About Living Waters Wellness

​Chapter 10 from A Guide to Child Health by Michaela Glöckler, Floris Books 2013

    10. Preventing Illness and Promoting Health

By preventive pediatric medicine, we mean first of all regular medical checkups, officially recommended immunizations, prevention of tooth decay and rickets, and the basics of nutrition and general hygiene. But we also hear questions such as, how does ultrasound affect the growing embryo ? This question is a good example of how disease prevention and health promotion interact. During an ultrasound exam (sonography), sound waves with frequencies above the range of human hearing are sent out as either pulses or continuous sound. Tissues treated with ultrasound produce characteristic echo waves that are then captured and made visible through computer technology. When these mechanically pro­duced sound waves meet living tissues, we cannot say for certain that they have no effect, even if no damage has ever been proven in the thirty years since the introduction of this technology. The only good rule is “as little as possible, as much as necessary.” This means that in an uneventful pregnancy, two examina­tions – conducted as late as possible – are sufficient.

What causes harm and what promotes health is always a question of both degree and reciprocal compensation. The new, health-oriented approach to medical research is called salutogenesis.* Salutogenesis is the first discipline to offer an approach to understanding how to maintain health and prevent ill­ness. In this sense, anthroposophical medicine and education have always taken a consistently salutogenic approach. As early as 1919, Rudolf Steiner made the teachers of the Stuttgart Waldorf School aware of the impact on growing children of many hours of daily lessons. In this developmental phase, when the physical body is being built up, any external stimuli that must be processed (whether on the level of body, soul, or spirit) has either health-giving or dam­aging effects on the interaction of the parts of the child’s constitution (see also Chapter 17, Health through Education).

In this context, it is informative to note the findings of a Swedish study on health differences between Waldorf and state school students.1 The Waldorf children received few immunizations, had significantly fewer allergies, and were treated with antibiotics significantly less often than the control group. 61% of the Waldorf children had contracted measles in comparison to only 1 % of the control group, 93% of whom had been vaccinated. This study leaves unan­swered the question of how much Waldorf educational methods contributed to these results.

    10.1 How does health develop ?

For the last two hundred years, the question of how disease develops dominated medical discussion, and prevention was understood as avoid­ing harmful influences and risk fac­tors. Now, however, health research is asking how it is possible to remain healthy in spite of exposure to dis­ease. During a flu epidemic that sick­ens fifteen percent of the population, why are the remaining 85 percent not infected ? What bodily, psychologi­cal, or spiritual factors are ultimately responsible for the immunological weakness that results in susceptibility to the flu virus ?

Medical sociologist Aaron Anton­ovsky lists three main causes of the development and persistence of health. His three primary fac­tors involve the ability to successfully come to grips with resistance, whether on the level of the body, the soul, or the spirit :

•    Overcoming metabolic imbalances resulting from nutrition, movement, rest, climate change, and other dis­turbances. Each body, organ, and individual cell is located some­where on a continuum of health and illness. New health develops constantly as disruptive factors and pathological tendencies are over­come.

•    Building up what is called the “sense of coherence” during child­hood and adolescence. Antonovsky also uses the German word Weltan­schauung (or view of the world) in this context. What he means is the possibility of processing every­thing we encounter in a meaning­ful way and integrating it into a personal sense of our own life and understanding of our environment. The more meaningfully the differ­ent levels of experience (as well as each new experience) can be incorporated into an evolving over­all picture, the healthier the person and the more resilient and inspiring their Weltanschauung.

•     Using “resistance resources” to come to grips with the stresses and adversities of life. Resistance resources represent an individual’s sum total of compensation and cop­ing strategies for positively over­coming problems and worries in life and work. These resources help pre­vent people from completely break­ing down under overwork, anxiety, stress, loss, and social marginaliza­tion or exclusion or under extreme circumstances such as imprison­ment and torture.

Those in special education refer to “resilience research,” the study of fac­tors that make children resistant and able to grow up healthy in spite of domestic situations marked by chaos, alcoholism, violence, or other stress factors. Decisive factors that preserve and enhance resistance include :

•   Being loved by another person

•     Believing in God

•     Trusting in progress and in the future

•     Being able to find meaning in one’s own destiny by processing prob­lems and conflicts and integrating them into one’s life.

