Anthroposophical Views

The sound of a butterfly's wings

Dora Wagner

There’s a song in all things swinging / Lost in dreams and still unheard. / And the world breaks forth in singing / If only you choose the magic word. (Joseph von Eichendorff)

"Oh, if only it were always like this and I could stop time." This cherished wish in a moment of leisurely relaxation contrasts with that heartfelt sigh when we run out of breath: "I wish the day had more than 24 hours!" We all experience challenges and pressures in our daily lives, burdened by that widespread stress— scientifically, ‘dysstress’ —that can make us sick in the long run. Your heart is swimming in your chest, you have no appetite, your hands get clammy. These are definitely stress reactions. Yet that's exactly how it feels when you've just fallen in love, and which of us would avoid that experience just because hormones set our bodies on alert? On the contrary, we are impatient; highly tense until that desired moment arrives, then wishing it would last forever and never end. And there it is— that positive, good stress that focusses our attention and energy on accomplishing exactly what is of greatest importance to us. It can make us perform at our best, be inspired and successful. This ‘eustress’ does not harm us, but gives us wings, activating our strengths. Dedicating yourself with passion and enthusiasm, acting almost non-stop and yet with great energy, getting the job done— this is not an experience you have while sunbathing on a deck chair.

Our autonomic nervous system oscillates in a temporal process, moving back and forth between tension and relaxation, between activation and inhibition, between eustress and distress. Stress is a physiological adaptation of our organism to internal and external demands. Whether a demand evokes eu- or dys-stress depends not only on unconscious and reflexive processes, but also on our individual socialisation (Opalka, 2015). In the hustle and bustle of today's world, with all the demands of life and work, there are many occasions to feel overwhelmed or unwell. Every fear, every tension, every grief, every overload we experience is reflected in physical symptoms— shortness of breath, distractedness, rapid pulse, hypertension, sweating, insomnia, diarrhoea, a tense posture that invites back pain. What a pleasure it is to find ourselves in situations of ‘flow’, where our thoughts or activities run smoothly in the here and now, when hours pass like minutes, where we are absorbed in what we are doing, oblivious to worry, neither overstrained nor bored.

Reactions to stress are controlled by the central nervous system's connection to the immunologically important hormones of the adrenal glands and gonads. Disturbances of fundamental rhythms, such as the sleep-wake rhythm, have a negative effect on health. They directly affect our immune system, impairing its ability to deal with stress. This suggests that stressful experiences can also decisively damage our immune system by shifting or overriding internal rhythms. Understanding the importance of these rhythms is the ambition of chronobiology, which examines the temporal organization of physiological processes and the repeated behavioural patterns of living beings. For those ‘internal clocks’ to function, an ongoing resonance between inner and outer rhythms has to be established continually, being especially responsive to the cosmic periodicity of day, month and year. As the Earth rotates on its axis, environmental conditions such as the amount of light, temperature, and availability of food, change rhythmically. To improve their survival advantage, organisms adapt to such profound changes. There is a permanent interaction between the external signals of the environment and the internal systems of the organism. With scant exception, all terrestrial organisms have evolved to accord with periodic processes in our solar system (Hildebrandt, 2021)— like our 24-hour rhythm of sleeping and waking. Air travellers, in particular, notice how important it is to synchronise their sleep-wake rhythms with the external signals of their environment— when crossing several time zones within a few hours, our internal clock gets out of synch. The most common complaints of jetlag are sleep disturbances, fatigue, dizziness, mood swings, loss of appetite and reduced performance in physical, manual and cognitive tasks. These symptoms usually seem to disappear after a few days, yet objectively measurable parameters— such as body temperature and hormone levels —only adjust after a longer period of time. For some people, shifting the clock for one hour from summer to wintertime can require several days of readjustment before their normal sleep pattern is restored. This is because the biological processes of metabolism and the maintenance of homeostasis— together with the corresponding hormonal, temperature, and energy cycles, including the female menstrual cycle —are fundamentally cyclical or rhythmic, characterised by the periodic alternation of intake and excretion, expenditure and regeneration. Periodic balance is also found in all recurring states of want, need, drive and satisfaction— think of hunger, thirst, and movement.

Virtually all species— humans, animals and plants —have evolved cellular oscillations and mechanisms to synchronise with environmental cycles. In the plant kingdom, internal timers anticipate photoperiodic environmental stimuli, such as light and temperature, telling the plant when to grow, and when to flower for the best chance of attracting pollinators. Leaf movement, growth, germination, stomatal/gas exchange, enzyme activity, photosynthetic activity, and fragrance emission, and many other plant behaviours all show responsiveness to these rhythms (Hut & Beersma, 2011). The earliest Western observations of a plant’s circadian cycle date back to the 4th Century BC, when Androsthenes, a ship captain in the service of Alexander the Great, described the diurnal leaf movements of the Tamarind tree (Tamarindus indica) (Bretzl, 1903). In 1729, the geophysicist and chronobiologist Jean Jacques d’Ortous de Mairan noticed the leaves of the Mimosa (Mimosa pudica) opened towards the sun during daytime and closed at dusk. He wondered what would happen if the plant was placed in constant darkness. Surprisingly, he found that the leaves continued to follow their normal daily oscillation and concluded that plants have their own biological clocks (De Mairan, 1729). In his Philosophia Botanica of 1751, Linnaeus described three groups of flowering plants that adapt their opening and closing times to cosmic conditions, including what he called the ‘aequinoctales’, or flowers with fixed daily time windows for pollination (Freer, 2005). How this internal rhythm worked remained a mystery until the early 1980s when Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash, and Michael W. Young discovered a ‘clock gene’ in all living organisms that encodes a protein accumulating in the cell at night and degrading during the day (Cha, 2017). Their ‘Discoveries of Molecular Mechanisms Controlling the Circadian Rhythm’ in which they explained how plants, animals and humans adjust their biological rhythms so that they are synchronised with the revolutions of the Earth, won the Nobel Prize in 2017.

