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jenettSo, this morning I had the first Functional Integration session. I'm doing them with someone who is a fair drive away (about 30 minutes, as he's in the SE suburbs) but whose website and other information I liked a whole lot. (He's also a concert pianist by original training and education.)
I like him a lot in person, too - he's my kind of geeky about the poking into why stuff works, and was delighted that I consider this very much a feature and not a bug.
A little background
The Feldenkrais method was developed by Moshe Feldenkrais, who started with a focus on healing from a major judo injury. Told that he'd have a 50% chance of ending up being a wheelchair user after a major knee injury, he went looking for ways to avoid that. What he ended up doing, essentially, is working out a bunch of the principles of neurobiology via observation that have since been proven and documented more fully in academia.
I've been circling around the idea of doing Feldenkrais work for .. oh, close to a decade, now. It gets discussed in the musician community a fair bit, and it was starting to show up in the riding world when I stopped riding seriously.
There are two things I found especially intriguing about the Feldenkrais approach:
The definition of health:
Feldenkrais defined health as the ability of the body to recover from shock or trauma. Life happens, we get hurt. What divides the line between health and disease is how we come back from that. It's not about what we can do in athletics, or what our blood tests show (though those things may help us problem-solve). It's fundamentally about responding to the world around us, and about helping our bodies to do that better (with less strain, stress, pain, and overwork, basically.)
This is a model I really prefer (it's also the basic model my herbalist uses). It is, however, pretty foreign to mainstream Western medicine.
The idea of choice
There are tons of movement modalities out there, including all sorts of physical therapy models. These certainly often work. However, they're also often based on the idea that there is a 'right' way to move, and that doing anything else will harm the body.
The Feldenkrais theory of this is that you have a choice. The work you do in the classic practice (there are people who've gone off and done combination practices with other things) is about trying out small, non-strenuous movements, and saying to your body "Hey, how'd that feel? Was that easier? Wanna try it again?"
But it doesn't dictate about that. It recognises that there are times you'll want to sit in a crumpled pile on the floor, or use your laptop at a less than great height, or just (often!) be focused on other stuff so you're not paying attention to what your body is telling you in great deal.
The idea is that if you do this regularly enough, and check in with your body enough, a) you get much earlier warning of the stuff that's your body telling you it's getting close to damage (i.e. pain, loss of function, etc.) because you're checking in regularly, and b) your body will eventually start going "Oh, hey, that easier thing? Maybe I will do that more often, instead of this habitual thing that makes me go ow." But it's not supposed to be a forced thing, but a natural decision.
This ... well, this reminds me a whole lot of my Craft training and growth. You take the thing, you try it out, you use it with attention sometimes. And then you start coming back to it more and more often because it's *useful* and it makes stuff better. And then sometime, you wake up and you find you're doing it easier than breathing, because it just plain works.
The two approaches
There are two approaches in Feldenkrais work. One is Awareness Through Movement, which is a practitioner leading a group of people through a lesson verbally, but generally not giving individual feedback. The benefit comes from having a specific set of motions/things to focus on, and giving yourself time to do so. This is, from the stuff I've read, by far the easier one to learn. (Makes sense, since it's pretty parallel to a lot of other modes of teaching.)
These lessons are pre-planned, but there are over a thousand in existence, so there's tons of variation and ability to focus in quite tightly on a particular area of function.
The other approach is Functional Integration, which is one on one work. This is the more expensive option (on which more in a second), but it also, obviously lets you do individual work on exactly the bits that are troublesome, and to get immediate and direct feedback that improves things.
This one involves the practitioner using their hands to guide specific movement patterns: it's very hands-on, but you're not trying to manipulate the muscle, but get the body to sense what's going on better. More on this when I get there.
Cost
Awareness Through Movement classes are about on a par with something like an aerobics or tai chi class: something between $10-15 a class, often in a seasonal series, but a lot of practitioners also do periodic seminar classes on a particular topic (The Healthy Back) for example.
Functional Integration sessions are comparable to any other one-on-one body work you might be looking at, though there's some balance points, because more frequent work is easier (and produces a lot more progress) than intermittent work. One reason I really like the practitioner I'm seeing is that he had a very thoughtfully nuanced explanation of why he sets his sliding scale the way he does.
