Cramping pain that Steiner traced to karma a person could not fulfil at its appointed hour, postponed then to the next incarnation.
Cramps as Hindered Karma in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's account of chronic cramping pain as the bodily sign of a karma that could not be discharged at the moment life offered for it. Steiner set it out in the first lecture of Human Values in Education (GA 310), given at Arnhem on 17 July 1924, using Friedrich Schiller as his case. Schiller was born with a poorly formed rhythmic system, the region of breathing and circulation lying between head and limbs, and suffered cramp attacks that grew almost continuous before his death in 1805. Steiner read those attacks as karmic arrears: at each appointed point where the man should have realised something he carried down from pre-earthly existence, the fulfilment paused and was postponed to a later incarnation. The bearer is the rhythmic system, the middle member of the threefold organism, where timing in a life is regulated. Anthroposophic clinicians still read chronic cramp as a question about biography rather than muscle alone.
Cramps as hindered karma names the link Steiner drew between recurring cramp and a life that cannot spend what it brought with it. Where Goethe discharged his karmic potential steadily into old age, Schiller had, in Steiner's phrase, to attack his karma, and the results would show only in a following earth life. The pain is not punishment. It marks the pressure of an intention held back until a later earthly life.
In Steiner's Own Words
Such pains, when they gain a hold in human life, point quite directly to a man's karma. If, with a sense of earnest scientific responsibility, one attempts to investigate these cramp phenomena from the standpoint of spiritual science, one always finds a definite karmic cause underlying them, the results of deeds, thoughts and feelings coming from an earlier life on earth. Now we have the man before us, and one of two things can happen. Either everything goes as harmoniously as with Goethe, so that one says to oneself: Here we have to do with Karma; here everything appears as the result of Karma. Or the opposite can also happen. Through special conditions which arise when a man descends out of the spiritual world into the physical, he comes into a situation in which he is not able fully to work through the burden of his karma.
What it Means Today
Anthroposophic medicine has read cramp as a rhythmic-system question since its founding. Ita Wegman opened the Klinisch-Therapeutisches Institut at Arlesheim, Switzerland, in 1921, and in 1925 she and Steiner published Fundamentals of Therapy (GA 27), which set the clinical method: read an illness as a relation between the members of the human being, not as a local fault in tissue. Cramp sits squarely there: a muscle that will not release has lost its rhythm, and rhythm belongs to breathing and circulation, the region Steiner named as defective in Schiller.
The therapy that grew from this is concrete. Margarethe Hauschka trained under Wegman at Arlesheim, developed rhythmical massage from Wegman's indications, and founded her school for artistic therapy and massage at Bad Boll, Germany, in 1962. Its touch is lifting and rhythmic rather than deep and static. Anthroposophic pharmacy pairs it with copper, Cuprum metallicum, the classic cramp remedy, given as an ointment over the calves or the kidney region.
Thalira synthesis: a cramp of this kind is biography arriving with nowhere to land, a deed held in the muscle because the life has not yet opened an hour for it, which is why the rhythmic system, the organ of timing, is where the holding shows. The question worth putting to a chronic cramp is not only where it hurts, but what in this life keeps being deferred.
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