Dr. Anthony B. James DNM(P), ND, MD(AM), DPHC(h.c.), RAC, SMOKH
Director of Education at ONACS: The Thai Yoga Center and The SomaVeda™ College of Natural Medicine
Those who have completed trainings in SomaVeda™ Integrated Therapies: Thai Yoga, Ayurveda and Natural Medicine know we spend a substantial bit of time learning about the threat to our health antibiotic resistant bacteria pose to everyone’s health. You would also be aware that as so called modern western medicine of the dominate culture is losing the effort to contain infections we need more alternatives for infections.
The use of antibiotics has long been the poster child in argument against the efficacy of indigenous, traditional and natural medicine and soon even that red herring will go away.
The article states “Humans are quickly losing the fight against bacteria as so-called “superbugs” continue to develop resistance to some of the last effective antibiotics, leading some scientists to worry about the possibility of untreatable bacterial infections.”
Our SomaVeda™ Thai Yoga and the advanced degree programs teach and educate practitioner’s in both the dangers and risk factors of using conventional, chemical based antibiotics as well as the solutions and alternatives to them that every professional Natural Healer should know and be able to provide as a resource for their clients and communicants. We literally believe that the often unnecessary use of antibiotics is a crime against nature, spirit and man and creates cascading levels of atrocity in individuals and in nature as eventually these chemical, drug based antibiotics end up in the greater ecosystem causing interference in natural life cycles of the ecosystem at every stage.
One of the best documented examples of this is of course the MRSA superbug. Most people still are not even aware that there are infectious bacteria being developed every day as a result of the over use and mis use of antibiotics. It’s been public information since the mid nineties and yet is still seen as an imaginary bugaboo by the average citizen. New strains of MRSA are being found worldwide.
However, this growing threat is not imaginary. Especially those of us calling ourselves healers, doctors and ministers or counselors of indigenous, traditional, natural and or spiritual medicine need to become experts in dealing with and counseling those under our care in natural anti infection strategies.
For more articles, links and information on the dangers of antibiotics, increases in antibiotic resistant bacteria and spiritual, natural based as well as scientifically valid strategies for treating infections without the use of antibiotics read further from my previously published article ” Natural Approaches for Treating Infections for Yoga and Holistic Therapists
” at http://thaiyogacenter.wordpress.com/2011/05/18/natural-approaches-for-treating-infections-for-yoga-and-holistic-therapists/
SomaVeda College of Natural Medicine
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Gain professionally recognized training, certification and a college degree as a Natural Health, Natural Medicine Provider? Want to learn the ins and outs of natural remedies for infections and a host of other conditions? Consider joining the SomaVeda™ College of Natural Medicine.
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Please note: The mentioned distinctions of energetic and physical self are arbitrary to help in your understanding. In reality, all such distinctions are illusion and can be limiting. In actual treatment the more advanced practitioner addresses the Inner, Outer and Secret simultaneously without preference for one over the other.
Disclaimer: All Information is provided for educational purposes only and not intended to be used for any therapeutic purpose, neither is it intended to diagnose, prevent, treat or cure any disease. Please consult a health care professional for diagnosis and treatment of medical conditions. While all attempts have been made to ensure the accuracy of this information. The author and ThaiYogaCenter.Com does not accept any responsibility for any errors or omissions.
Dr. Anthony B. James DM(P), ND, MD(AM), DPHC(h.c.), SMOKH
Director of Education at The Thai Yoga Center and The SomaVeda™ Institute of Natural Healing
The SomaVeda™ Therapeutic Day Protocol: How Therapeutic Day Programs Enable Therapists to Uncover the Real Cause of a Client’s Pain
What is the difference between getting one 2-hour Thai massage session from a series of Thai yoga therapeutic sessions? What distinguishes one practitioner’s credentials from another? Is there a difference between learning Thai yoga from a 10 day program overseas in Thailand at Wat Pho and the Thai Yoga Center here in Plant City Florida?
