muscle testing
Muscle Testing or Kinesiology is a way to access our deepest wisdom in the service of our healing and growth.
Muscle testing is a simple process where we ask the body yes/no questions. We evaluate a muscle as “strong” or “weak” when we test it, meaning that we ask you to hold your muscle locked and we apply a force against it. For one answer, typically “yes,” when we press on a muscle, typically the arm, the muscle stays strong, and, no matter how hard we press, the arm stays like steel. For the other answer, typically “no,” when we press on the muscle, it relaxes, and, no matter how softly we press and no matter how much we try to keep the arm up, it relaxes and goes down. MT, therefore, is set up in a binary mode. The two outcomes of strong and weak represent opposing realities; a yes answer or a no answer is obtained each time a muscle is tested. A series of muscle tests with yes or no answers can convey a significant amount of useful information which may never have been available to us otherwise.
The Basis of Muscle Testing
In order to understand the basis for muscle testing and why it is so useful, we first have to understand that there are three different levels of wisdom that we can access: conscious, unconscious and body.
1.) Conscious
We all know what we mean when we talk about our conscious level of wisdom. It is the level of what we know and what we can figure out. It soon becomes clear that this level can’t encompass all that we could know. Suppose we come to a healer for relieving our chronic neck pain that has been unresponsive to treatment. If the healer asks us, “What is the cause of your neck pain and what are you to do about it?” We might say to him, “Heck if I know. If I knew I wouldn’t be coming to see you.” So we can know that this level is very limited indeed. Arbitrarily, we will give this level of wisdom the numeric value of one.
2.) Unconscious
This is the level of wisdom that comes to us usually unbidden through symbols. We might open to this level of wisdom through dreams, visions, synchronicities, which are coincidences that we suspect might not be coincidences at all, or “slips of the tongue.” We know that this level of wisdom has to be deeper than the level of our conscious minds. The reason for this is that our rational, left-brain, logical minds cannot make sense of these wisdoms in any kind of deep/meaningful ways. If we give the conscious level of wisdom the value of one, this level of wisdom we could proportionately give the value of the speed of light.
3.) Body
There is an even deeper level of wisdom than the one we call unconscious. There are a lot of good words for this level in the East: chi, ki, prana, shakti. In the West, there are not so many words for this level of wisdom; we might call it a spirit level of wisdom, or the wisdom and energy that animates the body, our life force, our deepest intuitive knowing.
If we have never believed that we have experienced the body level of wisdom how might we know it exists?
An Invitation
Recall a time when you heard an inner voice that said, “Yes,” and you followed this voice and said “yes” to life. You knew in some way, beyond logical knowing, that you had touched your fundamental truth. How did you know?
Our Experience
Most everyone describes this experience in a similar way; they describe it as a felt sense. To put it directly, we might say that it wasn’t that we figured something out; it wasn’t that we had an emotion about it; we just knew. It is that gut sense, that deepest cellular knowing, that we are talking about when we talk about the body level of wisdom.
Allowing for the possibility that the physics and the metaphysics are exactly the same, if we arbitrarily give our conscious level of knowing the value of one, and our unconscious knowing the value of the speed of light, we could say that this level has the value of the speed of light squared.
What is the Value of Body-based Knowing?
In the context of healing, this level knows all of the stories that we need to discover in the service of our healing and what to do to make our healing complete. It is this level that is not traumatized by life’s events, but sees them as an opportunity for evolution.
How Can We Access This Body-based Knowing?
We can do something that on the face of it may seem very strange, we can ask our bodies to be a means of communication for it.
What does this mean?When we ask you a question and you answer with your mouth, is it your mouth that is answering the question? It seems clear that the answer is no, that the mouth is a means of communication (a mouthpiece) mainly for our conscious minds. In a like manner, when we get answers through the body, it is not the body that is answering the question; the body becomes a means of communication or a “bodypiece” for our deepest intuitive knowing. We can literally ask our bodies questions and our bodies can give answers.
Why Does Muscle Testing Work?
To understand why muscle testing works, we need to again consider the three levels of wisdom. When we are muscle tested,
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we consciously try to hold our arm up (one vote),
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our facilitator is consciously trying to push our arm down (one vote)
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our deepest level of wisdom is responding with an essentially infinite number of votes. The response of the muscle of our arm, staying strong or going weak, reflects our deepest wisdom’s answer to the question we are asking.
As we can see, the conscious mind, which we believe is running the show, has in fact very little power. It does in the end get to choose one thing. It gets to choose if it will be in alignment with Spirit. This is “free will.”