometimes it works out."
Continuing to smooth out her "energy field" with the intent of rebalancing it, working a few inches away from her body, moving my hands downward in gentle, rhythmic motions as she relaxed with her eyes closed, I asked about the size of the area of tension and pain on the right side. "It's about the size of a golf ball."
As she relaxed, her attention was directed to the phenomenon of a cell phone breaking up. You can hear the person you're talking to, then you can barely hear, and then it dissipates.
"And you might let this experience be like a cell phone call, and it's one cell phone in a city of 50,000 cell phones, and it's one person in a city of a million, and let it get smaller, and dissipate, become less clear, less important - maybe it will be a fiftieth of the size, even less …" My voice became progressively quieter, continuing, "smaller, smaller, maybe much less, and you'll begin to leave it behind, and Gary will arrive soon, your husband, and you'll be working soon, taking risks, living your life, and now just relax, sit and absorb, and I'll sit on the couch over there and relax too."
After awhile she looked up and smiled.
"How are you feeling?"
"Great. I'm fine, now. My hands feel like they weigh 50 pounds."
"Enjoy it while it lasts. How's your neck?"
"It's fine. You know what I got out of this? I remembered, when he first grabbed my cell phone, how funny it was. Before I got angry, I wanted to laugh at the whole situation. I'm talking on my cell phone about switching cell phone companies, and then someone comes up and grabs my phone!"
When her husband arrived, she explained about Therapeutic Touch and how she had wanted to laugh. "Humor can be healing," I said, "because it puts you at a distance. It changes your perspective. You're standing at a distance looking at it. You're not so close to it, now."