What is one of the distinguishing factors? In Thailand, you go and get an education that is based on the Thai Ministry of Health’s distinction of teaching foreigners basic tourist Thai yoga, whereas Our SomaVeda™ approach is educating students and practitioners on the basis of therapeutic, clinical hands on healing. It is not a one hour ‘fluff and buff’ session. That is factory production work. In the SomaVeda™ system we work with programs. Why? Because it is about treating the person, not the symptoms of dis-ease.
<<The basic SomaVeda™ program developed by Dr. James is the Therapeutic Day Protocol. The “Therapeutic Day” program consist of seven different individual sessions, conducted on seven different days. Depending on the complaint, necessity and goals for therapeutic outcomes, D. James creates a unique and personal approach for every client stressing integration of mind, body and spirit. “We treat people not symptoms” is the maxim. Whether your health and wellness challenge is of the body, mind or spirit natural, spiritually based holistic medicine has an answer for you. Program includes a free initial consultation.>> The Thai Yoga Center.
Dr. James explains in one of his lectures during the 200hour Certified Thai Practitioner Intensives in June 2012 that without the Therapeutic Day, you might entirely miss why a client needs your services as a Thai yoga therapist.
“I have a story to tell you.
I had a female client. As usual, in the first session, there was a cursory intake. You have them fill out a little form. My form had questions such as: are you on medication? Are you under a doctor’s care? Have you been recently hospitalized?
Nope, nope, nope. All good. She had had some pain and had gone to a doctor recently. She had been diagnosed by her Medical Doctor with Endometriosis. She described her symptoms, which sounded a little bit like Crohn’s disease to me. I didn’t say that. That was what was in my head.
I explained the benefits of committing to a 7-session protocol called the Therapeutic Day. She was like, ‘yeah I wanna do this’. She committed to a therapeutic day and came in regularly for the bodywork.
Initially she wouldn’t talk very much and was pretty simple about her answers with a lot of yes’s or no’s. There was not too much elaboration. However, she would elaborate on things that just seemed to be completely unrelated. In my opinion she seemed to be doing pretty well. She was communicating a lot less pain. I was happy with that.
I came to day number 5 – 2nd supine, which I usually think of as a fairly intense session. It is about the abdomen so the focus is on the ‘garden of delights’. You have to pay attention. I asked her, ‘can I pull up your shirt and look at your belly?’ She agreed. When I lifted her shirt, on the left lower side, there was a big, puckery circular scar that was quite large. The only ever time I’ve seen scars like that are from gun shot wounds.
I would have remembered if she had written ‘gun shot wound’ on her intake form. She had only mentioned abdominal pain. It was so big and without asking her I reached under her because I thought to myself, ‘this big of a wound has to have an exit right?’ When I put my hand on her back, sure enough there was a slightly larger scar there. Through and through it was.
I go, ‘Carol, look at me. What is (I had my finger out) this (and pointed to the scar)?’
Bless her heart, she whips her shirt up and bends over to look at the scar because she doesn’t know what I’m talking about. She goes, ‘ohhhh…yeah…I forgot.’
She then tells me a story about how she was bicycle messenger in Chicago. She was going over the Well Street Bridge in downtown Chicago let’s say. It is really kind of steep with a drawbridge at the top. For some reason, she was going a little too fast and she overshot the curb at the end of the bridge as someone made a hard right turn and ran the red light. They were supposed to stop before turning on the bridge but they didn’t. This is where two things come together. They nailed her.
EMT’s and fire department showed up. They took a saw and cut the handlebars off the bicycle. The bicycle handlebars had gone straight through her abdomen. She could then fit in the ambulance. She had to have surgery and was on dialysis for 2 years because she had lost her left kidney. It took that long for the other kidney to pick up enough function that she could get off the dialysis. This was only 5 years before the session.
Student: How do we forget stuff like that? Why?
Dr. J: It’s easy. You might think you remember pain but you really don’t. You remember the affective (emotional) memory of pain but you do not remember the sensory pain.
