Recently I met a young personal trainer and bodybuilder, clearly bright and very much into his art and its contemporary science. In his attempts to bring his body to the peak of balance, he told me how careful he was to work equally with his right and left, exercising both sides the same, one for one. He had extended this to his daily life, alternating the hands with which he brushed his teeth, which leg he put into his trousers first, and even – forgive me, but it shows the depth of his dedication – wiping his ass alternately.
I wonder how this is going to work out for him. For one thing, is it possible to so equalize one’s life? Does he, for instance, have an English car that he drives on alternate days, so that his shifting alternates with his steering? And even English cars have the accelerator under your right foot with the brake to the left, as with American cars. Like it or not, the world is made for right handed and right-footed people, and equality is probably as elusive in the somatic world as it is in the cultural. Though this guy is making a good stab at it.
I suspect that for this young man, it is his ‘Year of the…’, as I call it. For bodyworkers, it often manifests as a particular area of the body. “Tom, it’s the feet, it’s all in the feet, if only we got the feet right, everything would fall in the place, you should just teach the feet.” I smile indulgently down at them from the great height of my age: been there. I had my year of the feet, my year of the neck, my year of breathing (actually, that was at least three years, each a number of years apart, as I got into breathing at greater and greater depth).
But we all have these temporary but valuable enthusiasms. I too had my year of trying to balance right and left, or at least a long Engllish summer. My Rolfer® colleague and I went out on Primrose Hill looking over the London Zoo each evening after work for the endless twilight, throwing a Frisbee for hours exclusively with our left hand (we are both right handed). I certainly got better at throwing and catching with my non-dominant hand, but it was always a relief to return to the immediate skill and connection I have with my right hand.
I am strongly right handed, even though I am left-eyed. Likely there are native differences in the degree of such lateralization, my daughter is much more ambidextrous than either of her parents.
But lateralization is interesting in itself. If we look at the three major whole-body systems, our fibrous body (the musculo-skeletal system if you must, but that term is fascia-dissing) is actually the most anatomically symmetrical, each muscle and bone pattern is repeated right and left. The neural body – the nervous system taken as a whole – is anatomically symmetrical, but functionally lateralized, such that 10% or so are left-handed, south-pawed (and gauche and sinister as well). Set against the 90% of us who are right handed. The brain is clearly lateralized as the split-brain experiments and the reports of Oliver Sachs have so clearly shown us.
But the third whole body system – the vascular – is the most lateralized anatomically, in other words, the organ system. Nearly everyone has his stomach, heart and aorta on the left, and the liver, a larger lung and the ascending colon on the right. There are people who are reversed, a mirror image, all the same organs but right and left reversed – it is called situs inversus. Because not everyone is autopsied, we don’t really know how prevalent this is – estimates range from 1:10,000 to 1:25000. But either of these figures is far lower than the 90-10 ratio of lateralization in the nervous system alluded to above.
Early embryological twisting throws a lasso loop in the large intestine and swerves the liver right and the stomach and heart left, putting one half of the vagus nerve in front and the other half into the rear. This is a… – nay, this is the underlying asymmetry of the body, unavoidable, even desirable. You have to hang 27 feet of gut tube from 3 feet of spine, so some asymmetry is inevitable.
This organic asymmetry definitely accounts for the difference between the two domes of the diaphragm, and may account for the right hip anterior / left hip posterior anomaly seen in so many of our clients, and as yet unexplained (at least, to my satisfaction).
Often what I am going for in my clients who are unbalanced is not visual symmetry but a good functional marriage between their left and right sides.
So go, my friend, balance that neuro-muscular system for all you’re worth; it certainly looks good on you. But please understand that from the point of view of the ancient organic system beneath the muscles, your entire neuro-muscular chassis is just a convenient vehicle – a jet pack, so to speak – designed to get better food and better sex for this very asymmetrical tube who invented both your hands – whichever one is next – to wipe its nether end.