Center for divine straightening

I asked Alexander and Carolin if I can have my testimonial posted on their website because I experienced a miracle.  When something so profound, happens it can only be a miracle even though they can explain it!  I still, near a month later, don’t know what they’ve done to me.  What I do know is that I am out of pain, I’m not sad anymore, and I’m not tired. I am able to practice yoga and Pilates with more strength and flexibility and  sleep on my stomach for the first time since I was a little girl.  I am so grateful!!!

Here’s my story.

By Varshini, Los Angeles

I have had back problems rooted in scoliosis.  A few major accidents later I was in chronic pain.  I have avidly pursued finding relief  trying NCR, chiropractic therapy, healers to yoga and Pilates with specialists.  Nothing fixed my problems and although some treatments relieved the pain temporarily, for a day, the next days were worse as my back bent into the wrong way again.  This last year has, by far, been the worst!!!  My shoulders started hunching forward and my hands were in excruciating pain so much so that I couldn’t open bottles of water, jars or shake people’s hands.  I felt like I broke two fingers and was desperate to find help without doing surgery.

I receive so many emails in a day and skip most of them unless I’m expecting to receive something.  I get quite a few emails from a local bookstore I love, but stopped reading them over a year ago and redirected them to spam mail.  On a Thursday I oddly opened one and scrolled right to the bottom to read a sentence about Divine Straightening.  I looked at the time and realized I was late for an appointment so I couldn’t research it, although it intrigued me.  I replied to the email asking for more information. Two days later, Saturday, morning I received a response at 11:30am saying the lecture and healing will take place that same day from 8am through noon.  So I had ½ hour to get there and learn what it is.  I arrived at noon, the lecture was over and they were running late treating people individually.  I couldn’t speak to them because they were having one on one sessions in a private room.  I waited my turn, I felt shy and embarrassed that I missed the lecture and didn’t want to disturb anyone, I can be a bit of an introvert at times.  I waited my turn.  Carolin introduced herself to me and said I was next she had me face my back to her and immediately pointed out the scoliosis, shoulder and neck problems and said her husband will take over.  Then I met Alexander.  He is a very calm and gentle natured man.  I wanted to ask him so many questions but I felt it wasn’t fair that they did their part and I was late so how selfish of me to stand there and hold them up even further to ask for a private lecture of who they are and what they do!   I instantly trusted him.  He asked me to turn my back to him while I was standing.  He told me where my back was crooked and again my shoulders were hunched in, as well as the visually obvious curve in my neck.  He asked me to lay face up on his table and he drew a line across my ankles.  He asked me to lean up and look at the marked line.  The difference of leg lengths was 0.8 inches (2 cm) and I wasn’t surprised!  He asked me to close my eyes and literally five seconds later he asked me to look at my feet again.  Of course in my mind I’m thinking he didn’t do anything, but when I looked at my feet they were even!!!  I felt nothing!  No pain and no amazing feeling of good, NOTHING!  I couldn’t believe it.  I stood up and again I felt nothing different.  I reached for the back of my neck where a vertebrae literally sticks out and it was aligned! The next 2-3 days I experienced knee, shoulder and lower back pain.  Nothing like the “normal” pain I used to experience.  But I could feel my body adjusting to the adjustment.  By the third day the pain and discomfort altogether went away.  That same Saturday of my healing for the first time since I was a little girl I slept on my stomach without props, or pain.  I don’t know what he did.  I do my part by practicing the chakra harmonization daily.  Other than that I have so much energy and love to exercise noticing a significant difference in flexibility and strength.  I am learning yoga again because I have been doing my asanas wrong to accommodate the scoliosis that no longer is.  I wake up everyday and the first thing I do is look at my feet to see if it’s still even.  I am still in awe over this.  I don’t quite know what to make of what’s happened.   I have the book now and I’m going to read it to figure out what they’ve done to me. 

Maybe not everyone can have the results I have.  Maybe your results can be even better than me, but I promise you one thing;  I believed I would find my way out of pain somehow.  I didn’t even know what I was walking into.  I still don’t.  But I’m out of pain.  I opened the email and went to the one relevant sentence that supported my belief system that I would be healed.  If anyone suffers from pain then you know that its depressing, discouraging, sometimes you feel you’d rather die than go through a life living with the pain as it gets worse.  As a woman who wants to have children one day I felt I wouldn’t be a good mother because I’m always in pain, what would pregnancy be like for me… I didn’t even realize how much pain I was in until I was out of pain.  It snowballs on the body and as it gets worse you tolerate it because there’s no other option. 