He says: "These days health care as a whole is deeply divided along class lines; I teach using a sliding scale so that my practice isn’t. It is important to me to promote access to the benefits of Functional Integration as widely as possible, and to run an ethical and sustainable small business for my own family." Which is an expression I really resonate with, and a lovely example of clear boundary setting. (His scale runs $30 to $90, and while he gives income guidelines, he doesn't ask for income: you pick what you can sustain for the number of sessions that will actually do you some good. He also does a $90 for 3 sessions for new people, which I also like because we all know the first session or two of this kind is a getting-to-know process.
Timing varies hugely: the practitioner
The actual session
I started this process by emailing and saying "Hi! I'm interested" and a bunch of practical background, including some questions like "Would it make more sense to start now, or wait until summer break?" Obviously the answer to the latter one was "Now's good." (I can do one session a week right now, but two a week would be really challenging with the driving issues.)
He sent me a bunch of information: I had to dig out a pair of pants to wear, because a lot of the work is done on a lowish wide table (like a massage table, but with different specs). He works out of a studio in his house, so there's a certain amount of which side of the driveway to park on, etc. I drive down, get mildly lost, but now know where to look for the turn-off, and actually get there just about on time. (It's almost exactly half an hour with an average run at the stop lights along the way.)
I ring the doorbell, get shown in to have a seat while he's finishing with the previous person, and then we do the intro stuff - we talk about what I'd like to do better, where my previous habits have been, etc. (He's already commented on my self-awareness in this area.) A side benefit is that this work might actually fix the mild TMJ I've had for decades.
He walks around me observing (this is one of those Schroedinger's moments: the idea is to not change stuff because you're being observed, but of course, we're human, and we always do.) We talk about how it feels for my feet on the carpet, and where I'm putting weight, and how that feels.
He then puts his hands on my shoulders and very gently guides me to twist side to side. We talk about what that feels like - my right side is moving more freely, but on my left side, when I bring the right shoulder forward, I feel it gripping in the lower back and hip, and when the left shoulder goes forward, I feel it gripping with the left shoulder.
We then move to the bench, which is like a massage bench, sort of, only it's a) wider, b) shorter and c) less padded. (There's also no head rest, because you do the work on your side or back not your front, mostly.)
I start on my back, and he spends a while feeling how my feet and legs move and respond to different small movements - as he says, he's actually interested to how it's moving up my back and torso, more than the feet and legs themselves. We do some talking about what feels comfortable in the lower back (knees bent with feet flat, or propped up on bolsters, or what) and try some variations out.
We then talked about how I slept (I'm a side sleeper) and then spent a lot of time with me on my right side. He started with side to side movement (i.e. bring your hip and shoulder forward to the surface you're lying on, then backwards the same way.)
Hi! Here is a habit! What I've been doing is that my entire side moves in lock-step, so the whole thing moves around the central axis. This is not, in fact, an ideal way for a body to move. (Which I'd mostly known, but not known how to fix.) So, we try a wide range of movements there - what happens if I just move the knee forward? What happens if I move the hip? What happens if the knees are in a slightly different position?
He then goes rummaging around to try and find a movement that is natural and free without those habitual locking moments. For me, it turns out that vertical movements are much easier: extending the leg and hip and up through the torso is easy, and I don't start gripping along the way.
The idea is that you show your body "Hey, look, doesn't this feel good? Wouldn't it be nice if this other movement felt like that too?" by doing some alternation, then by trying to nudge the body into giving up the tension that it's trying to hold onto. There's lot of trying stuff, and with reminders to "Let your knee feel heavy" and "Let me guide you in this, you just come along, don't try to do it for yourself."
But there's also a bit here that I hadn't realised I was looking for. More on that in a second.
We then move up to my shoulders, and do the same things up there, trying a whole bunch of different arm positions and rolling forward and backward, and seeing how to disconnect the whole side from being rigid. There's a lot of feedback about "Yes, do that again! Did you feel how everything just released and stopped grabbing?" that's very helpful. We discover some exciting tender spots on my collar bone, and work around them in the process.
(The touch in general is .. sort of hard to describe. It's impersonal but caring, and a lot of it is mostly guiding your body into a particular movement, rather than pushing or pulling. He was very careful to watch for cues that anything was uncomfortable, and gave me clear instructions to speak up if he didn't catch something. I can see ways it would be much more challenging for people with touch-related abuse in their background, but I understand there are ways for a skilled practitioner to work around that.)
I then shift to my other side, and he walks me through doing it myself. My exercises for this week are to lie on my side (hand on the upper arm flat on the floor) and:
- rotate my elbow down to the floor.