•     Outer security and a high standard of living

•     A stable social network.

If health is the body’s ability to balance out one-sided stress factors and counteract possible disease ten­dencies, there must be as many dif­ferent forms of “health” as there are of illness. Individuals face unique and specific challenges in regulat­ing body heat, ensuring adequate supplies of oxygen and nutrients, and establishing a fragile state of balance between breakdown and regeneration processes in the body. These efforts require just as much care and support as children’s emo­tional and mental ability to process events.

Health is also the orderly interac­tion of bodily, emotional, and men­tal functions and activities. How is it possible that good thoughts actually have healing effects ? How do peaceful feelings promote sleep and ease physical pain ? Why is a positive attitude toward life refresh­ing and appetite-stimulating ? These effects have been confirmed by comprehensive psycho-neuro-immunological research (see Sec­tion 2.4, and Endnote 2 of Chapter 2) and documented by salutogenic research. A concrete understanding of these phenomena will continue to elude us, however, until we stop restricting ourselves to natural-scientific approaches and become interested in the reality of the laws of soul and spirit and their relation­ships to bodily functions.

    10.2 Promoting health of the soul and spirit

           Motivation and meditation

In the second and third parts of this book, we will offer many practical suggestions for promoting health in children and adolescents. At this point, we would like to give examples of what adults can do both for them­selves and – indirectly, by modelling health-promoting behaviors – for their children.

The most important and readily available means of preventing illness is to enjoy your work. It generates emotional warmth that keeps the body healthy (see Section 2.4). Thus it is essential to organize or approach your daily work in ways that make it pos­sible for you to enjoy it.

Anger, quarrelling, agitation, chronic stress, and the lack of a sense of coherence and connection are not only psychologically unsettling but also undermine health. Over longer periods of time, taking unprocessed influences of this sort into sleep means that sleep loses its revitalizing effect. We feel less refreshed in the morning and become more susceptible to infec­tious diseases.

Almost everyone is aware of this type of “emotional pathology” from direct personal experience. “Psycho­social stress” – that is, the combina­tion of personal and social problems – can be effectively dealt with only by deciding to pursue either a path of self-development or conflict resolution methods. Psychotherapy, biog­raphy work, and pastoral counseling offer many different options.

Anthroposophical meditative train­ing also offers techniques for medita­tion, concentration, and relaxation. Although their raison d'etre is the search for self-knowledge and a spiri­tual understanding of the world rather than the preservation of health, these techniques, like all other sincere spiri­tual efforts, have direct positive effects on health. For example, the beneficial ordering effects of Steiner’s verbal meditations are immediately apparent on reading them. It is helpful to recall and reflect on words and themes of this sort now and again in the course of the day or before important or dif­ficult events.4

We are fully justified in thinking of hygiene not only as regular bath­ing, clean clothes, and appropriate living conditions but also in terms of emotional and mental hygiene. Do we cultivate our life of soul and spirit as carefully as we care for our bodies ? Couldn’t a brief session of meditation or concentration exercises each morn­ing and evening become just as much of a need as brushing our teeth ?

Rudolf Steiner’s discussions of ner­vousness and the human “I” and of practical training in thought offer a series of very effective exercises for schooling attentiveness, memory, per­ception and concentration.5 Other cen­tral issues of emotional hygiene include how we think and feel about other people and realizing that our thoughts and feelings can be either destructive or constructive for ourselves and for oth­ers. How we think and feel contributes to the “climate” in our homes, which is also experienced and judged by our children and teenagers.

