Marta, Recovering from Polio with The Grinberg Method - Subtitled in 7 languages

I got Polio when I was 9 months old. I had two fevers and my mother thought it could be Polio. She took me to the doctor and doctor confirmed that I had Polio in my left arm and right leg. I wanted to be a normal girl, like all the other girls and I did not want anyone to notice my arm. I did not want people to know that my arm was thinner and that I could not move it. The doctors said my arm would always be like this because Polio is irreversible and that there is no cure, and it would never get better. So, the goal of the exercises was to maintain my arm, but there was nothing really that could be done. When I heard that I thought if there is nothing that can be done then there is nothing that can be done. My first experience with the Grinberg Method was because I had fallen and injured my knee and it was very painful. After a long time with this pain I could not take it anymore. The process with Teresa was so good that when I left and was on the way home I thought, "hey! this could be, I don't know, it could be good to work on my arm, something I never thought of". When Marta came for her first visit, the first thing I noticed was that she had an arm that she barely used. And I have never worked with Polio so I decided to consult Avi Grinberg, my teacher, and see if there was a possibility to help her before I promised her anything. I wanted to ask if her arm could really begin to function again, and if it can, to see if he could be a guide to show me how to help her. I chose to work with Martha as a part of a project for developing a methodology for nerve regeneration. This methodology is developing through the clients I am working with and Martha is one of them. After Martha was sick, she adapted to the idea that she has no arm, and in a way her brain wasn't interested in getting back the arm and also did not know how to do that. So what I did basically is to get it interested again in the arm and own it again. It is like it regressed or retreated from the arm and now it was working again to rebuild the connection. The first visit with Avi he saw lots of possibilities to heal the arm and he asked me how serious I was about working with Marta because it would take at least three sessions a week to heal her arm to normal use. My goal was to heal the arm so first I focused on the obstacles. When I started to do the sessions with Teresa my arm was very week and had no sensation. To move the arm, I had to do a lot of effort in all my body, so much, that I never wanted to use my arm. Today I can move it with the not much effort and use it in situations that before I couldn't. The idea of a recovery process is to teach people to employ their full abilities when they try to recover from a condition. We also call it recover because we look at it as taking back what we lost. When we look at people as creatures of attention and we look at an arm that got hurt in this case, we can see that she retreated, she pulled her attention from that area and that all my work with her is about getting back the attention to this area. If the body is very quiet and the attention is a body attention, intense stimulus like this, forces attention and the brain to connect to that place. The first session I noticed first how I had ignored the polio during all my life. Afterwards I noticed I started learning that I could use my arm without a lot of effort in the rest of my body. This for me was very important. In each session I learned new movements and new sensations that until then I had never experienced like for example to keep my arm up even for only a short period of time. Stimulating the muscles and the nerves my are returned to life, it had strength, reflexes. In the sessions I learned to put my attention and my will on recovering my arm. Teresa and Avi motivated me to feel my arm as part of me. I can see now how being an active part of the sessions and continuing to train daily has a positive outcome. The more options I gain, more motivation I have to continue forward with my arm. The most exciting part for me but also a big challenge was once she was relaxed to send to her brain, to her nervous system, the message that it can wake up, that the nervous system can reconnect and recognize her arm. One of the most intense perceptions of humans is pain; it makes us pay attention and become aware, so I was using pain, of course not torturous pain, but a moderate kind of pain, consistently to pull her attention into her arm. This way the nerves were growing because the body was noticing pain and trying to do its best to deal with that pain. In the beginning the hardest part for Marta was to relax all the efforts of this area. So we worked hard to stimulate the area and make it bigger. At some point we measured her back, and it was almost equal, were as the beginning it was very different. The methodology I am using is based on the idea that our bodies are organs of perception, that everything that we are as humans is out of our perception, so what I was trying to do with Martha is to expand her perception to include again the arm that she lost in the past. Some people's brains can learn and adapt themselves and recreate themselves, by actually using her own perception of her own body and increasing the level of her abilities to perceive herself, she managed to call back her arm and reconnect her to her brain. Once the nerves started to wake up in her arm, muscles could start to build up. When I started first to work with Martha she had a stick, there were very few muscles, there was very little movement and no control. The more the nerves woke up, the more she was exercising her muscles, the arm got stronger, she could get much better mobility and at the end also sensation came back to the fingers, to the tip of the fingers and then she could use her hand like the other hand completely. The experience of getting a piece of yourself back is one of the most amazing experiences possible. You know? It's like its looking for its form, how to be, this experience it's so new, it's a new sensation in my arm, it seems like it's looking for its form, its place. If I think of the process that I'm doing with Marta, and I see how her body which means any body, has the incredible potential to recuperate a limb even a limb which has not been used for forty five years, something completely illogical, and to see how the wanting, the wish, the disposition, to stimulate systems of the body, of the organism, make it possible that all of a sudden an arm is growing, it's being born. For me this is an incredible gift because it's like to see the essence of being human, it's potential and what we can do with will, with wanting, allowing the body to organize itself and this is fantastic. To see that I can recuperate an arm, my will power, my self-esteem, my desire, I see more possibilities, I believe that I can do more things, achieve more, if I have small desires or big desires, in my head if I had the possibility to regain my arm, if I can recuperate my arm, I also can do other things and I have more confidence in the things that I can do.