None of my friends have heard about this!  How can this be?!?!  Everyone should have an opportunity to be healed of the things we can’t heal ourselves.  Someone or something brought you this far.  You are now closer than I was when I leaped on faith.  Try it yourself, there are few miracles that touch our lives and affect us so deeply.  This one could be yours too.

www.varshinisoobiah.com

Vidya

“I noticed a very unusual stand - It was displaying before and after pictures of peoples legs, shoulders, spines coming to balance. Now, I knew I had one leg longer that the other and this was affecting my Lower Back and Neck.

In fact I had been experiencing enormous pain. I have been doing a strong dance practice since 2000 and I feel this had put a lot of compacting pressure in my spine. This pain had driven me to look for help; I had spent a lot of money over the yrs. with Chiropractors and Osteopaths, I use an inversion table sometimes and eventually 2007 found Kieser Training - a gym in Camden London that specializes in rebalancing and strengthening muscular imbalances (with "med x" machines). The relief was great at Kieser and so much so that  I trained to be an Instructor there and work there now. HOWEVER I still had one leg longer than the other! and I knew this needed to change! - I had heard that a few sessions of Bowen may help - however I was procrastinating as I have had a lot of healing and treatments that all helped and are costly after a while and wanted a guarantee of a positive lasting result. Then I met Caroline and Alexander.  

They said "Divine Straightening" could correct my situation. I was amazed I said id think about it. The next day I had the treatment and … it worked in a second! I was told I had a scoliotic pelvis (not uncommon) and this was affecting Leg length and shoulders tilting, I also have an overly straight upper back. At the beginning of the treatment Caroline assessed my spine and shoulders,

Then I sat on the treatment table. Alexander pointed out and marked the difference in my leg length (1.5 cm). Then ok are you ready for the divine straightening? He asked. Yep suppose so I said.

When I sat up one moment later thinking "this is weird" and there it was - my legs the same length! So, how do you like that? You have a new order now. As I lay back down he put his hands on my head for a few minutes - it was nice, I felt warmth in my heart area. My legs have been the same length since.

Walking away with their book I felt a little different, I had some old memory surface to my consciousness later and tears of love, which all felt good. My exercises felt different at the gym I work at and the cronic lower back pain was gone. I do get a little pain in my LB around my period sometimes however it is nothing  what I was experiencing before my Divine Straightening.

I also heard many peoples experiences and they were all wonderful and personal. A friend of mine had a 2 cm leg length difference and showed us that she could now touch her toes, another woman was in a wheel chair and later on had it confirmed by a chiropractor that her spine was straighter.”

Vidya, London

A Divine Day in Los Angeles

"We started out in the batmobile (my ORGANIC LIFE AND FITNESS wheels) and went first over to downtown LA for a new type of healing session that I heard about from my friend Varshini. It’s called Divine Straightening and it’s performed by some German Practitioners Alexander and Carolin Toskar.  They come to LA to see clients once a year.

This is their vision: “May all beings in all worlds live in comfort and happiness.”   May sorrow and suffering disappear so that every human can become who they truly are – complete, spiritual and healthy.”  Divine Straightening with spine healing, which we facilitate, encompasses the whole human being.  It aligns the spirit, cleanses the soul and straightens the spine.

When I got to the appointment, I felt that Alexander and Carolin were lovely people and warm spirits.  They proceeded to assess the alignment of my spine and noticed slight differences between the left and the right sides.  Alexander then got me on the table and performed the healing.  What an incredible experience!"
Marcus Patrick, Los Angeles

An Introduction for sceptics, pragmatist, scientists and pseudo-scientists.

By Dean Hoshizaki

Alexander Toskar and his wife Carolin provide a unique treatment.    To understand the unique nature of their treatments we must first provide a background.

