The body unravels like an onion
You just keep peeling back layers of compensations over time
Some folks have asked me why they feel like old symptoms resurface for periods of time as they do this process.
And in some cases it can worry them. As it might be an old pain in the knee or the lower back or something.
But usually it’s gone within a week or so.
And my view is that this is because the body compensates and uncompensates like an onion.
When you are compensating (ie. getting worse) you are putting on layers. And when you’re uncompensating, as you should be when you’re doing Reviv, you will be removing layers.
And be ready for lots and lots of layers!
Let me now explain.
The onion of compensations
I’d heard this onion metaphor before many years ago and i’m forgetting where exactly… but it has definitely held true in my experience.
As i’d unwind with this mouthguard biomechanical process some old injuries & tightnesses would resurface.
For example i’d always felt tight in my left shoulderblade like 20 yrs ago and for a short while this tightness came back like a year ago.
Or my knee would feel a bit tight the way it did many years ago. Then it would go away after a week or so.
It gave me the sense that these compensations were like layers that the body had wrapped on for its own protection when it was collapsing.
And so the body is kind of trained to just keep compensating to survive. Till one day these compensations lead to a serious illness, which in turn results in death.
This explains many things people have experienced
When I hear people describe their own health history I often get reminded of this onion metaphor.
They will say things like…
“I had a lot of tightness in my left shoulder but then I did this XYZ treatment and it miraculously went away.”
Or “I had pain in my lower back for years but then finally it just went away.”
Or “I started seeing this great doctor who got rid of my XYZ tightness.”
The reality in the vast majority of these cases was that they never actually got rid of them. In fact they did not even get better. Rather they were covered over.
The body had just continued compensating in order to turn the signals off to that old problem. And so the person thinks they got rid of it when in fact it was covered by another compensation layer.
The logic in this becomes evident as you unravel
As you do this process and these old issues reappear you will typically also experience things that finally ‘let go’.
For example my left calf is sore for a few days now. The calf muscle had probably been shortened for many many years and finally my skeleton has unwound in a way that is allowing it to stretch a bit.
And I bet that it’s not done. My skeleton will continue to unwind and perhaps in 6 months the muscle will be sore again.
I’ve seen this logic play out many many times with my body during this process.
It’s often not a “one and done.” Rather you might go thru mini-releases in the same area many times over a several year period.
The body unwinds relatively slowly.
And trust me that is a good thing!
Slow is good
Many people doing this process want to be done quickly. The reality is that it will take the vast majority of folks many years to finish.
Because their skeleton has probably tacked on LOTS of compensation layers.
It took many years to go thru all of those compensations. And it will take a very long time to take them off.
Imagine if it really was quick. Imagine that you could have a horribly compensated skeleton and unwind it all to perfection in just a year.
What would that mean?
Well that would likely mean that you could also damage your body just as quickly. Physics works both ways after all!
And that would be a very bad thing.
So it seems to me that the body has found a way to compensate very slowly… which is why your average human will live to at least 70 or 80 years old. The body just smartly keeps compenating to survive.
And if that were not the case…. then theoretically you could have some bad orthodontics or extractions done… and boom you’re dead in a year.
That is what I think would happen if the body did not work like an onion but rather worked in a more direct collapse like a building collapsing.
And the flipside to that is… it’s going to take a long time to keep rolling back all of these compensation layers.
Closing thoughts
I consider that i fully understood the rules to this biomechanical process in late 2021 and have been on a pretty straight line trajectory since.
It has therefore been about 4.5 years.
Which is a long time and i’m not even done. I hope to finish this year, but we’ll see. I’ve stopped making predictions about it.
Whereas when I did this process the first time around 2016 I feel like I got to the ‘soft tissue end’ a lot faster.
The difference?
Well… i think i’d tacked on a lot more compensation layers in some of those intervening years. Especially in parts of 2019-20 when i was in hard collapse from having left a posterior open bite unsupported.
My neck, for example, was in far worse shape in 2021 than it was in 2016.
And so i’ve learned about these compensation layers the hard way.
But it has also intuitively taught me that you can just keep taking these layers off… till you are pretty much perfect again (health, aesthetics, function, etc).
And that is my positive message to you.
It will take a long time… but there is almost no truly ‘permanent’ damage to the body in my experience. It’s all just tucked away in a deeper layer that you haven’t yet gotten to.
i see the body shrinking and collapsing as its way to preserve resources and conserve lifeforce. the less strain it can take, the more it needs to wrap around itself to support itself. it makes itself smaller, move less, reduce energy output so it can conserve, save, preserve. muscles tighten, fascia bunches up, joints stiffen so that the body can support itself without having to expend more energy. invariably, this also puts pressure on the organs and the skull.
which is why when the body heals, things soften, open, loosen expand. there is more energy because the body recognises that it can afford to support more energy. very curious phenomenon in that my weight and body fat is quite similar to six months ago, but my activity levels and food intake has both gone up.
wonder how much damage people who use energy-'boosters' to be more productive are causing themselves. they lack energy because their body can't produce enough - trying to push and extract more from an engine at its limit just accelerates its decline. i suspect western doctors also know this, but since they have no solution, they can't just tell their patients to 'just be less productive lol'.
some taoists teach that most people can only have health or wealth. you can trade health for wealth, or keep your health by not chasing wealth. only those who have a high level of self-cultivation (basically wisdom and spiritual development) can have both, but those people need to go through significant early hardship to acquire said development.
Great timing for this article, as I've been wondering about just this topic of old symptoms seeming to come up since I started using the mouthguards recently, and I haven't had much time to dive into Skool. Thanks for the clarification!