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Anthroposophical Views - Dora Wagner
iii: Anthroposophical Views
The healing gifts of warmth and air
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Dora Wagner
‘The air that I breathe’, Albert Hammond for The Hollies
"Learn how to float," my father told me when helping me to become a swimmer. This advice has stayed with me all my life. Now it lifts me up during challenging situations, reminding me to take a deep breath and, thereby, relax. The ability to hold my breath kept me very busy as a little girl, competing to see who could stay underwater the longest. Only when exhausted did I learn to value breathing and cooperation above competition. They say a person may survive three weeks without food, three days without hydration, but only three minutes without oxygen. Our respiration, along with warming and caring interpersonal affection, is the very precondition of our existence.
A healthy adult breathes about 25,000 times a day, and up to 15 times per minute. Fortunately, we usually don't have to think about it. Even when we are stressed or excited, we are sometimes unaware that our breathing is changing, yet our cortisol levels shoot up, our muscles contract and our respiration becomes shorter, shallower and no longer comes from its happy place, the diaphragm. Practising slow, deep, belly-breathing can turn our proinflammatory stress into calm. That is much harder when wearing an anti-Covid mask, so we need to learn how to keep our airways healthy and protect ourselves from infection, so that we can all breathe a little easier.
Anthroposophical medicine’s tripartite perspective describes the ‘rhythmic system’, the central part of our organism, constantly working to balance the ‘metabolic-limb’ and the ‘nervous-sense’ systems. It is primarily located in the chest area, regulating the rhythm of breath and blood circulation; the heart and the lungs sharing the task, down to the pulmonary bubbles which supply the entire organism. If we spread out the cell layer of our 300 million alveoli side by side, they could cover the floor of an average three-room flat. Thanks to these 100 square metres of gasexchanging tissue, all cells of our body are constantly supplied with sufficient oxygen, even during hard physical exertion.
In anthroposophy, however, breathing is not only understood physically, but also emotionally and spiritually. In the rhythmic change of inspiration and expiration, we interact in a figurative sense with the world outside: in withdrawal and encounter, dejection and elation, motion and standstill, rejection and affection, allowing and avoiding, holding and letting flow, keeping and letting go, receiving and giving away, excreting and ingesting, sleeping and waking. Anthroposophy even describes a ‘sensory breathing’, where sight is understood as something that guides us into the world, hearing as something that leads the world into us. These two polar sensory qualities are visible in the archetypal symbol of Jupiter as ear and crosshairs (GAÄD, 2021). Tin, a very soft, silvery metallic element with the chemical symbol Sn (Lat. Stannum) is, according to occult tradition, one of the seven planetary metals associated with Jupiter. In anthroposophical hospitals, stannous preparations are being used to treat people suffering from severe Covid-19 conditions, with some success. Evidence shows the virus not only hindering our physical breathing, but also restricting our overall exchange with our environment and our sensory perception— for example, by making us less able to taste and to smell (Wilkens et al., 2021).
The rhythmic system is considered the most essential physical tool both of our emotional life and our language. Every mood change, every joy, every sorrow is reflected in a slight change in breathing, in an accelerating or decelerating heartbeat. Just as every physically induced change in breathing and heart rate is immediately reflected in our emotional life, so it colours our way of speaking.
In 1979, Antonovsky coined the term ‘Salutogenesis’, from the Latin ‘salus’, meaning ‘health’, and the Greek ‘genesis’, meaning ‘origin’. The term emerged from Antonovsky’s (1979) socio-medical research, in which he interviewed Israeli survivors of Nazi concentration camps. He reached to the unexpected conclusion that almost 30% of the women interviewed were in good health and enjoyed well-being, despite their unbearable experiences. He surmised that three basic attitudes seemed to promote overall health.
The first is the ‘sense of comprehensibility’: the ability to treat even unfamiliar stimuli as ordered, consistent and structured information. The second— the feeling of manageability’ — describes a person’s ability to solve difficulties and to perceive the availability of suitable resources. Thirdly, the ‘sense of meaningfulness’ is the extent to which a person is able to integrate the ups and downs of experience into a view of life as emotionally meaningful. Within Salutogenesis, health is not seen as being free of complaints, but as being able to cope with them in such a way as to consistently create subjective well-being. Health is not a temporary state of well-being or an absence of disease, but an ongoing process of establishing one’s own well-being. Antonovsky (1997) deduces a person can never be entirely healthy, nor entirely sick, but will always be constituted of both healthy and sick parts. He employs the metaphor of a ‘river of life’— one cannot stroll along the banks, but in moving through the midst of the stream we must each be met with forks, currents and even dangerous rapids and swirls. We are all just trying to become better swimmers in the waters of life.
