Structure
My absolute desire in bodywork is healing successes for those involved. Even in highly developed, systematic, and strategically-customized treatment plans, sometimes successes fade.
The work I’ve built the foundation of my professional practice over the years has largely been fleshed out by my own intuition, trial & error, and my listening abilities. Obvious implementation of “Rolfing-style” myofascial release techniques have dominated, but in ways incomplete, in other ways expanded.
Listening to the body has always been a true passion. However, the reciprocated awareness by my patients hasn’t necessarily been enforced, and this is where my practice has been lacking. In complete sincerity, it has been a raw deal in which I’ve surrendered more than I have expected to receive in return. I own total accountability for this.
The Vulnerable
In being accountable, I have seen the roots in my fear of rejection, my fears of exile and loneliness, fears of bad word-of-mouth, and yet deeper: my fear of discovering my own self-worth. Most of these hinge on the decisions made by others, save for the deeper, and are largely out of my control.
I have seen how I am breaking my own heart. I’ve learned where my boundaries lie, yet also how implementing them is dreadful and it stings.
What hurts more, is that my negative relationship with self has bled into my practice and negatively impacted my patients’ healing. This is not a minimization of any individual experience which has benefited from my services, as I believe learning is healing, teaching is healing, and vice versa. I believe we simply live and experience to heal, or we would have no reason for experience, itself. We are only healers of ourselves and therefore of humanity, and therefore, of the experience of humanity; of the world. As experience is our primary filter for existence, healing informs and clarifies reality. My only action is the facilitation of healing for myself or others, period.
Though, I never deem myself, nor anyone of us in our grand masterpiece, a perfect healer.
So, away from the cosmic, what has changed?
The “Juice”
I have fallen in love with Structural Integration. My Instructors at Anatomy Trains in Walpole, ME (Kelly Chadwick, Cristy Harper, and Tom Myers) have opened up my life, my understanding of therapy, and improved the channels of healing for my patients.
This is the work I am meant to facilitate. I know it will be part of my practice for the remainder of my career. The comprehensive, global approach to treatment and practical theory sing deeply to my soul. There are endless avenues for growth and expansion of innovation and wisdom. My heart flutters in awe of the “Aha!” moments in class.
One notion of which I’ve chewed on cyclically, as a mantra, is “A conversation between two intelligent systems.”
The difference between the “lazy Rolfing” I used to provide, is the reciprocal verses non-reciprocal nature.
Massage is mostly non-reciprocal: you drop your shorts, hide in the womb of blankets, bolsters, and heating pad, bury your head prone in the face cradle, and poke out various parts and appendages to be serenaded by whale sounds and passive, manipulative lubricating. There is no required transaction other than the payment for service. There is generally no necessity to be present for a Swedish massage, as the work is usually being done to you and not always with you.
Please excuse my flippancy in this description, and know that I do not intend to discredit the crucial benefits of massage therapy for certain conditions. Yet also understand that I am not being purely rhetorical when I assert that structural bodywork is very different from massage. It is work, in one way or another.
Like my Aquarian father likes to say: “work is hard, that’s why they call it work.” Be that as it may, this work may be sometimes hard to receive, however I am here to rise to the challenge with you. This is a project in which we share the effort.
This work that I want to share involves active participation, and not the option to dissociate. Previously, this dissociation may have occurred on my treatment table, in the form of mundane conversation or just going to one’s “happy place” if the work is too painful, avoiding all ungraceful confrontation.
Bodywork through the lens of Structural Integration coaxes your attention, honesty, somatic talent, and actually trains these qualities.
In a massage, we postpone our control, we hide from our distress, and reorient the pressures of carrying ourselves through an arguably ill society.
In a structural integration session, one of our goals is to empower you to occupy the places in space which you may not have lived before.
Behavior, at any level, begets structure. Moving into this changed, somatic world can allow us to alter our beliefs in the limitations previously set by our own structure (behavior) and therefore, allows us to stand firm in renewed power.
Then, not only can we navigate with a sharper vitality and gravitational ease, but we are confronted by the murky expanse which veils the mystery of freedom. I believe structural bodywork bestows the opportunity to solve this great mystery.
The Strain
After a series, change is felt both in real time, in several months following, and with new patterns of alignment, emerging permanently, for years to come.
My patients may notice that my style has previously fallen somewhat haphazardly between therapeutic bodywork and passively receiving a massage. I implement the techniques and approach of bodywork, within the procedure of a massage. This is largely due to working constraints within my clinic of employment, being that I was hired as a massage therapist, a job description not explicitly including bodywork, and yet my passion for fix-it work demanded a place.
Now, this is changing, both in my private office, and in the clinic. My supervisors at GHC have championed my education in Anatomy Trains Structural Integration, and have been anticipating its implementation.
Proceeding, this means that I will direct you to physically move within a range where changes occur, gliding through the fascial bags of muscle, as I maintain their contact. You will feel my pressure communicating in these spaces, and corresponding to your movement application. This is “calling for movement.” When a release happens, there could be any number of different responses or sensations that occur, but you will know when they happen.
We want the subjective experience of this work to find the safest sensation within the range of pain. When the body feels unbearable pain, it can brace, suppress, or compensate. It’s possible to hide the pain in a somatic conversation. You’re the only one in there, so speak up when the sensation of pain is too greedily detracting from our capacity to work. We make the choice to both experience discomfort within the ranges of pain, and to surrender our egoistic perseverance through suffering at the expense of completion. Sometimes that suffering is overblown and unnecessary.
Continued in my next post: Changes Pt. 2