For anyone who has experienced the joy (or terror) of attending social dance classes, one will know exactly what it feel like to slowly rotate around a large circle of people, one by one dancing (or trying to dance) with the next person along - until one has experienced dancing with each person in the group.
The most striking thing that one notices when placing hands in the right position, is that every person in the group feels completely and surprisingly different! Some people feel tense and wound up like a spring, others are floppy and feel like a wet dish rag, some feel like elastic rubber, and others just have a mysterious and inexplicable sense of interconnected calm, that instantly put's one at ease. In some people, one can feel inside and through their body to the ground, and so one then has a really good sense of spacial orientation, for others, one can only feel half way down to the ground, or maybe can't feel anything but a layer of surface tension under one's hands: and so no capacity to sense how the person is moving.
For anyone that has asked the question, "What is an Osteopath", and "What exactly does an Osteopath do?", imagining for a moment what it feels like to put hands upon and dance with 20,000 people over a period of years. How might one's perception of the physical body change over time? Would you be able to tell more about the intricacies of a person's body, and how it interconnects and functions? By the time you have danced with your 15000th person, you have a vast library of past experience to draw upon, and you can recognise those elements that help a person to dance well, and those elements that contribute to a reduced capacity. When one puts hands upon a new person, one is able to anticipate problems, and either offer suggestions or perhaps make moves that have shown themselves in the past to help a person experience a greater sense of fluid interconnection and coordination within their own body.
With "Knowing, Seeing and Thinking Fingers", an Osteopath is able to place hands upon any person's body, and with a library of experience to call upon, sense to what degree that person's body has deviated from normal. A normal body is one that is fluid and transparent to the touch, and which incorporates Wholeness, Vitality and Natural Self-Healing.
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