<<No studies have yet explored the cerebral areas selectively involved in the explicit, conscious memory of the sensory aspects of pain. In contrast, memory of the affective aspect of pain has been proposed as a critical element in the expression of pain empathy (Preston and de Waal, 2002)>> (http://www.jneurosci.org/content/27/17/4612.full)
It’s quite normal for people who have incredible trauma to block it out. That is the most normal thing in the world. It is part of the symptomology of what we call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Before this was studied, it was observed that people sometimes blanked out after traumatic events but they didn’t realize it was part of a psychological profile.
I’m thinking, ‘okay, Endometriosis. I mean come on. Think about it. Through and through the abdomen. Post-reconstructive surgery and 2 years of dialysis. How much scar tissue would there be from that? Could there be scar tissue encroaching on the uterus?’
The handlebars grazed the uterus. The connective tissue went off like a bomb had hit it. You cannot surgically fix that. All the doctors can do in this case is clean it up as best they can. They cannot put it back because it is a thin filmy sheet under tension. Think about it. If you blow up a balloon until it pops, that is similar to what happens when fascia is exploded. All the little remnants and rough ends that aren’t taken care of become sites of encroachment of further scar tissue. They become a nexus or node of scar tissue. That’s why those kinds of wounds have very complex patterns of scar tissue. It’s not on a single plane.
I worked on her and she got better. I changed my tactic because I went into scar tissue therapy mode. I did long, strong, deep stretches with lots of breathing where we were holding them long enough to actually get microscopic tears. When scar tissue forms, it is created in cross-fiber pattern against the normal grain of the normal fasciae. In order to realign the connective tissue, a lot of movement and deep slow work is necessary. That takes sustained pressure right on the crisp edge of pain. The fasciae planes then heal separately to enable more mobility within the visceral and muscular aspects of the abdomen. This tactic also works well for things like hamstring tears where there is encroachment on the adductor magnus for example.
I didn’t know to take that direction with her until her fifth session. I had already given her seven hours hands-on before I knew what was really going on with her. If I had just spent 11 minutes with her doing a basic assessment, I might have recommended something for stress.
“Maybe you just need some uterine herbs to relax your uterus” I might have suggested. I’m not saying it might not have helped, but it certainly would not have addressed her primary issue at all.
The therapeutic day gives us seven different opportunities to connect with the client. Any one of these sessions could give us key information that we would have otherwise not known, making our therapies less effective overall.
Here’s another thing I found out. From my personal experience of having worked on clients for over 20 years and doing both individual sessions and therapeutic programs, I can relate to you the following: People who commit to programs get better more often than people who do not. I think it’s due to their commitment. If all you are committed to is 45 minutes, then there is only a certain amount of healing that you will allow yourself to have. If you know you are committed to be with me for seven weeks or seven months, your engagement is completely different.
The therapeutic day could be done every day for seven days or every other day for fourteen days, every third day for 21 days, once a week for seven weeks, or once a month for seven months. Technically the closer the sessions are together, the better it seems to work, but it will actually still work if you only work on the person once a month for seven months.
I don’t know how that works. My logical mind says that if all you do is come to see me for one session once a month, there is no conditioning affect. The physiologist part of me has to acknowledge there is not conditioning effect. People actually have had really good results that rarely. I call that grace. I believe there is grace in what we do. That is where we see it. You see grace when there shouldn’t be the results you get. You get them anyway. Well isn’t that the placebo effect because you convinced them that you should have a benefit? By the way, in natural medicine, we don’t really care if it’s a placebo. We are okay with that. Ultimately, it is about bringing the person back into balance with nature-the nature within their body as well as the natural world surrounding them. If that means, using a simple means like the placebo effect, then yes, as a natural doctor, I am all for it.“
The Therapeutic Day is the basis for the SomaVeda™ clinical method. Technically, as a practitioner or therapist, you are not doing SomaVeda™ unless you are doing the 7-session protocol. I don’t expect you to see the kind of benefits that I see in sessions unless you are doing the seven-session protocol. You don’t have enough contact time or enough variety.
