Over the past few months, I've found myself in conversation with several people who have commented on how many different things I seem to do in my healing arts practice. I often reply somewhat playfully that I only really do one thing - change. Recently, one person replied, "I want to tell other people about how helpful this work is, but I don't know how to describe it - I don't think just calling you a massage therapist or coach would communicate what you do."
I empathize with this statement, because I also don't know how to label my work in a simple way. Massage Therapy and Coaching can refer to a diverse range of styles and approaches. While they do describe my scope of practice and my roles when working with people, they don't necessarily communicate the experience that this work often evokes. Clients report that sources of tension and pain spontaneously resolve, often accompanied by systemic restoration of movement and strength in the body, powerful shifts in consciousness, and opening of creative expression. However, these experiences are not something I do to anyone - they're what emerge when we collaborate with each other.
I practice many modalities, and I often like to divide them into three categories - Holistic Bodywork, Developmental Coaching, and Creative Exploration. The Bodywork I do has Craniosacral Therapy, Myofascial Release, and Structural Integration at its core. My approach to Coaching centers around Somatic, Developmental, and Transpersonal methods. Creative Exploration draws on Breathwork, Ritual, Trance, and Energetic Practices.
Some people might find these phrases meaningful, and others might not; they’re labels I use for the extensive methods I’ve trained in, and they inform different styles of working with people that I adopt based on what the person is most interested in, and what I think will have the greatest efficacy. Often when people come to see me, they arrive driven by difficult symptoms or obstacles. Our work often begins by addressing the following issues:
Pain
Immobility/Rigidity
Imbalance
Nervous System Dysregulation
I treat the remedial phase of my work with clients as important but provisional. The essence of what I help people with is cultivating the qualities that they can access in their bodies when these issues diminish:
Creativity and joy
Fluidity and openness of expression,
Alignment and economy of motion
Co-regulation
While it can be fine to start with an intention of alleviating difficult symptoms, I think it's also important to have a vision of what life could be like after these symptoms dissipate. Who would you be - and what would you do - without your pain? What qualities in yourself, and what resources in your life, would you like to cultivate in order to bring that reality into being? The essence of this work involves staying in contact with that vision, of listening to the inner voice that calls us towards greater well-being, even when we hear that call through states of pain and imbalance. Our process of healing and recovery begins exactly where we are now.
As a change artist, I facilitate emergence - some radical new pattern sends out a signal, deep in someone’s subconscious, and I support them in learning to listen and respond. Sometimes something has erupted into their lives, like a physical injury or the sudden ending of a relationship or job. More often, the call for change expresses itself like an alarm clock that gets gradually louder the longer it rings.
Emergence and change have already happened, and continue to occur in spite of our pattern maintaining behavior. Coaching, Bodywork, and Creative Exploration all offer different avenues for meeting change halfway.