From an anthroposophical perspective, the rhythmic and balancing processes of respiration and circulation are connected to our emotional life. The rhythmic system, represented by the heart and the lungs, is seen as the primal source of balance and wellbeing. Similarly, in many ancient cultures, breathing exercises form the basis of meditative and healing practices. Our inner rhythm is generated and communicated to the rest of our body, so positive activation is seen as primarily working from the soul. Health is a mastery of rhythm— the ability to resonate with the world and its demands and to adapt and transform conditions according to one's own beat. A loss of rhythm is considered one of the main causes of disease. In his lectures, Steiner describes those processes that follow the rhythms of both the human and the social organisms as an interplay of spirit and matter. Balanced rhythm and healing repetitions in professional, social and private life are seen as important prerequisites to well-being and health. Eurhythmie— a rhythmic dance therapy —and Rhythmical Massage— a specific physiotherapy —are anthroposophical therapies designed to initiate and to accompany recovery processes.

Steiner once advised the young chemist Dr Rudolf Hauschka to, "Study the rhythms, rhythm carries the life". In the preparation of medicines, anthroposophical pharmacy works with various methods that take into account not only individual processes in our bodies, but the perpetuation of rhythmic cycles in nature, harvesting different parts of a plant (leaf, flower, fruit, root) according to the seasonal cycle. In order to maintain a particularly high quality of plant extract and to synchronize the rhythms and the essence of the herbs with those of our organism, special emphasis is placed on sophisticated manufacturing procedures known as ‘rhythmisation’, or ‘Rh methods’. ‘Rhtinctures’, for example, are prepared from crushed fresh plants or pressed juice by a fermentation process that follows diurnal light-dark rhythms by alternating temperatures of 37°C and 4°C in a corresponding warm-cold rhythm. In homeopathic preparations— which, depending on the dilution, may no longer contain plant molecules —a repetitive, ‘triadic procedure’ is used. This follows a strictly defined, three-phase sequence of ‘weighing and diluting’, ‘rhythmizing’ and ‘resting’. In this way, the healing substances are believed to be imprinted with memory and information that resonates with the human body. These complex manufacturing processes are designed to preserve the powers of nature and the effects of the herbs. The products are made without preservatives and some even without alcohol. Both the production and the consumption of the medicine follows an alternative medical method, in which rhythm is integral parts to treatment.

It seems to me that in elementary vital, natural, pre-reflexive life, processes and time move cyclically—perhaps as in flowing waters; in circles, lemniscates, spirals, waves and whirls, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, in an eternal back and forth. And this also seems to apply to our own experience. Our lives do not appear to run in a straight line, strung out from minute to minute. Perhaps this is why we sometimes seem to be spinning in circles but can also be sure that after a downward slide, things will start to look up again, or why sometimes we be timeless, existing only in the here and now. As far as I know, we humans are the only species that can reflect on our deep dependency and interconnectedness with our fellow world. Hence, in my eyes, our central mission should be to sensitively improve both our resonance and resilience; to remain healthy despite adverse life circumstances, to find constructive solutions to persistent stresses, and even to cope with traumatic experiences. We ought to be aware of how we can build these capacities more strongly. We should reflect on our vulnerability and our commitment to environmental conditions, our responsibility for our wellbeing and the preservation of our livelihoods. Perhaps it would be wise to pay more attention to the manifold rhythms and magical beats of our world and to dance in harmony with all flourishing life.

Images: Adapted by Dora Wagner from Creative Commons

References: Bretzl, H. (1903) Botanische Forschungen des Alexanderzuges. Leipzig: Teubner Cha, A. E. (2017) "Nobel in physiology, medicine awarded to three Americans for discovery of 'clock genes'", article in The Washington Post (2.10. 2017). Retrieved October 4, 2021. De Mairan, J.J.O. (1729) Observation Botanique, Histoire de l'Academie Royale des Sciences, Paris Freer, S. (2005) Linnaeus' Philosophia Botanica, Oxford University Press Hildebrandt, G. et al (2021) Chronobiologie und Chronomedizin–Bioögische Rhythmen und Medizinische Konsequenzen, Graz Hut, R.A. and Beersma, D.G. (2011) ‘Evolution of time-keeping mechanisms: early emergence and adaptation to photoperiod’, in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, 366 (1574): 2141–54

Opalka, M. (2015) An- und Entspannung im Rhythmus (Rhythmic tension and relaxation), Karl F. Haug Verlag in MVS Medizinverlage Stuttgart GmbH & Co. KG von Eichenorff, J. (1835) Wünschelrute (‘Dowsing rod’), tr. Dora Wagner