SomaVeda™ is unique in its approach to working with clients through the use of a systemic hands-on protocol of several sessions over time that enables a greater integration of the healing of mind, body and spirit.
SomaVeda™ Integrated Traditional Therapies are a spiritual, energetic and competency based therapeutic healing system or Spiritual Medicine (See: What is SomaVeda™?). In the SomaVeda™ system there are over 1000 different therapeutic postures used commonly. SomaVeda™ is a complete holistic system of Native, Traditional and or Natural Medicine. SomaVeda™ Integrated Traditional Therapies is a Registered TradeMark of Anthony James.
For info and live courses with Aachan Anthony James at the Thai Yoga Center, visit ThaiYogaCenter.Com
Dr. Anthony B. James DNM(P), ND, MD(AM), DPHC(h.c.), SMOKH
Director of Education at The Thai Yoga Center and The SomaVeda™ Institute of Natural Healing
History of Flow in SomaVeda Thai Yoga System
History of Flow in SomaVeda™ Thai Yoga System
The Spanish invaded the Philippines, which is over 7107 islands. Over a period of 100 years, they completely conquered the islands. They apparently killed more than half of the people. During that time, they had their conversion to Christianity. They forbade all expressions of traditional culture like medicine, martial arts, and so on. It was a class 1 felony to practice. For 330 years, from 1565 to 1898, if you were a Filipino and did a traditional healing art like Hilot, which is the equivalent the Thai Yoga, or Escrima/ Kali or similar we learn here or if someone ratted you out (because there were bounties on healers), you could go to prison, be tortured or put to death.
“ By 1583, the Spanish laws, under the Royal Decree of King Philip II, were imposed upon the islands. All forms of martial arts were completely outlawed and the carrying of any bladed weapons was forbidden. Kalis, Silat and Kuntaw and other forms of martial arts were banned and not permitted to be practiced.” [ http://www.ksk-fma.net/History/philippine_history.html ]
This also pertained to traditional dancing, traditional music…in other words you had to learn how to play Spanish music and could not play traditional music on traditional instruments. “You are not Filipino anymore. You’re Spanish”.
The Filipinos went, “ok, you got the swords, you got the guns, you got the canons, you’re going to shoot me if I don’t nod my head so yeah, what you said. Okay, I’m Spanish and not Filipino. I don’t know any healing. I don’t know anything.”
The arts were practiced in secret. This might have been a typical scenario as described to me by Guro Unangtagpagturo and Arnis Lastra Maharlika Master Jorge Lastra on one of his trips visiting my school : According to Jorge For over 300 years, when the moon was full, little groups would find their way to a farm, which they found through a trail of “breadcrumbs” There might have been a little piece of fabric tied to a tree here or a piece of fruit with a chunk cut out of it. Once at the farm, they would practice by moonlight.
Now they’d only have about a day or maybe two because there were rules against travel – you weren’t free to travel and couldn’t go far from your village without permission from whoever was the local authority. Traveling was enough to get you thrown in jail or tortured. Everything they were practicing was technically illegal for 480 years because it was all considered traditional culture.
They practiced not just the healing arts but the music and martial arts like this under the Spanish rule.
So they only have a day or so. So here I am. I’m a teacher right? You just snuck out of your village, traveled through the bush for long distances. We are not going to use light because if we have people and bright lights, that will attract attention. The neighbors will turn us in because there are bounties.
We get together under the moonlight and practice for just a day or two – not so long that anyone will be missed or that someone might show up by accident and surprise or discover us.
Over these centuries, there was developed a concept of how to impart a lot of information very fast that a person can take with them, go back to their homes and villages, and practice it and open it up like a flower blooming. In other words, you get a little bit from the teacher and then go home and practice. You practice and get instruction until you can set up a little place to teach in secret.
My teacher Guro Leo T. Gaje Jr. was one of the first generation of Filipino that could practice out in the open legally. That was after the Second World War in the 1950s. They could practice in public without having to have a permit, a license and no one had to worry about going to jail because they were do traditional healing arts.
