Your body tells me stories about you
I've written a thank you note for my first blogpost. Kinda liked it so I’m writing another one.
I don’t have any socials so it’s kinda nice to just word vomit not knowing who would stumble upon this random page lol.
Anyways.
I get a lot of questions on how my process works when treating a body. There's an energetic side and a physical side — today I’m going to blab about the physical. I approach the body through texture, lines, and opposition. Girl huh? Lemme attempt to explain myself…
Texture. Distinct tactile sense for the epidermis, fascia, the interstitial/transcellular fluid, bones, nerves, membranes, muscles. Each has its own archetype, and healthy parts feel integrated and orchestrating with the grander symphony. Example: fascia that's hydrated gives suppleness to the muscles, which shows up as consistent suppleness and breadth across the tissue. When there's a separation between these archetypes — when one layer isn't coexisting with their neighbors — the dance doesn’t flow or make sense. So I start asking where the consistency in lines breaks in the body. That's where texture hands off to lines.
Lines are felt through a sensation, a purposeful stroke into a direction — a flow, inspiration, a charge, a pull towards where it wants to travel. The systems innately have their lines of consciousness, its own sense of direction for where the lymph, the blood, the fascia, the muscle want to go. Your body asks me to feel the nuances between the systems. And when one system is stuck, I ask which system is easiest to influence, so it can cascade the others back into their flow.
That cascade is really what opposition is: pulling apart the lines, pulling apart the texture, so there's more negative space in the body. Creating space for fluid to rush in coagulated or fibrotic parts, for discs to breathe so nerves can hush, for the diaphragm to sync with the pelvic floor.
Texture, lines, and opposition aren't three separate steps — they're one continuous method to scan the body.
Even when the body is still, it's incredibly dynamic inside. I've noticed that the wisdom I adopt through Modern Dance, specifically Laban Bartinieff technique, shapes the way I feel into the body just as much as any clinical training does. So in the treating process, I feel the body, I watch how someone carries themselves through space, and I look for what the body yearns to express.
I’m sure that’ll evolve as I go to Osteo school but as of now, this is how I relate to your tissues. Your body is always performing or dancing its truth, and I'm fascinated by it’s story telling — and how you want to dance and feel through the world, in your own fabulous skin.
