Let us come to understand, and more deeply appreciate what supports our face, cranium, and brain from below – namely the neck. This cervical region is also the passageway for breath, for song, and the expression of heartfelt feeling.
Read MoreThese days I read the massage magazines and I see one ad after another, article after article touting answers - how you resolve neck pain, how such-and-such modality is so powerful, how you can easily be a business success. You know what? I'm sick of answers.
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I’ve heard it said that 60% of healing is the environment. What can we do, as teachers and therapists, to make a learning environment healing?
Read More“Every day we find a new sky and a new earth with which we are trusted like a perfect toy.”
Read MoreThe shoulder girdle and pelvic girdle are both wingèd - take new view of the pelvis!
Read MoreI was doing a session on a radiologist and couldn’t resist asking him about the many wondrous things he’d seen through MRI’s, etc. I asked him, of everything he’d seen, what had he found most fascinating?
Read MoreMay this wrestle and dance we do with dis-ease, with dis-position, and with destiny help people smile with joy at the music they can make of their lives. Having been an artist, working first in music, then in bodywork, for now for over 50 years, I have met many wrestlers – clients wrestling with their lives, students, teachers, and therapists.
Read MoreThe practice of creating “memory palaces” was first recorded around the time of Cicero. Remember, before printing, the primary way to remember events and to achieve learning was to use one’s memory. So, naturally, methods to enhance memory were invented.
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Today we began a new class at my school. Something our Co-Director, John Conway, said at the orientation introduced an idea that I had never quite as precisely verbalized.
He was beginning to guide the new students in an exchange of brief shoulder massages with one student standing behind another seated in a chair. He was talking about what to do as we stood there, even before we put our hands on.
Read MoreIf you will take your left leg up, placing the ankle on your knee and look at the bottom of your foot, there is a number 7 in the sole of your foot, looking back at you!
When, about six million years ago, our ancestors descended from the trees, more and more distinctness began to grow between the structure and roles of the feet and hands.
There are essentially two models for how we affect people positively through therapeutic touch. One is the soft tissue manipulation model and the other is the neuro-muscular or, if you like, structure and energy model. Both are useful and true in their way.
Read MoreThe primary issue for therapists working with the feet is a fairly simple one. Most therapists do not know the intrinsic muscles of the foot.
Once one has clarity about the muscles that are there, the work becomes quite straightforward. Exploring successively each layer of the foot,; doing some cross-fiber and direct palpation, assessing tension is the first step; and then melting with a “soft tissue fulcrum” where called for. This will have a dramatic impact on the foot and, because the energy upwells from the kidney meridian’s “bubbling spring”, this work affects the whole self.
Read MoreBecause we are raised within an educational system excessively focused on mental skills - reading, math, and memorizing facts – we come to identify overly much with the mind. This leads to a profound imbalance; our energy gets upwardly displaced, particularly toward the brain. Thus, the greatest energy imbalance in many people is too much attention, too much energy in the upper half of the person and too little in the lower half.
Read MoreFor this fulcrum you will use your forearm, particularly whichever part of the ulna works best for your body/energy mechanics. This fulcrum involves active movement by the client. Ask client to very slowly and fully flex and extend ankle (e.g. “ Please point your toes and then lift your toes up.”). Explain the movement and have them try it once or twice. This also gives them the basis for a “feeling comparison” afterward.
Read MoreFor this fulcrum you will use your ulna just distal to the elbow. As you are standing at the side of the table facing the lower legs, you will usually use the arm nearer the head (i.e. right arm on the left leg and vice versa). This stroke involves active movement by the client.
Read MoreTrue story. Over 30 years ago, when I was just getting to know the person who I later married, Julie Harper, we spent an afternoon walking through an art museum here in Austin, Texas. I already had a very positive sense of her – she was funny, smart, pretty, interesting and kind.
Read MoreFor this fulcrum you will work with the heels of both hands together. The direction will be from lateral to medial. You will be working along the lateral margin of rectus femoris and across its belly. The structural objective will be create more freedom of movement between vastus intermedius and rectus femoris. The impact is amplified if you involve the client’s active movement.
Read MoreFor this fulcrum, you will be using primarily the same side hand as the side of the client with whom you are working. You will work with your loose fist while your other hand supports the leg. (Variant: you may choose to ask the client to interlace his/her fingers beneath the knee and actively stretch as you do this technique).
Read MoreThe lower legs lead to the thicker muscles and tendons of the thighs. Here our roots become our trunks. And like the lower legs, the thighs call for understanding, compassion, and nurturing. Ever notice how children running around seem to gain energy from running? Unfortunately, as we age, often the sheer joy of running, leaping, spinning around, escapes us, much to the detriment of our legs and our whole body and spirit.
Read MoreTime is what we are made of – in addition, of course to space. Ida Rolf noted “gravity is the therapist” – meaning we derive the sense of balance from our relationship to gravity in space. To say that “time is the therapist” is equally true. Of course we already say “Time is the great healer” – meaning superficially that, given the right amount of time, things will tend to heal themselves.