What can support medical challenges as diverse as:
prematurity
hayfever
poor wound healing capacity
eczema (especially when there is translucent
skin)
depressive episodes with lack of boundaries in all the senses
or, strong environmental sensitivity?
An important answer comes by looking at the starting point for how we meet and engage with the world around us. How do we interface with things? Are we too open? Are we too closed off?
What happens on the border of inside and outside, especially when we are asked to do too much, too soon (like a child born long before their due date, who then experiences residual high sensitivity and seems still “too open” to the world).
In many traditions, the fullness of life is seen as a series of seven differentiated steps. We work with this sevenfold all the time, such as speaking of seven colors in a rainbow, rotating through seven days in a week, even playing seven notes in a musical scale (with the 8th note really a repetition, variation, of the first).
Within anthroposophic medicine and Waldorf education, a helpful tool for looking at growth and learning is the seven “Life Processes.” They have a special order:
Breathing—Warming—Nourishing—Secreting—Maintaining—Growing—Reproducing
These seven steps are continually at work, whether transforming the substance from yesterday’s lunch or processing an important social or emotional encounter from last year which we are still trying to “digest.”
The First Life Process: “Breathing”
Breathing comes right at the beginning and it is easy to remember, because it’s the first thing we do in life—we breathe in! It’s also the first process that happens whenever we come into relation with something new—such as when we walk into a room, when we get ready to eat a meal, when we contemplate a change or begin to develop a new idea. Another way we could describe it is: “taking in.” There is a really interesting observation made by Rudolf Steiner, who described these life processes, that the way we are most connected to our environment is through the air. Not through our touch, not through our eating, but through our breath. We breathe in, we breathe out, continually encountering the air that is also being taken in and released by those around us. That idea might feel a little strange, or even invasive at first, but it points out how we constantly engage with the world, even if we are sitting quietly and not speaking, moving, or touching things.
“In the breathing process, our bodily life touches the outer world”
But “breathing,” as an archetypal process, goes far beyond the lungs. It happens wherever we meet something outside of ourselves and then start to adjust, so that what is outside can appropriately be taken into our own inner activities. A simple example is jetlag, where we have to work hard to integrate the (new) outer rhythm of light and dark with our existing inner rhythm. Waking and sleeping are, in fact, a kind “breathing" process for our wakeful activity.
Within anthroposophic medicine, there are a good ways to either stimulate or protect this boundary activity. Plants and substances that have a special silica content are one example. Different types of meditation, eurythmy and observation exercises are also interesting ways to work with better “breathing.”
To gain insight into your about your own “breathing” life process, try to answer these questions:
Do outside changes (season, rhythm, location) deeply affect your inner world? Do changing mealtimes throw off you digestion? How about daylight-savings time shifts?
Or, are you someone who is unphased by outer changes and does just fine with frequently changes? Are you unphased by most things?
A physiologic truth is that everyone tends to go in one direction or the other. That’s part of what makes us interesting and unique. As we will see, it’s also often the case that one (or more) life processes are the places that we find our biggest gifts, as well as sometimes our biggest challenges.
Next: Warming, as a life process…