    The effect of art

Artistic activity is a very gratifying way of promoting health. The third part of this book will describe art’s contribu­tion to stabilizing health in childhood and adolescence, so at this point we will mention only the basics and refer you to the Bibliography. Again, we have Steiner’s research to thank for providing an exact scientific basis for this field. The creative activity of mod­eling, sculpting, and carving directly stimulates and regulates the sculptural, formative functioning of the etheric body, to which it corresponds. Musical laws and their relationship to air (as the vehicle of sound) corresponds to the activity of the astral body, which is also musical in character. Every detail of the human body is structured according to specific proportions and numbers, not only with regard to the body’s shape but also the rhythms and relative proportions of its physi­ological functions. In his book The Harmony of the Human Body, Armin Husemann makes a first attempt at a comprehensive understanding of the musical laws governing the human body. Singing and other musical activ­ity (but also working with different color “tones” and moods in painting) has harmonizing effects on the astral body’s activity. The result is a sense of emotional harmony that works back on bodily functions.

Through artistic speech and speech therapy, the I-organization is directly activated. After all, we express our­selves in the truest sense of the word when we say something about our­selves or how we understand the world.

Eurythmy and curative eurythmy, which together constitute an art form that combines the governing princ­iples of sculpture, music, and speech and applies them to bodily movement, have comprehensive effects on bodily functions and regulate the interaction of the different members of the human constitution (see also Section 22.4 on curative eurythmy).

    10.3 Hygienic measures

In the bacteriological sense, hygienic protective clothing (including isolating contagious patients, gloves, masks, and goggles if needed) disinfecting rooms and objects, and ensuring the safety of water and food. Without consistent implemen­tation of such hygienic measures, the successes of modem surgery and epidemic control would have been impossible, and rates of infant and maternal mortality in hospitals would still be at nineteenth-century levels. Nonetheless, every mother knows that her well-protected baby on the chang­ing table will soon be crawling around on floors dirtied by other people’s street shoes.

In the long term, is it more prophy­lactic to avoid germs or to learn to cope with them ? A logical extension of this question is, should every ill­ness be treated with antibiotics or only those that a child is unable to over­come without such help ? Experience shows that first children are seldom ill as babies because they grow up alone and catch infections only from their parents. When they enter kindergar­ten, however, we can expect at least two winters of frequent colds. First children bring home almost every infection that is going around ; they seem to spend more time at home than in kindergarten. Second children have similar experiences, but by the time third children come along, they con­stantly catch upper respiratory infec­tions from their older siblings and may also come down with alarmingly severe cases of the classic childhood diseases at very early ages. These third children, however, are often the sturdi­est and healthiest later on. This typical experience speaks for itself and may be some consolation for families with many children.

    10.4 Observing and cultivating healthy rhythms

The body’s ability to self-regulate and adapt is closely linked to the coordina­tion and interaction of the chronologi­cal rhythms that make life possible.

In early childhood, cultivating daily rhythms is especially important because the infant’s ability to regulate rhythmic functions is still undevel­oped and needs support and stimula­tion.

The circumstances of modem life and work often encourage us to disre­gard essential rhythms. This disregard promotes a number of different ill­nesses or weakened states. Eventually, years or decades of flouting natural rhythms may result in exhaustion and collapse. In contrast, consciously cul­tivating the most important rhythms increases the body’s stress tolerance and prepares it to encounter life’s challenges.

    What is so special about rhythmical sequences ?

•    Rhythm is the repetition of simi­lar processes under comparable circumstances. In respiration, the archetypal rhythm, no breath is exactly as deep or as long as any other, if measured exactly, and yet each breath is similar to the last.

•    Every rhythm balances out polari­ties. Wherever contrasting elements collide in nature, rhythms mediate between them. For example, rhyth­mically structured fleecy clouds appear in the sky where high and low pressure systems meet. Rhyth­mical wave patterns line the shore, where movable water encounters solid ground. The breathing process mentioned above rhythmically bal­ances the polarities of movement and rest.

•    Rhythms form the basis of every adaptive process. Because rhyth­mical repetitions are never exactly the same but represent subtle fluc­tuation around an average value, flexible adaptation is an attribute of rhythmical processes, whereas a strict tempo is totally inflexible and has no capacity for balancing out or integrating differences.

•    Rhythm substitutes for strength. Any rhythmically repeated action takes less exertion and energy than a one-time action performed at an unusual time or under unusual cir­cumstances.