- draw my shoulder back down toward the floor (as if moving to lie flat)
- lightly move my knee closer to the floor (this is a rotation, not much actual movement.)
- move my hip back, as if moving to lie flat
- move the elbow and hip forward together (but not in lock step)
- move the elbow and hip back together
- move the elbow back and the hip forward.
- move the elbow forward and the hip back (this one is really really *really* hard for me right now)
I then sit and stand, and we do a little more discussion of how things feel now. There's a *lot* move ease of movement when we try the exercise we did at the very beginning (the very slight twisting back and forward.) He then sends me out to go walk up and down the street for 5 minutes to get a feel for how it works before I drive home.
What I hadn't realised I needed
Now, my physical body training stuff is different than a lot of people's. I did a wide range of sports when I was young, but I was lucky enough to end up in my riding instructor's hands mostly before puberty really hit, and he was the first athletic-type person I really spent lots of time with.
The thing about riding is that it's a sport that you can't do by brute force. The horse is *always* bigger and stronger than you are. So there's a lot of discussion in riding circles (and was then) about how being able to move with the horse and respond is really a lot more useful than forcing a particular mode.
What I learned from that - and I think this is where a lot of my later patterning comes from - is that I learned that just pushing through something isn't actually useful. I'm very amenable to pausing, figuring out what's going on, and trying again. Rote attempts annoy me. The downside is that the "Try, re-evaluate, try something with a slight variation" is that it's incredibly time consuming, and you have to build a high level of self-awareness for what you're doing.
But here's the other part: it's been quite a while since I've had conscious focused feedback about what I'm doing *well* from people where I know they've got wide perspective on what they're seeing, and who can describe the variants and what they're seeing with them in some detail.
- I don't get it at work, mostly, because most of the people I work with don't know my field well enough to give detailed feedback on what's working and what isn't.
- I used to get a fair bit of this (at least if I asked) in group religious work. However, leading your own group, that option drops away. I can tell how well what I'm doing seems to be working, but I can't get wide feedback on "This thing that works, or this other thing that works, which is better" as readily. This means I can tell when something's *good*, but not always if it's the best/most effective it could be.
- I used to get it in music lessons, but that's not been part of my life for a while. Same deal on the feedback: I can find (and appreciate!) people who say "I really like that", but it doesn't help on the refining process of which of these things to choose.
- I *do* get it with my writing in some contexts: you all reading this help with that, thank you! And here, I have places to dig if I want detailed feedback, which is handy. But it doesn't solve the other places in my life.
This lesson, though, I got *lots* of feedback, and most of it of the "Oh, that's brilliant, do that again!" and "Hmm. See how you had it right at the beginning there? Try for more of that." which was really really helpful, but also felt like it was falling into a nearly-dry parched well of being told I was doing stuff right. It's nice to be told my body is doing right things at the moment.
Right now
I felt a bit less focused during our May Day ritual this afternoon, though it went quite respectably. But that might be as much the fact it's been a busy weekend without as much rest as I'd really have liked as anything else.
I do notice myself going "Oh, hey, is that really what I want to do with my body?" and trying something slightly different as I sit here. I'm not thinking of it all the time, but I'll pause and take a breath, and go "Oh, yeah." and do a slight adjustment and see how it feels.
I like him a lot in person, too - he's my kind of geeky about the poking into why stuff works, and was delighted that I consider this very much a feature and not a bug.
A little background
The Feldenkrais method was developed by Moshe Feldenkrais, who started with a focus on healing from a major judo injury. Told that he'd have a 50% chance of ending up being a wheelchair user after a major knee injury, he went looking for ways to avoid that. What he ended up doing, essentially, is working out a bunch of the principles of neurobiology via observation that have since been proven and documented more fully in academia.
I've been circling around the idea of doing Feldenkrais work for .. oh, close to a decade, now. It gets discussed in the musician community a fair bit, and it was starting to show up in the riding world when I stopped riding seriously.
There are two things I found especially intriguing about the Feldenkrais approach:
The definition of health:
Feldenkrais defined health as the ability of the body to recover from shock or trauma. Life happens, we get hurt. What divides the line between health and disease is how we come back from that. It's not about what we can do in athletics, or what our blood tests show (though those things may help us problem-solve). It's fundamentally about responding to the world around us, and about helping our bodies to do that better (with less strain, stress, pain, and overwork, basically.)