Instead of the pathogenic approach, which treats us as drowning victims to be rescued at great expense, nothing strengthens our resilience and boosts our immune system better than interpersonal affection and compassionate warmth. Especially in these pandemic times, it is important that we care for and support each other, but also that we are aware of and share our creativity and resources to dispel the things that weigh us down and make us feel frightened. In the spirit of Salutogenesis, my 91-year-old mother started blowing up several balloons every day to exercise her lungs, while my aunt gargles a freshly brewed Sage (Salvia officinalis) tea every morning to strengthen her resistance.
Conscious care of the throat and everything that supports the self-cleaning powers of our respiratory tract can make a significant contribution to ensuring as few microorganisms as possible reach our lungs and cause inflammatory reactions there. The respiratory tract has extremely effective selfcleaning mechanisms. Its walls consist of cells with tiny cilia, covered with a thin layer of mucus. These hairs move in a circular synchronicity, comparable to a conveyor belt, transporting the mucus slowly from the bronchial tubes upwards into the pharynx. To ensure this cell-driven conveyor does not come to a stop, the mucus must not be too viscous or the layer of fluid too thick (Vogel, 2020). Mucolytic and expectorant herbal remedies can be very helpful here and can also be used preventively.
In anthroposophical medicine, extracts of Purple Coneflowers (Echinacea purpurea) strengthen human warmth, whilst Scotch Marigold (Calendula officinalis) and Sage (Salvia officinalis) enhance resilience against pathogenic microorganisms. Pneumodoron is an anthroposophical remedy for febrile bronchitis containing homeopathic extracts of Aconitum napellus (Monkshood) and Bryonia alba (White Bryony) that can also be taken preventatively to support pulmonary function (Soldner & Breitkreuz, 2020). Yarrow (Achillea millefolium) and Ginger (Zingiber officinale) are particularly suitable for external application as moist, warm compresses. An early afternoon or evening Yarrow liver compress, once a day, three times a week, is beneficial for exhausted people with weakened vitality, sleep disturbances, reduced appetite, and weak digestive activity.
Nervous, hypersensitive individuals, who tend to feel cold, appreciate a morning Ginger kidney compress once a day, three times a week. This not only helps to improve organ function, but can bestow a durable strengthening of inner warmth, clear relaxation and, sometimes, a reduction in anxiety (Soldner & Breitkreuz, 2020).
Since ‘all healing originates from breathing’ (GAÄD; 2021), it is of particular importance right now to inhale and exhale mindfully, to stay closely connected with nature and with one another, to breathe our manifold competences into a common treasury in order to creatively deal with the breathlessness and lack of warmth of our currently situation. Possibly the most precious gift in times of physical distancing is to keep in touch with those close to your heart and, despite any obstacles that may exist, to be grateful for each and every positive response as you breathe into the world.
Images: Dora Wagner. Collages created from common, free materials and with kind permission of www.delft.care and innovationorigins.com
References Antonovsky, A. (1979) Health, stress, and coping. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Antonovsky, A. (1997) Salutogenese— zur Entmystifizierung der Gesundheit. Deutsche erweiterte Herausgabe von Alexa Franke, dgvt-Verlag Tübingen GAÄD (2021) Ostertagung (Easter conference) Soldner, G. & Breitkreuz, T. (2020) COVID-19’, online article, in Anthromedics www.anthromedics.org. Accessed 26.04.21. Vogel, V. (2020) ‘How to Further Reduce the Risk of Serious COVID-19 Infections’, Laboratory of Applied Mechanobiology, Institute of Translational Medicine, Department for Health. ETH: Zürich, Switzerland. Wilkens, J. & Meyer, F. (2021) ‘Corona natürlich behandeln; Covid-19 ganzheitlich verstehen, vorbeugen, heilen’ (‘Treating Corona Naturally; Understanding, Preventing, Healing Covid-19 Holistically’). Pamphlet. Aaarau: Switzerland