Regular, rhythmical activities foster the development of habits, which are the structure underlying per­ sonality and character. Learning to observe regular times for eating and sleeping and to structure the day in a way that balances work and recre­ation, tension and relaxation, allows us to face the demands of daily life reliably and productively. In contrast, when we pay no attention to our internal clocks and become heavily dependent on outer circum­stances or on our own momentary inclinations, we risk exhausting ourselves because we overestimate what we can accomplish. We lack the flexibility to adapt, the strength to persevere, and a sense of healthy limits.

•     Every consciously repeated action strengthens the will and thus also our ability to act.

•     Rhythms link nature and humans to the change of seasons, the sequence of day and night, and the many different movements of the planets against the background of the fixed stars. All of the rhythms and pro­portions that regulate the courses of the planets in our solar system are reflected in the life processes of plants, animals, and humans and reveal the common origin and con­nected life of all known creation.6

Only in the twentieth century did research on biological rhythms and time structures become a recognized branch of science. The sections that follow provide an overview of the essential rhythms that underlie and support life processes. Our suggestions on daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly rhythms are intended to stimulate a new family culture that once again takes these rhythms into account. Healthier, more adaptable children are our reward for our efforts.7

    Cultivating daily rhythms

Newborns have not yet learned to develop typical maximums and minimums in the rhythmic alternation between day and night. Their fluctua­tions in body temperature (0.5°C/1°F lower in the morning than in the evening), blood sugar levels, levels of various hormones and blood salts, and other metabolic processes are not yet synchronized with the sun.

The later structure, elasticity, and adaptability of a person’s rhythmic system depend on how it is imprinted in infancy with all of daily life’s little actions related to eating, bath­ing, playing, and sleeping. All organs, especially the large organs of metabo­lism and digestion, must coordinate their functions and learn how to work together optimally. Alternations between eating and not eating, activ­ity and sleep, are essential in foster­ing this learning. To encourage your infant to develop a twenty-four hour rhythm, it is helpful to pay special attention to getting up in the morning and going to bed at night (always at approximately the same time, if pos­sible). In the morning, this process is supported by a morning song and looking out of the window together. From the very beginning, an infant’s bedtime ritual can include lighting a candle, singing a few notes (possibly accompanied by a simple children’s harp or lyre – preferably tuned to a pentatonic scale), and a short evening prayer before saying good night.*

The more clearly a baby’s day takes shape in the course of the first weeks and months – mornings at home while Mom does housework, after­noons spent outside being carried in a sling – the more strongly he will experience the course of the day and the difference between day and night and be able to respond with his entire body.

    The weekly rhythm

The names of the days of the week reflect the fact that they were once associated with the planets – includ­ing the Sun and Moon – that moved across the background of fixed stars.

Sunday - Sun
Monday - Moon (French lundi)
Tuesday - Mars (French mardi)
Wednesday - Mercury (French mercredi)
Thursday - Jupiter (French jeudi)
Friday - Venus (French vendredi)
Saturday - Saturn

The planets in the sky are very different in their individual manifes­tations – distant, indistinct Saturn ; brightly shining Jupiter ; red flickering Mars ; the warm radiance of Venus in the morning or evening sky ; elusive Mercury, only briefly visible for a few days shortly before sunrise or after sunset ; the Moon with its constantly changing illuminated shape ; and the Sun, towering over all the others and shedding its light everywhere. With practice, we can become aware that the days of the week are equally dif­ferent in character. Chronobiology and research on rhythms has shown that the seven-day rhythm is the essen­tial rhythm underlying responsive processes, including adaptation and healing. Acknowledging the rhythmic character of the course of the week is a way to support and stabilize the seven-day rhythm as the basis for flex­ible reactions to stresses and injuries of all kinds.

