On New Beginnings, to Varying Ends
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Health Gossip is a newsletter for a new way of being. Today: hot doctors, a recurring pregnancy dream, and the emotional applications of applied kinesiology.
“You are accusing me of having been born—I plead not guilty!” — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That
Shortly before launching this newsletter, I had a dream: I was pregnant, but incredibly ambivalent about being so — so much so that the dream, whose premise would normally be a cause for celebration, began to feel like a nightmare.
In retrospect, the meaning is clear. Instead of a baby, I was pregnant with an idea, whose realization I felt conflicted about for some unspoken reason. Night after night, I was trapped in that same liminal space, three or so months pregnant and increasingly uncertain about the outcome.
Semantically, ambivalence is somewhat hard to place. It traditionally denotes a state of having mixed feelings, a sort of ambient distress that results from being pulled in different directions. In psychoanalytic terms, these feelings are not mixed but opposing, forming a tension that dictates much of our lives. To feel ambivalent about giving birth is to be caught between two poles—the joy of new life and the inevitable grief accompanying it.
In “Against Self-Criticism,” Adam Phillips expands on this tension, writing that “wherever we hate, we love” and “wherever we love, we hate.” To him, as to Freud, feeling ambivalent about something merely proves its significance.
Ambivalence has come up quite a bit in my work with Dr. R., who I’ve been seeing since early last Fall. He’s one of only a few hundred actively practicing doctors in the field of applied kinesiology, a form of alternative medicine that seeks to marry Eastern health philosophy with Western understandings of anatomy and physiology.
We first met in 2020 but didn’t make it past the first few sessions due to a host of factors. For one, he’s hot, with a boyish, somewhat arrogant appeal that certainly doesn’t go unnoticed by his (mostly female) clientele. He speaks loud and stands tall, dainty Cuban chain peeking out of that day’s button-down of choice.
It took me two years to realize that his arrogance was in fact an earned confidence, a welcome respite from the defensive nature of many other doctors I’d seen. After coming to many of the same conclusions on my own, I returned to his practice eager to get to the root of a laundry list of symptoms.
The basic goal of applied kinesiology is to identify and correct imbalances in the patient’s body, spanning the emotional to the physical. This is largely achieved through muscle testing, a hotly-contested practice that uses the muscles as a gateway to the subconscious mind.
Building on the work of chiropractor George J. Goodheart, the theory is as follows:
The body has an electrical grid both within and surrounding it, which is in direct communication with the nervous system.
The condition of this system can be assessed through the muscles.
If something impacts your electrical system in a negative or unproductive way, your muscles will be unable to hold their strength.
By applying light pressure to the muscles and seeing which stimuli might “strengthen” or “weaken” the patient, the doctor can both pinpoint specific issues and troubleshoot possible remedies. It’s a tedious and fairly intimate process, built on shared trust and synchronicity.
With time, Dr. R. has become someone that I trust, a man who, despite his conceit, has mostly pure intentions and a kind heart. Our work together has helped clear a number of blockages, ranging from subconscious programming to the hormonal issues that I originally came to him for two years ago.
Occasionally, I’ll catch hints of something darker: the demons that he claims to have exorcised from patients with poor energetic boundaries; the visions he’s had of his father, 40 years dead. And then there are the passing mentions of his mentor, a cultish-sounding figure with “emotional issues.”
I’ve heard about the mentor before, from my mother’s doctor (M.) who first referred me to Dr. R. The mentor used to host M. and R. — along with 30 or so other applied kinesiologists — at annual conferences in Las Vegas, where they would present findings, perform muscle testing demonstrations, and, presumably, argue about the intricacies of their craft. The conferences have since dissolved, largely due to the mentor’s erratic behavior, which culminated in an affair with a patient and subsequent license suspension.
M. is someone who I admire a great deal, perhaps even more than Dr. R. and definitely more than the mentor. He’s a sort-of family friend who my mother first started seeing in the early 2000s, when he was married to the sister of one of her artist friends (they’ve since separated). It was only recently that she rediscovered his practice, as certain health issues resurfaced and she was desperate for a different opinion.
Unlike some of his peers, M. takes a more theoretical approach to his craft, regarding the inherent contradictions of the healing process1 as a dialectic that must be embraced. Since meeting, we’ve struck up an unusual friendship, sparked by a shared interest in Zen Buddhism and largely maintained over email.
Our most recent exchange happened early last year, when I was having a sort of mental break (likely induced by reading too much New Age literature) and hadn’t yet returned to seeing Dr. R.
Following the usual truisms on the importance of meditation and seeing life as an unfolding lotus blossom, he wrote: “to be born a human is the greatest blessing, and also to be thrust into hell.”2
An example of this might be accepting a traumatic event while also seeking to integrate it into one’s life. This can be achieved through inner child work, meditation, visualization exercises, etc.
Paraphrasing his guru, Sri Chinmoy. He continues: “The blessing [is] to have transformational experiences, and to manifest something from the aspiring soul. And of course, this is incredibly hard.”
Video stills courtesy of Dr. Robert Morrison.