BODYWORK

Your body with its aches and pains and myofascial tension tells the story of your life. From the moment you were born, and even in the womb, you have been expanding and contracting in response to your experiences. Over time you developed habits that made their way into your cells, structure, posture, and body language. Stress leaves its mark on your body as well as your psyche. Bodywork can help free you of these effects of mental and physical stress and invite you to expand beyond your conditioning.

How is bodywork different from psychotherapy?

There’s a whole field now called body or somatic psychotherapy that recognizes the intimate and intricate relationship between body and mind. Not all bodywork fits into this category but given my training as a psychotherapist, I integrate the bodywork I do as part of psychotherapy. The body can be a much more direct pathway into your inner world than talking. By bringing attention to your body, you are able to slow down, experience yourself more deeply, and effect change at a deeper level. Sometimes, especially with Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy, you will go into altered states beyond conscious awareness where even deeper levels of cellular change and psychic reorganization can take place.

What kind of bodywork do you do?

I am certified in Rosen Method Bodywork and Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy, as well as licensed in massage therapy. I use my training and skills in these modalities to help you deepen into your felt experience. By using conscious touch and/or presence, I invite you to drop into a state of relaxation and unwind from within, holding the space for whatever wants to emerge. Sometimes this involves talking and exploring actively what is happening. At other times, especially with touch, we may go into silence and allow deeper forces to work and unconscious processes to unfold.

Will I have to remove any clothing?

No. I usually only ask people to remove their shoes if they're going to lie on the massage table. Unless someone wants “pure” Rosen Method Bodywork, there's no need to remove any other clothing.

What if I don't want to be touched?

That's fine. It's not even necessary to lie down on the massage table for you to access your bodily experience. Using conscious presence I can guide you with my voice to go inside and feel yourself. Either way, we're not involved so much in analyzing experience as being with it. Whether it be sensations in the body, feelings and emotions, memories, or deep, quiet states of relaxation, the process is one of opening to what is happening and inviting new experiences and ways of being.

Why use touch at all then?

For some people, touch can help them access themselves even more easily and deeply. Also, touch is healing. Studies have shown that it causes the release of oxytocin, sometimes referred to as the “the love hormone,” which also counteracts the stress hormone, cortisol. Thus, it can be effective in countering depression and anxiety.

And for people who have been hurt by unwanted touch such as physical and/or sexual abuse, conscious touch can help heal those wounds. When they are given control over when and how and where they are touched, they can reclaim their power and feel safe being touched again.

Also touch, much like meditation, can take you todeeper states of relaxation and/or subtler levels of consciousness where more profound healing can take place.

What are other benefits of the bodywork you do?

Deeply held and long-term patterns of tension and their psychological correlates can be released from this work bringing increased freedom and ease. Most of our early memory from the first six years of life is nonverbal. Since this is when we’re most impressionable and our basic patterns get set, being able to access these imprints through bodywork can be tremendously helpful.

As infants, we get our sense of security and safety in the world from the way we are touched and handled. When we become toddlers, it is through the movement of our bodies that we begin to assert ourselves and separate from our mothers, developing a sense of our own individuality. If our caretakers were unable to treat us tenderly when we needed it or to support our separation skillfully, we carry the negative effects of this into adulthood and especially into our relationships.

Using our relationship and bodywork, I can help you renegotiate these developmental stages and redress emotional wounding left over from them, freeing you to live a happier, healthier life. States of joy and happiness can be accessed as well as grief and trauma processed and moved through to completion.

What about trauma and PTSD?

For people who have been traumatized, the body is even more important. Bessel Van der Kolk, a renowned clinician and researcher in the trauma field, emphasizes the importance of working “from the bottom up.” By this, he means bringing you into direct contact with your somatic experience and not just talking about what happened. Work with trauma survivors has shown that traumatic memory is encoded more as somatosensory and emotional information than as narrative like normal memory. All the talking in the world cannot clear out those sensory imprints. That’s why simple things like sounds, smells, and touch can trigger flashbacks in traumatized people. Body-focused work becomes absolutely necessary at a certain point in recovery, but it must be done sensitively and slowly, with a great deal of caution, presence, and compassion, in order for it not to be re-traumatizing.

How will bodywork take me beyond my conditioning?

Deep relaxation requires a surrender of the defensive holding or muscular tension in the body that is the physical analogue of the ego. It asks you to let go of who you think you are and just be. As roles, ideas and images of yourself fall away, you can be carried into altered states of consciousness. You may experience a deeper intuitive knowing and insight, or find your heart opening to a vast peace, love or joy that is beyond words. These experiences will change you and slowly loosen the hold of your conditioning.

Call 505-577-4607 or email me to schedule an appointment or for more information.