This is a model I really prefer (it's also the basic model my herbalist uses). It is, however, pretty foreign to mainstream Western medicine.
The idea of choice
There are tons of movement modalities out there, including all sorts of physical therapy models. These certainly often work. However, they're also often based on the idea that there is a 'right' way to move, and that doing anything else will harm the body.
The Feldenkrais theory of this is that you have a choice. The work you do in the classic practice (there are people who've gone off and done combination practices with other things) is about trying out small, non-strenuous movements, and saying to your body "Hey, how'd that feel? Was that easier? Wanna try it again?"
But it doesn't dictate about that. It recognises that there are times you'll want to sit in a crumpled pile on the floor, or use your laptop at a less than great height, or just (often!) be focused on other stuff so you're not paying attention to what your body is telling you in great deal.
The idea is that if you do this regularly enough, and check in with your body enough, a) you get much earlier warning of the stuff that's your body telling you it's getting close to damage (i.e. pain, loss of function, etc.) because you're checking in regularly, and b) your body will eventually start going "Oh, hey, that easier thing? Maybe I will do that more often, instead of this habitual thing that makes me go ow." But it's not supposed to be a forced thing, but a natural decision.
This ... well, this reminds me a whole lot of my Craft training and growth. You take the thing, you try it out, you use it with attention sometimes. And then you start coming back to it more and more often because it's *useful* and it makes stuff better. And then sometime, you wake up and you find you're doing it easier than breathing, because it just plain works.
The two approaches
There are two approaches in Feldenkrais work. One is Awareness Through Movement, which is a practitioner leading a group of people through a lesson verbally, but generally not giving individual feedback. The benefit comes from having a specific set of motions/things to focus on, and giving yourself time to do so. This is, from the stuff I've read, by far the easier one to learn. (Makes sense, since it's pretty parallel to a lot of other modes of teaching.)
These lessons are pre-planned, but there are over a thousand in existence, so there's tons of variation and ability to focus in quite tightly on a particular area of function.
The other approach is Functional Integration, which is one on one work. This is the more expensive option (on which more in a second), but it also, obviously lets you do individual work on exactly the bits that are troublesome, and to get immediate and direct feedback that improves things.
This one involves the practitioner using their hands to guide specific movement patterns: it's very hands-on, but you're not trying to manipulate the muscle, but get the body to sense what's going on better. More on this when I get there.
Cost
Awareness Through Movement classes are about on a par with something like an aerobics or tai chi class: something between $10-15 a class, often in a seasonal series, but a lot of practitioners also do periodic seminar classes on a particular topic (The Healthy Back) for example.
Functional Integration sessions are comparable to any other one-on-one body work you might be looking at, though there's some balance points, because more frequent work is easier (and produces a lot more progress) than intermittent work. One reason I really like the practitioner I'm seeing is that he had a very thoughtfully nuanced explanation of why he sets his sliding scale the way he does.
He says: "These days health care as a whole is deeply divided along class lines; I teach using a sliding scale so that my practice isn’t. It is important to me to promote access to the benefits of Functional Integration as widely as possible, and to run an ethical and sustainable small business for my own family." Which is an expression I really resonate with, and a lovely example of clear boundary setting. (His scale runs $30 to $90, and while he gives income guidelines, he doesn't ask for income: you pick what you can sustain for the number of sessions that will actually do you some good. He also does a $90 for 3 sessions for new people, which I also like because we all know the first session or two of this kind is a getting-to-know process.
Timing varies hugely: the practitioner
The actual session
I started this process by emailing and saying "Hi! I'm interested" and a bunch of practical background, including some questions like "Would it make more sense to start now, or wait until summer break?" Obviously the answer to the latter one was "Now's good." (I can do one session a week right now, but two a week would be really challenging with the driving issues.)
He sent me a bunch of information: I had to dig out a pair of pants to wear, because a lot of the work is done on a lowish wide table (like a massage table, but with different specs). He works out of a studio in his house, so there's a certain amount of which side of the driveway to park on, etc. I drive down, get mildly lost, but now know where to look for the turn-off, and actually get there just about on time. (It's almost exactly half an hour with an average run at the stop lights along the way.)
I ring the doorbell, get shown in to have a seat while he's finishing with the previous person, and then we do the intro stuff - we talk about what I'd like to do better, where my previous habits have been, etc. (He's already commented on my self-awareness in this area.) A side benefit is that this work might actually fix the mild TMJ I've had for decades.