We start with the assumption that “alternative healing” disciplines represent a wide and diverse ecosystem of methodologies.    Consummate with this variety, the effectiveness varies widely.    So we must be careful not to oversimplify or  lumps groups treatments together and address each based on its individual merits.   It is usually the case that the more miraculous the claims the more suspect the discipline.   To wit, there are several problems with alternative treatments, principle among them are:

1)     Verifiability of the cause-effect relationship between the treatment and the benefit

2)     Practitioners often cloud any investigation with pseudo-science methods or fallacious arguments

Understanding these limitations will cast Divine healing in enough light that people can make their own judgments to its merits and value.  

The first point can be further divided into three parts:

                  1a) Verifiability of the cause

                  1b) Verifiability of the benefits

                  1c) Verifiability that the cause’s linkage to the benefits

Traditional science starts from a long tradition of empirical sciences.  Hallmark to these sciences are the apparent ease of verifying causal relationships.   Chemistry and physics are two disciplines that provide numerous examples of how we are obliged to accept as facts their bodies of knowledge because, they provide clear causal relationships.   However, traditional Science does not end there, by ANY means.  Indeed a principle tenant of scientific advancement is to examine phenomenon which the cause and effects are NOT so clear.   Furthermore, science attempts to incorporate these phenomenon into the existing framework and maintain consistency in the belief system and thereby revise the boundaries of what is consider the collective knowledge of reality.

Further down the ladder of empirical science, we have those garner less clarity in their casual relationships.  Examples are biology and sociological disciplines such as cognitive psychology.   These disciplines carry, on the surface, the additional burden of causal complexity and the  “human element”.  Specifically, the complexity of the relationships being one to many and difficulty in verifying within the medium of “thoughts and beliefs”.

At the lower rungs of the ladder, are the alternative medical practices.   Often they suffer from a complete breakdown of discipline.   As if their foundations are so frail as to not being able to even look objectively at the corpus of established scientific knowledge nor at their own assumptions.  Ironically, as a result, they languish in a lack of respect from the traditional sciences, for they do not pay due respect to the established disciplines.    An in doing so they cast themselves into the realm of Pseudo science.  

We used the following excerpt to describe “What is pseudo science, as opposed to real science?, taken from the excellent reference to the current thinking:  http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pseudo-science/.  

                  “(the) seven-itemed characterization of pseudoscience was proposed as representing seven common ways to deviate from a minimal (necessary but not sufficient) criterion of science, namely: Science is a systematic search for knowledge whose validity does not depend on the particular individual but is open for anyone to check or rediscover.”

1. Belief in authority: It is contended that some person or persons have a special ability to determine what is true or false. Others have to accept their judgments.
2. Nonrepeatable experiments: Reliance is put on experiments that cannot be repeated by others with the same outcome.
3. Handpicked examples: Handpicked examples are used although they are not representative of the general category that the investigation refers to.
4. Unwillingness to test: A theory is not tested although it is possible to test it.
5. Disregard of refuting information: Observations or experiments that conflict with a theory are neglected.
6. Built-in subterfuge: The testing of a theory is so arranged that the theory can only be confirmed, never disconfirmed, by the outcome.
7. Explanations are abandoned without replacement. Tenable explanations are given up without being replaced, so that the new theory leaves much more unexplained than the previous one. (Hansson 1983)

So what is the spiritual healing Divine Straightening?

                  So armed with this background we can take an objective look at these treatments.

According to Alexander Toskar,   Divine healing is an energetic state whereby the body becomes as it should.    Furthermore, when the body is allowed to energetically flow properly, the spine assumes a default configuration that is optimal for health and neuro physicalogical function.

What is unique about DH w SS among the alternative medicine realm are the measurable results.   Each patient’s legs become of equal length.  Assuming this is the result of the pelvis becoming equalized as a result of the spine returning to it’s default optimal position.   This particular result is not only repeatable by Toskar, but highly consistent.

Where the waters become a bit murkier are in the following areas:

               I.         What is the cause of this result (effect)

              II.         Given the visible, measurable, result, what are its health benefits.

Let’s look at the first point.   During the treatment Alexander does not physically come into contact with the person receiving the treatment.   Furthermore, the pelvis and leg equalization happens in the time span of 5- 10 seconds while Alexander appears to be “concentrating” over the person receiving the treatment.   Observers can actually see the legs at the heel point move into an equalized position.

