The construction of physical and emotional health

Introduction

Thirty years ago I joined the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (National Autonomous University of Mexico) as a teacher of psychology. As a result of spreading the education project in the context of the government of Luis Echeverría, were created the Escuelas Nacionales de Estudios Profesionales Aragón, Acatlán, Cuautitlán, Iztacala y Zaragoza (National School of Professional Studies Aragon, Acatlan, Cuautitlan, Iztacala and Zaragoza). I studied in Iztacala and then I settled down there.

Years later those schools became Faculties and they remain the same up to now. This comes about because in 1978, was the behaviourist hegemony school and did not allow other thoughts or psychological theories on campus, while the population increased demands on their conditions, economic and cultural poverty seemed to have no limit, today there are millions who still lack access to health, culture, housing, recreation, etc.

We can not say that they have access to their body, their processes and messages that build on these days the threat of death in the disputes of drug markets nationally and internationally for groups of drug traffickers and political power, the anxiety and the culture of fear have taken over the body and no matter the social status the transformation of family and personal life is real hard to hide, that resulted in new patients, with bodies full of allergies, psychosomatic problems, chronic degenerative diseases, cancer, sleep disorders, gynecological problems, sexual identity issues, depression, anorexia, bulimia, among many others, the social reality makes us more and more artificial. We move away from our nature and live mental ideas we build or were built by the mass media, the representation of life, we are filled with worldly desires that never end, therefore, we cultivate the suffering and so even though we have no physical condition, we have an emotional condition because we have a desire, we want to have more or care more about what we have, the case is that we enter into a dynamic of pain for desire and then we build a condition. It was very much reality for a behavioral theory, which presented its first crisis in the year 1981. We wanted to change the curriculum but nothing was done. The import of psychological models was in crisis, its epistemological and philosophical explanations did not correspond with the emergence of our reality, fewer strategies to solve the psychological problems of Mexicans who cannot learn or receive therapy while they are hungry or unemployed.

This means that the human body is going to build alternatives to protect life, the presence of self-regulatory mechanism in us a chance to think about other alternatives, think about that possibility when there was no solution to the orthodoxy of a psychology that just wants condition or verbalize.

While the patient cannot find a way out of his body process that does not understand, because it crosses the guilt and sin and feels punished, we find a body is entering a new response for survival, therefore, must have its history, was not the result of divine punishment, nor was evolution, less a machine, we found it a body-building process that relates to the history of the society in which we live, the culture of physical neglect, with the depreciation of not deserving anything, with the loss of affection and esteem, it weighs in memory that we are no good for nothing and that we are an inferior race, finding that with ancestors is a severe shock, keeping out of the emotional state that is said that we are a sad country reason why we eat too much spicy (chile). What psychology could give us another look to solve or prevent physical, psychological and psychosomatic problems of our patients, none gave us a viable, all aimed at specialization and fragmentation of the human being, so it had to be trained academically in other fields of knowledge, we seek national history, literature, alternative medicine, acupuncture, anthropology, philosophy, epistemology, work with the body moving cellular and emotional memory, zazen meditation, among other things and we started to apply them to patients, there were good results, hence derive the need to theorize about the etiology of psychosomatic problems, which are increasing, along with cancer and chronic degenerative diseases.

Performing the work of deep reflection of body process demanded to create its history, how it is instituted in a society and become “normal” in the eyes of generations, to unravel the process made us get out of the canon of psychological science that only search stimuli or causes and use other disciplines such as history, oral history, anthropology, acupuncture as a theoretical model, philosophy and epistemology to build another interpretation of the process in front of us, a body with multiple choices of notice. Our first explanation was to differentiate between categories of body and corporal for contending that the subject makes the process of building a space, geography, culture, religion, food systems, a family history and last but not least their body also builds solutions to conditions of danger to the life of the body. To discover and document this reality, took us several years, we made the history of psychology in Mexico, the history of the body, documentation and illustration of the corporal and psychosomatic process, we have come to volume VII, we create workplaces, try to illustrate this fact in many ways, in newspapers, in stories, novels, life stories, many senior thesis, master’s and doctorate, as a result of that background the texts were born and make up this book. I made an arrangement out of sequence in production, I made three sections in the first one named The background, I try to answer that question, why do the subject of the body, secondly, The problem shows the vision of work and its epistemology in a kind of interpreting the corporal (physical) that manages to look beyond frontiers to positivism, the third, I named; The explanation and solution, I try to go to the daily part of the body that named psychosomatic can be found in any area of the body and to culminate a work with diabetic women. Thus, the paperworks are a sample of the process that I discovered in practice and theory, as they were scattered in different books and hard to find, some sold out. I brought them together in a way that allow a kind of synthesis, to understand our theoretical proposal and I would not like to detach them now, I think it’s better for the reader to reveal his own truth, make his own judgments and expressions, and say, “this is me” or “how do you know”, if that happens I think I will have fulfilled my mission.

Zendo Teotihuacán

Winter 2011