For example, Sunday can assume a more festive character, with a more leisurely breakfast preceded or fol­lowed by some singing or reading aloud. All the other days of the week can also have their special morning songs or specific activities. Regular obligations distributed throughout the week can be anticipated with plea­sure and set the tone for each day. The same is true of little cultural habits – visiting friends or relatives or receiving visitors at home, look­ing at pictures, or making music. In the past few centuries, human beings have become increasingly eman­cipated from weekly, monthly, and yearly rhythms. Increasingly prevalent symptoms of burn-out indicate how severely this lack of rhythm under­mines health. “Having enough time” begins with consciously cultivating time, that is, by shaping its rhythm, sequence and intervals through the alternation of activities and pauses (see also pages 300f). The same is true of fostering religious and medita­tive life. The secret to acquiring and developing inner forces and abilities is to distribute inner work over daily or longer rhythms.*

    The monthly rhythm

From the science of climatotherapy, we know that the restorative value of a four-week cure is significantly greater than that of a two or three-week cure. And when someone is truly exhausted, two to three months of recuperation are needed; a four-week vacation is not enough. The monthly rhythm is the rhythm of profound recuperation, habit development, and stabilization. It takes at least four weeks for a new habit to take hold. Waldorf Schools take advantage of this fact by divid­ing instruction into four-week subject blocks whenever possible.

   Activities that cultivate the monthly rhythm

*    In this context, we would like to point in particular to the eightfold path of the Buddha as formulated for modem human beings by Rudolf Steiner It includes a spe­cific exercise for each day of the week :

Saturday - attention to one's conceptual activity
Sunday - work on right judgment
Monday - consciously cultivating conversa­tion and choice of words
Tuesday - paying attention to one’s actions ("right deed”)
Wednesday - finding the right perspective in life
Thursday - correctly assessing one’s own strength and ability to work
Friday - attempting to learn as much as pos­sible from life.8

Rhythms include looking at calendar pictures, singing songs about the months, and observing seasonally changing natural processes and related farm and garden work. The type of clothing we wear also changes as the months go by.

In planning your vacations, we urge you to consider the four-week rhythm whenever possible. We advise against short vacations when rest and relax­ation are the goal. Short breaks may be a stimulating change of pace for adults, but they are more likely to be a strain on children, who often come down with infections during or after a short vacation trip.

    The yearly rhythm

It takes nine months of gestation plus the first three months after birth for infants’ physical bodies to mature to the point where they can focus their eyes and grasp with their hands. It takes another year for them to learn to walk, another to learn to speak, and still another year until indepen­dent thinking begins. The physical body continues to develop in yearly rhythms, and seasonal changes in weather and light stimulate bodily changes. Similarly, each childhood illness has specific years of life in which cases are most and least likely to occur.

Long-term adaptation also follows yearly rhythms. When we have lived for more than one year in the same place – that is, when we experience one season of the year for the second time – we feel at home there. When we have lived there for more than seven years, we feel like “locals.” It is a good tradition to celebrate the anni­versaries of historical events, just as we celebrate birthdays and yearly sea­sonal holidays (see also Section 24.3).

1    Von Aim, J., and J. Swartz, Atopy in children of families with an anthroposophical lifestyle, Lancet, 1999. 353 :1485-88.

2    Antonovsky, A. Health, Stress and Coping, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco 1979 ; and Unraveling the Mystery of Health, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco 1987.

3    Opp, Fingerle, Freytag, (eds.). Was Kinder starkt. Erziehung zwischen Risiko und Resilience, Munich 1999.

4    Steiner, Rudolf, Verses and Medi­tations, Rudolf Steiner Press, UK 1972.

5    Steiner, Rudolf, Overcoming Ner­vousness (Lecture of Jan 11, 1912). Anthroposophic Press, USA 1978, and Practical Training in Thought, Anthroposophic Press, USA 1978.

6    Endres, Klaus-Peter & Wolfgang Schad, Moon Rhythms in Nature, Floris Books, UK 2002.

7    For a thorough discussion, see Glockler, Michaela (ed.) Gesundheit und Schule, Goetheanum, Domach 1998.

8    These exercises for the days of the week are included in Seelenübungen, Vol. 1, Domach 1997.

*   Salutogenesis : from the Latin salus, health ; genesis, creation.

*    Pentatonic scales are five-note scales with no half steps, such as the series D-E-G-A-B. Pentatonic melodies have a light, open char­acter and can end on any note of the scale. In Waldorf and curative education, the pen­tatonic instruments most commonly used are flutes (recorders), lyres, and children’s harps.

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