What they worked out was this concept called “flow.” That’s where my concept of flow comes from. It comes from Jorge Lastra, Leo T. Gaje Jr. (Pekiti Tersia) and Deonisio Kinyeti, it comes from Flora Villobrea. And Danny Inosanto.
The first person that taught it to me in detail was Danny Inosanto. He said, ‘I can teach you a flow, a sequence of movements that you do. Don’t try to do it right. I’ll show you the right way to do it but don’t try to do it right. Just get the flow down. Then go home and practice repetitively. What will happen is that the flow will teach you how to do it.’
I came from a school in Thailand where the average student was in the school for four to seven years. I’m teaching in the USA where the average student can’t tolerate me for a weekend. I’m just saying, ‘how am I going to get those two together?”
When I first started teaching, I tried to do it the way I was taught. You would move into my house and train with me for four years and we ca practice all day and all night and nooo! ahhh!
After a couple weeks or whatever people would jus t leave. They couldn’t do it. They couldn’t make those commitments and certainly not if they didn’t even know what it was. This brought me to develop a level system. I came up with this idea from my Philippine teachers, that the best way to teach the most information in the shortest time was do the same way that the Hurimentados in the Philippines had practiced their Hilot sacred healing arts for over 380 years. You get together for a short time; you learn the flows or vinyasa – which is the Philippine word just like in Sanskrit. That’s because before the Spanish, what was the culture of the Philippines like? It was a mixed and diverse culture. It was part of the Majipayat Empire of India being the southern most outpost of the great Indian culture-the Magahad kingdom. The Filipino Island culture was called Maharlika. Because of the Indian and Vedic influence, some of the words are very similar like Chakra, Vinyasa, etc. The southern Islands such as Mindinao because of their proximity to Indonesia were heavily influenced by the culture of Islam and eventually became Moslem. Of course the Spanish Catholic Christian culture was not any more tolerant of this than they were any other variants of native indigenous culture anywhere else in the Philipines or South America.
I started doing flow after training with Danny and that’s what brings us to where we are today.
I know you’ve been to a lot of other classes, which are technique focused. They give you a technique and you practice that repetitively until you get it down and then you go on to the next. If you’re lucky, toward the end of whatever you’re doing you put it together.
How do you get from one technique to the other is not important or emphasized. You could take a cigarette break from one to the next and it wouldn’t be a big issue, as long as you do things in the right sequence.
Our flow is like that. It is a fine science of how to give you a lot of information in a really short period of time that by the time you leave class you will have the flow and sequence of that that you can practice at home. The gift box of the benefits of that flow will come later only if you practice. That’s another sad part. This art requires practice. If you don’t practice, you don’t get to dance. You wont get the treasure because it is only as a result of practice.
I say 300 is the magic number for each flow. Once you get about 300 in, something just clicks in your head.
Those of you who have been practicing and doing this for a little bit, don’t you see that there’s a point where one day something is just different?
Having done this so many times, we can predict when that will happen based on how much you actually practice. You may get 30 repetitions in before we’re done. Kudos to you! That’s if you don’t start and stop. You’ll get more if you flow. You’ll get less if you don’t. You’ll see. There will be a big shift once you knock it out 30 times.
It will seem like yesterday I was struggling and all of a sudden today it’s like I’m a different person doing this. It will seem like a miracle to you but it’s a miracle I told you was going to happen.
SomaVeda™ Integrated Traditional Therapies are a spiritual, energetic and competency based therapeutic healing system or Spiritual Medicine (See: What is SomaVeda™?). In the SomaVeda™ system there are over 1000 different therapeutic postures used commonly. SomaVeda™ is a complete holistic system on Natural Medicine. SomaVeda™ Integrated Traditional Therapies is a Registered TradeMark of Anthony James.
For info and live courses with Aachan Anthony James at the Thai Yoga Center, visit ThaiYogaCenter.Com