So clearly we don’t have a traditional explanation.   However this is not a point where we can condemn his treatments.  Indeed, the history of science is replete with examples of results being observed and the mechanism leading up to the results are not clearly understood until sometime later in history.

For a non binding explanation, Alexander offers a spiritual explanation.   See his books or brochure for details.  It is non binding because one is not required to “buy into” the explanation to experience the results.

On the second point, not being of a medical, bio-mechanical, nor physiological discipline, one can offer a couple of launching points for further investigation.   However, there are several facts of the matter which should be considered.   First the spinal column is in the core of the physical and neurological body.  As such, common sense dictates a healthy optimally functional spine (bones and nervous tissue) would help the body performs its proper functions.

Pragmatics:

Because we have painted a reasonably objective picture thus far, we can switch our attention to some practical aspects.   First up is the risk versus reward of experiencing a treatment with Alexander Toskar.   From this viewpoint, the main risks are a loss of time, some money and perhaps hope if one is disappointed.   The rewards could be significant.  As compared to alternative treatments such as, chiropractics, surgery, leg-heel lifts, orthotic shoe inserts, structural body work, this single treatment is a bargain.    In addition since there is no physical contact required, your body will be no worse for wear than simply arriving at the location and getting on and off a table where you receive the treatment.

Also one should manage their expectations.   One should expect the pelvis will be horizontal to the ground (orthogonal to gravity), as represented by legs of equal length.     We call this the “Base Result” Furthermore, but less concrete, the spine is energetically straightened such that its default position is optimal.    However, this does not mean that ones bones or muscles will be transformed immediately.   Nevertheless, one physiological theory goes if one stands and walks symmetrically, i.e. orthogonally against gravity, over time the musculature and bone structure will organize itself accordingly.  The former much faster in a matter of months and  the latter in over years.   Finally, one should note, that in general the bones of the legs are of the same length.  However, most often they are not the same length functionally due to neuro-muscular imbalance.  The base results correct this imbalance.

The concept of energetically straightening might seems foreign at first.   However, we can frame the concept in terms of how we continuously use our bodies.   If a person is slouching over, and they “straighten up”, they are using their neurological capability to influence the muscles and the body becomes erect.   This is common sense.   The intention to stand erect is manifested in the nervous system dictating to the muscles how to configure themselves to “straighten up”.    In this context, these treatments create an energetic situation analogous to nervous system dictating the muscles to conform to being properly erect.    After all, the body can change positions and shapes at will quickly.  A key difference is the default or resting position becomes the optimal position, as if the nervous system and hence the muscles have a “standing order” to be optimally positioned.

Lastly, one will find there is no attempt to indoctrinate persons into a belief system or religious assumptions.   One could not even speak the same language as Alexander and have the same basic results.

Common questions and further inquiry:

Is this a mystical experience?

Under the broad definition, cited below, of what qualifies as mysticism, No.   Here is a good reference for further inquiry.  http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mysticism/    In particular, there is no attempt at hiding or subterfuge by Alexander.  Next there is no attempt to bolster the effectiveness of the base results with a requirement to believe his personal ontological beliefs.  Finally, the base result is ostensible; i.e. it does not rely upon personal testimony or narratives to verify the results.  These three points are hallmarks of “mystic” experiences.   Do not confuse his personal explanation, if you find them obtuse or incompatible with your belief system, as an effort to deceive or hide.    Frankly, if he has or will have more explanatory currency, he would freely divulge it.  In that way the work is more like science in its embracing of openness to scrutiny and to document and verify where possible.

Is this a miracle?

On this point, the jury is probably still out.   On one hand, the causal relationship is not understood.   On the other hand, the extra-ordinary nature of the treatment, might tip the scales towards “yes”.   However, as stated before, because the causal relationship is not known, at this time, we should be cautious not to conduct simple minded thinking and be too quick to embrace an all encompassing explanation.  We need to consider and exhaust the obvious explantions first and foremost.  Indeed, not only does a “miracle” explanation go against critical thinking as required to stay above the quagmire of pseudo science, it does not serve to further our understanding, in the broadest sense.  For an investigative starting point we cite this link:  http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/miracles/