Striking a balance

Looking to achieve balance across all aspects of your life? Why not try kinesiology. Melanie Murphy explores the benefits of this holistic therapy  striking a balanceLooking to achieve balance across all aspects of your life? Why not try kinesiology. Melanie Murphy explores the benefits of this holistic therapy

 

A balance between what we eat, and when we work, rest and play is essential for maintaining a happy and healthy mind and body. A balance between our physical, mental, spiritual and emotional states is also important for our overall wellbeing. However the stresses of everyday life can disturb these delicate energy balances and manifest in various parts of the body, resulting in a range of symptoms and problems. The good news is, this can be corrected through support from modalities such as kinesiology.

Kinesiology is a system of natural health care, which works in a holistic way to aid most conditions by identifying and correcting the elements that inhibit the body’s natural internal energies. Muscle testing is the key technique in kinesiology as it provides information about a person’s wellbeing by detecting where a particular imbalance is located. It helps the body to clear this stress and heal itself with the aid of gentle corrective techniques.

Tasmanian-based holistic kinesiologist, Maxine Blackaby, says kinesiology doesn’t diagnose conditions. Instead it works energetically and looks at the whole person – their emotional, mental, physical and spiritual health. All of these elements are interconnected, so when one area is affected, so too is the smooth functioning of a person’s bio-systems. “When these are affected, it manifests into physical pain, mental discomfort and the myriad expression of disease,” Maxine says.

Session length

Kinesiology sessions range in length from 30 minutes to 90 minutes, and the number of sessions required depends on how long the client has had the issue, what effect it has had on their life and how serious it is.
Cost: Usually $50 to $150 per session.

These can include:

o poor health
o nervous disorders
o poor performance and learning problems
o relationship difficulties
o postural problems
o allergies
o digestive disorders
o anxiety and depression

“When these are occurring, the system is malfunctioning. Kinesiology can assist with exploring the cause and assisting the body with its own healing by bringing smoothness back to the energetic transmission,” Maxine says.

How it works

The reason kinesiology uses muscles to monitor energy flows is because muscles can provide neurological feedback from the body and mind. Muscles have the ability to access holistic information being held in a person’s core operating unit – the subconscious. “This normally inaccessible neural substrate holds our memories (life experiences and traumas), information about physical (including organs, glands and hormones), emotional, mental and energetic states and also determines our muscle tension. Using this remarkable muscle monitoring tool, information gained can be quite specific and it can give the information on the best strategy to assist the body to reinstate balance,” she says.

Muscle tests are applied to different areas of the body and an examination may reveal an over-energised or unlocked muscle. In some cases a particular muscle will function well on one side of the body and poorly on the other. These changes in the state of the muscle’s energy matrix indicate what the emotions are, what level of the body the imbalance relates to, where this challenge to the person first started and what is needed to help the body to clear this stress state. It also identifies which survival or limbic area is involved. “Once identified it can assist the body to clear this to avoid the need for the body to recreate this body state,’’ she says.

While there are many different types of kinesiology, Maxine mainly works with an applied physiology approach. After acknowledging what a patient’s issue is and what they need for wellness, she says the indicator muscle informs her what and where the energy imbalance is, what vibrational healing is to be used and where. This involves the examination of meridians, emotions, chakras (energy centres) and auric fields. With the identification of the stress state within these areas, techniques to assist the person clear the stress include holding acupoints, using a ti-shin on acupoints, stimulating by massage on specific areas, using figure eights, sound vibration (chimes or specific tuning forks), flower essences, colour and homeopathics to assist the clearing. It will also look at the neurological brain pathways. At times, various follow-up exercises are also needed. “With identification and the use of a number of vibrational supports, the person’s body can move towards balance,” Maxine says.

The results

Kinesiology’s ability to empower someone to take control of their life and correct any imbalances still amazes Maxine after nine years as a private practitioner. “I have seen a client who could sing in a choir but when they needed to sing with their group and publicly perform would always have a sore throat or laryngitis, one session cleared this and it has not occurred for this person since. A soccer player with recurrent groin injuries – two to three sessions of kinesiology and it has not reoccurred,’’ she says.

Some of her other success stories include helping children and adults with behavioural and learning challenges to become more confident, less reactive and have fewer learning difficulties; helping people with food sensitivities to safely eat a wider range of foods; helping chronic fatigue sufferers get back into the workforce; helping people through depression; and helping one client overcome a life-long fear of heights.

“It does not have these outcomes with every client but changes do occur for most clients,” she says. “I can never promise or guarantee anything, as it is their body and their own healing that takes place. As a practitioner, I only act as a facilitator to assist their body with its own work. That is the beauty of this work.”

Kinesiology history

American chiropractor Dr George Goodheart is the father of modern day kinesiology. In 1964 he used muscle testing to evaluate what he was doing chiropractically. This model of muscle testing was developed in the 1930s but Dr Goodheart made the breakthrough that pushed kinesiology to a new threshold. He found that muscle monitoring could also access the functional status of other physiological systems.

Goodheart researched further, exploring the subtle energy pathways described in Chinese medical literature. He found this premise held true. Goodheart had discovered a valid entry pathway into the information held as energetic patterns within the human body. Today kinesiology serves as an umbrella term for a rapidly expanding suite of specialised modalities. What ties the different modalities together is still a reliance on muscle monitoring as the basic feedback mechanism into the human bio-computer.
For more information log onto www.aka-oz.org

Maxine Blackaby (Dip. Health Sciences Holistic Kinesiology) is a holistic kinesiologist based in New Town, Tasmania and is an Australian Kinesiology Association registered practitioner, level 3. You can contact her on (03) 6278 3730. Or to locate a registered practitioner in your area, visit www.kinesiology.org.au.