I am doing this work because I know how impossible life can feel when we suffer from chronic pain, and I believe everyone deserves to feel good about their body. When we feel constantly tired or headachey, when we have pain in our back, knees, hips or shoulders, it makes us want to shut down and not feel anything. It makes it difficult for us to be good to the people in our lives, or effective at work. I know, because I have struggled with chronic pain myself.
This world needs empowered, centered people. People who are in touch with their bodies, making good healthy decisions for themselves and our planet. Feeling good, being cheerful and kind. Awakening to their spiritual potential. Playing music, running, gardening, painting, playing sports, writing, dancing… Many of us have passions that can contribute to bodily wear and tear. Yet these are the things that make life joyful. I want everyone to be able to do what they love, and feel good doing it. Because when we feel good, friendliness, kindness and helping others comes naturally. That’s why I believe that investing in your own physical comfort actually makes the world a better place.
I believe that the journey from painful to feeling good is important, and that in order to last, it must include a process of gaining awareness. Nothing lasts if we don’t know how we got there; if we haven’t learned something new about ourselves that we can come back to later. And I don’t mean a textbook factoid. I mean learning through sensations, the wordless direct experience of our own bodies, experiences that shed light on how we hold ourselves, what the texture of our life’s patterns feel like. It’s usually hard to articulate, but it helps so much to try.
My own influences, both inside and outside of Rolfing heavily influence my approach. I have been doing mindfulness meditation since I was a teenager, and teaching it for nine years. This profoundly simple practice can have great impact on one’s awareness and ability to focus. Joining it with the Rolfing work emphasizes a body awareness that I find is a much-needed antidote to the constant external focus and push for maximum speed that we all experience.
I feel strongly resonant with many of Ida Rolf’s core concepts, and always have them in mind as I work. I believe in the idea that we are organized around a vertical axis that can be visualized as a line that can be used to gain energy and support from the gravitational field. It’s therefore important to take the time to assess each client’s personal ways of carrying tension, so that the work can be made to fit them. Working holistically, I apply the understanding that fascia is a continuous web throughout the whole body, and structures that do not conventionally seem related often affect each other in unexpected ways.
The body has the potential to be extremely sensitive to minor adjustments. We are alive. This means that nothing about are bodies is fixed—we are always breathing, growing, relaxing, tightening—seeking the most efficient way to maintain homeostasis. Most of this is unconscious unless we reach a problem that cannot be solved by the internal system, and then we say “I have a bad knee” or whatever it is.
Pain and ‘gain’ are not necessarily related. Sometimes my work creates intense sensations of stretch, or we discover a sensitive spot. Sometimes breathing deep is necessary to flow through these sensations, but these do not make up the majority of my sessions. Often, my clients have grown so disconnected from their bodies that pain is the only face in the room that they recognize. What is initially interpreted as pain can be a symptom of vivid reconnection with any and all feeling-sensations in the body.
My work comes from the idea that first and foremost, we are healthy. We start out with perfect health, and then that gets obscured by various events and traumas. I believe our bodies possess intelligence about their histories and their connection to health. My job is to create space for an open communication with your body, listening to it as I invite change. If it is a good change, the body will move toward it, because that will be a more efficient way of moving through the world.