He walks around me observing (this is one of those Schroedinger's moments: the idea is to not change stuff because you're being observed, but of course, we're human, and we always do.) We talk about how it feels for my feet on the carpet, and where I'm putting weight, and how that feels.
He then puts his hands on my shoulders and very gently guides me to twist side to side. We talk about what that feels like - my right side is moving more freely, but on my left side, when I bring the right shoulder forward, I feel it gripping in the lower back and hip, and when the left shoulder goes forward, I feel it gripping with the left shoulder.
We then move to the bench, which is like a massage bench, sort of, only it's a) wider, b) shorter and c) less padded. (There's also no head rest, because you do the work on your side or back not your front, mostly.)
I start on my back, and he spends a while feeling how my feet and legs move and respond to different small movements - as he says, he's actually interested to how it's moving up my back and torso, more than the feet and legs themselves. We do some talking about what feels comfortable in the lower back (knees bent with feet flat, or propped up on bolsters, or what) and try some variations out.
We then talked about how I slept (I'm a side sleeper) and then spent a lot of time with me on my right side. He started with side to side movement (i.e. bring your hip and shoulder forward to the surface you're lying on, then backwards the same way.)
Hi! Here is a habit! What I've been doing is that my entire side moves in lock-step, so the whole thing moves around the central axis. This is not, in fact, an ideal way for a body to move. (Which I'd mostly known, but not known how to fix.) So, we try a wide range of movements there - what happens if I just move the knee forward? What happens if I move the hip? What happens if the knees are in a slightly different position?
He then goes rummaging around to try and find a movement that is natural and free without those habitual locking moments. For me, it turns out that vertical movements are much easier: extending the leg and hip and up through the torso is easy, and I don't start gripping along the way.
The idea is that you show your body "Hey, look, doesn't this feel good? Wouldn't it be nice if this other movement felt like that too?" by doing some alternation, then by trying to nudge the body into giving up the tension that it's trying to hold onto. There's lot of trying stuff, and with reminders to "Let your knee feel heavy" and "Let me guide you in this, you just come along, don't try to do it for yourself."
But there's also a bit here that I hadn't realised I was looking for. More on that in a second.
We then move up to my shoulders, and do the same things up there, trying a whole bunch of different arm positions and rolling forward and backward, and seeing how to disconnect the whole side from being rigid. There's a lot of feedback about "Yes, do that again! Did you feel how everything just released and stopped grabbing?" that's very helpful. We discover some exciting tender spots on my collar bone, and work around them in the process.
(The touch in general is .. sort of hard to describe. It's impersonal but caring, and a lot of it is mostly guiding your body into a particular movement, rather than pushing or pulling. He was very careful to watch for cues that anything was uncomfortable, and gave me clear instructions to speak up if he didn't catch something. I can see ways it would be much more challenging for people with touch-related abuse in their background, but I understand there are ways for a skilled practitioner to work around that.)
I then shift to my other side, and he walks me through doing it myself. My exercises for this week are to lie on my side (hand on the upper arm flat on the floor) and:
- rotate my elbow down to the floor.
- draw my shoulder back down toward the floor (as if moving to lie flat)
- lightly move my knee closer to the floor (this is a rotation, not much actual movement.)
- move my hip back, as if moving to lie flat
- move the elbow and hip forward together (but not in lock step)
- move the elbow and hip back together
- move the elbow back and the hip forward.
- move the elbow forward and the hip back (this one is really really *really* hard for me right now)
I then sit and stand, and we do a little more discussion of how things feel now. There's a *lot* move ease of movement when we try the exercise we did at the very beginning (the very slight twisting back and forward.) He then sends me out to go walk up and down the street for 5 minutes to get a feel for how it works before I drive home.
What I hadn't realised I needed
Now, my physical body training stuff is different than a lot of people's. I did a wide range of sports when I was young, but I was lucky enough to end up in my riding instructor's hands mostly before puberty really hit, and he was the first athletic-type person I really spent lots of time with.
The thing about riding is that it's a sport that you can't do by brute force. The horse is *always* bigger and stronger than you are. So there's a lot of discussion in riding circles (and was then) about how being able to move with the horse and respond is really a lot more useful than forcing a particular mode.
