Quotes from Deane Juhan

Calcification At a certain point in the cartilage's development (and this moment is different for different bones in the body), the chondroblast cells, which have been secreting cartilage, undergo a physical and functional change. They expand in size, stop producing cartilage, and begin to secrete the chemicals which precipitate into crystals the dissolved mineral salts delivered by the blood.

It is important to remember that in its simplest form the nervous system is merely a mechanism by which a muscular movement can be initiated by some change in the peripheral sensation, say, an object touching the skin.

The primary job of the muscles, even in a body at rest, is to stabilize our structure and keep our joints from slipping apart. And in addition, muscle cells themselves will not thrive without a certain level of constant stimulation from their nerves.

Since any muscle cell will eventually reach a state of exhaustion—a depletion of available ATP—if it is kept constantly firing and working, one of the primary tasks of neuromuscular coordination is to maintain this overall tension set without exhausting any one cell. This is accomplished by a firing pattern called asynchronous stimulation, which alternates the working tonus contraction from motor unit to motor unit, so that some are always engaged while others are resting.

Helping to correct the solipsistic tendencies of abstract contemplation is one of the most important roles of bodywork.

It is difficult to imagine a stream that flows two directions at the same time, but this is just what the nervous system does. The failure to sufficiently appreciate this unity of seeming opposites leads us into separating too absolutely afferent from efferent, sensation from behavior, attitude from activity. And this leads us in turn into forgetting how powerfully touch, sensation, continually alters internal conditions and overt behavior.

There is another mechanism which even further selects and distorts incoming sensory information, and which is extremely important to the therapeutic purposes of bodywork. Side-by-side with the ascending dorsal and spinothalamic pathways are descending sensory pathways, outgoing tracts from the brain which are not efferent, which do not contact motor neurons, but which synapse densely with the ascending sensory pathways and exert a centrifugal flow against their incoming sensory information.

The Golgi tendon organs are found among the collagen bundles of the tendons, in the border zone where the muscle fibers are attached to the tendons. Although they are located in the connective tissue of the tendon rather than in the midst of the muscle cells, they are, like the spindles, minute gauges for the efforts of the alpha muscle fibers.

And as with the sensory elements of the motor spindles, the pathways carrying the sensory information from the Golgis are culminated in the ganglia of the brain stem, with very few direct connections to the conscious cortical areas. We normally receive no more conscious sensation from the Golgis than we do from the muscle spindles; their information is processed and responded to primarily in the brain stem and the spinal cord, beneath our level of conscious awareness.

When we peer into the fine structures of their tissue, we discover that our muscles turn out to be full of sense organs, and very fine sense organs at that. The principle kind, the muscle spindles, are the most elaborate sensory structures in the body outside the eyes and ears.8

The principals in elegantly simple. We learn to love by being loved, we learn gentleness by being gentled, we learn to be graceful by experiencing the feeling of grace.