Continuum & The Creativity of Health interview with Ashima Kahrs (video transcript):

To me, the life journey is about creativity. The lives we lead, the people that we engage with, you know, that’s always an ongoing evolutionary process. And that has to do not just with relationship but how we interact with the world on a daily basis: the foods that we eat, the places we choose to go, the entertainment that we look at, the way we are in our environment, how we shape things. So to me health is a part of that. You have to think about wellness as an ongoing learning process, because especially in this culture with so many things positive and so many things negative, it’s always a gift to explore what is health.

“You don’t know the potentials that you have …”

[My] stroke was in 1971. I met Emilie in 2006. And what I was told when I had the stroke was after two years no more healing should be allowed. And so, when Emilie started working with me I had that mindset in my head. There was a beautiful lady whose name was Barbara Mindell, who was in a wheelchair from a car accident. And Barbara took me down the hall one day and said to me, “you need to be the student of Continuum at a physical level and let Continuum guide you.” Because I was flabbergasted that she could talk about things happening in her sit bones and around her coccyx when I knew she was paralyzed. And I had done anatomy and physiology so I knew that was allegedly impossible but she was talking about that, and so then she says to me, “you don’t know the potentials that you have, you’ve never asked your body to show you the potentials that you have.”

One of the consequences of the stroke was that I had no sensation on the right side at all, I mean, at all. Among the first things that happened with Emilie was that all of a sudden I had some proprioception, not necessarily feeling, but I would dance and the foot began to know where it was in space. And that was huge. And then gradually I began to get more sensations back. I will say I probably have maybe 70% now, and I’m happy with that but I had shingles earlier in the year and it has affected my walking a bit. But, again, it’s one of those things where I don’t see it as that kind of thing anymore as, “oh, I have to go the doctor” or “oh, I’m going to have to have surgery on my knee.” I see it as, “oh, so where/how can Continuum inform me so I know how best to move forward.” I always think in terms of where’s the flow and how can we make it better. My students, my clients, my family, my children – what can I do to contribute?  And you know, everything that I do is about enriching my life and then, if I can,  then use that information to share with other people.