What I learned from that - and I think this is where a lot of my later patterning comes from - is that I learned that just pushing through something isn't actually useful. I'm very amenable to pausing, figuring out what's going on, and trying again. Rote attempts annoy me. The downside is that the "Try, re-evaluate, try something with a slight variation" is that it's incredibly time consuming, and you have to build a high level of self-awareness for what you're doing.
But here's the other part: it's been quite a while since I've had conscious focused feedback about what I'm doing *well* from people where I know they've got wide perspective on what they're seeing, and who can describe the variants and what they're seeing with them in some detail.
- I don't get it at work, mostly, because most of the people I work with don't know my field well enough to give detailed feedback on what's working and what isn't.
- I used to get a fair bit of this (at least if I asked) in group religious work. However, leading your own group, that option drops away. I can tell how well what I'm doing seems to be working, but I can't get wide feedback on "This thing that works, or this other thing that works, which is better" as readily. This means I can tell when something's *good*, but not always if it's the best/most effective it could be.
- I used to get it in music lessons, but that's not been part of my life for a while. Same deal on the feedback: I can find (and appreciate!) people who say "I really like that", but it doesn't help on the refining process of which of these things to choose.
- I *do* get it with my writing in some contexts: you all reading this help with that, thank you! And here, I have places to dig if I want detailed feedback, which is handy. But it doesn't solve the other places in my life.
This lesson, though, I got *lots* of feedback, and most of it of the "Oh, that's brilliant, do that again!" and "Hmm. See how you had it right at the beginning there? Try for more of that." which was really really helpful, but also felt like it was falling into a nearly-dry parched well of being told I was doing stuff right. It's nice to be told my body is doing right things at the moment.
Right now
I felt a bit less focused during our May Day ritual this afternoon, though it went quite respectably. But that might be as much the fact it's been a busy weekend without as much rest as I'd really have liked as anything else.
I do notice myself going "Oh, hey, is that really what I want to do with my body?" and trying something slightly different as I sit here. I'm not thinking of it all the time, but I'll pause and take a breath, and go "Oh, yeah." and do a slight adjustment and see how it feels.
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no subject
Date: 2010-05-03 01:58 am (UTC)If so, say hi to him from Ian Osmond. We went to high school together.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-03 12:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-09 01:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-03 04:19 am (UTC)I once did a little bit of bodywork with someone I was working with in another modality, but I honestly do not remember if it was Feldenkrais or Trager or something in between. The part I really liked was how it kind of enabled me to find a whole other degree of freedom between my top vertebra and my head.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-03 09:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-03 11:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-03 01:58 pm (UTC)I was thinking about the 'how do you do this if you have existing pain' thing, and I'll try and remember to ask at some point soon.
In general, I think they ask specific questions, and then find movement modes that don't hit the pain. (The guy I'm seeing said "I expect you to be like the whiniest princess and the pea ever. If it even so much as hurts, say ow lots." The thing with pain is not just that you go ow, but that pain teaches the body to tighten up and grab hold, which is the last thing you want when you're trying to teach it to relax.
When we hit the really tender points on me, he just adjusted where he was putting pressure to somewhere that wasn't tender. But my pain issues are more about tender points and knots, rather than, say, bone spurs or something equivalent that is going to hurt a lot when it actually moves.
I know that they've done lots of work with people *with* these issues: just don't know how the process starts as clearly.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-03 02:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-03 05:48 pm (UTC)I'm curious though if these somatic therapies work in reverse. What I mean is, most discussion about these therapies is around protocols for physical injury/trauma which eventually express themselves as diminished range of motion, pain, etc. What about emotional traumas that express themselves as physical dysfunction (ie - PTSD)? Would these somatic therapies work for someone with emotional trauma?
no subject
Date: 2010-05-03 06:12 pm (UTC)I know that some of my chronic tension issues are due to physical trauma (nothing that even broke bones, but that set my body ajar) but I also suspect that some of them are emotional. (For example, I grip with all of the abdominal muscles I can manage on some kinds of movements, which is a pretty classic emotional response pattern.)
Mostly, I come down to "Try it, see if and how it helps, and go from there." I'm hoping that it is going to release some of those chronic emotional-turned-physical patterns of movement, but I'd also be very happy if bits just moved better and stopped going ow in the ways they currently do, y'know?
no subject
Date: 2010-05-04 03:18 am (UTC)In yoga, we can use different asana to address the chakra(s) most affected by the emotional trauma, but it can be a long process. I was just curious if there was a physical protocol that more directly deals with emotional trauma.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-04 10:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-04 11:08 pm (UTC)