Mind-body-soul work
“Balance arises when we enter, with mercy and awareness, areas [of the body] that have been withdrawn from in fear and anger. Healing is a rehabilitation of deserted areas of the mind-body, a living of our whole life.”
~Stephen Levine
Why?
People ask me how I came to do the work that I do. This bodywork focus grew over the past 5 years. I’ve realized over this time, through the brave patients that come to visit me, that there are few resources for healing the scars left over from trauma from invasive medical treatment. There is no standard in trauma recovery or rehabilitation. People recover at home, alone. Occasionally they have a problem that they take back to the doctor, “I can’t deal with this pain and discomfort on my own any more” and the doctor says, “I guess we could send you back to the surgeon or prescribe some physical therapy.” Outside of support groups, that is basically all she wrote. Few natural alternatives for recovering from medical trauma are well known or understood.
After an invasive surgery or procedure, the conventional medicine model says, “hey, congratulations! You didn’t die from [fill in the blank], go home and live life now!” But after an intense experience of pulling your life back from the jaws of death by taking a tour through hell, well that leaves a mark on your body AND your soul. We could think of it as being broken down to be reborn, but sometimes these patients are just left broken down and they don’t ever get to the “reborn” part of the story. The body can become stuck in a compensation pattern to protect the scars from this intense event. Sometimes these events are a "close call" that didn't physically scar the body, but left and emotional scar that is locked in the fascia.
If you are looking to get to the root cause underlying your problem, rather than smoothing over the same symptoms over and over, 5-Dimensional Bodywork could be the answer.
5-Dimensional Bodywork
“Horizontal desire versus vertical aspiration”
~ Dan Menkin
The 5-Dimensional Bodywork perspective is inspired by my own journey healing my chronic migraines, as well as the work of courageous bodyworkers like Dan Menkin, developer and teacher of Transformational Bodywork. Dan says our horizontal desire is to just make the pain go away and assuage our ego, in which case we will likely have to revisit our issue again and again. Meanwhile, vertical aspiration wants to find the message in the madness, the underlying cause as to why I keep re-injuring myself; to search out my body’s wisdom for healing my pain permanently in many areas of my life.
This work is moving from temporarily “fixing” aches and pains, to using this pain information as a signal for restoring our neural connection to our life’s path. This leads to being able to feel our choices in our bodies and to use this deep information to take the best action for ourselves in true integrity.
Here is the TENET of this work:
Tissue
Emotion
Neural
Epigenetic
Time
TISSUE
We can help your physical body heal, to release restrictions from the scars that breast disease leaves on the body, whether it is the bones, muscles, nerves or organs. Using lymph drainage therapy and other gentle cranial and fascial release techniques, we can relax the tissue to reduce pain and improve circulation. Energetically, is there some acupuncture, reiki, qi gung or another treatment modality that you can participate in which will help you rebuild vitality and life force? Energy work is an important part of each session and can be formatted in a way to easily dovetail with all belief systems.
EMOTION
Do you have a talk therapist or clergy person who you are doing emotional work with? Also, how could we get a meditation, mindfulness or prayer practice into your life? This is so you have a resource to talk yourself back from all the emotionality that you will have after overcoming this medical challenge? Guided visualizations are added to the sessions to help turn off the “monkey mind” and help you relax into your body.
NEURAL
From a neurological perspective, what are our bodily habits? If there is a radiation scar on your chest that causes you to roll your shoulder forward, it doesn’t help you to release that fascia and then leave you with the shoulder rolling habit. We will likely have to massage that fascia over and over again because your nervous system is going to repeat the contraction of its known habit. You will get tightness in your chest again and again until we clear this habit from your nervous system and retrain your brain to hold a different posture. Essential oils, tuning forks and other modalities are incorporated to help reset the neural patterns.
EPIGENETIC
Have you looked at your ancestry? Maybe noticing that you are dealing with this issue, and your parents dealt with this issue and your grandparents dealt with this issue. This thing has become a family paradigm of “we are all going to get sick and that’s just how life is." Or maybe it’s something that keeps repeating in your relationships or in your circle of friends. Can we recognize those habits that show up in our blood family or our adopted family? By learning new, healthy, self-care practices, we can shift our genetic expression and clear these old patterns from our lives.
TIME
Frequently, areas of the body that develop cancer are areas that were injured or traumatized previously. Sometimes this happened very early in life. It is important to address all the scars that occurred in this area of the body, not just the most recent. So a thorough health history is a crucial part of the process. We want to leave no stone unturned.
The last “T” could also stand for “TEAM”. This work is more than a single practitioner could successfully embody in one lifetime. So collaborative medicine is frequently utilized, sometimes co-treating a client at the same session. Approaching this work from a multi-disciplinary perspective allows a natural synergy to arise so the treatments can progress more efficiently and effectively. Co-treatments with other health care professionals are an excellent way to make incredible shifts in healing.
This is a multi-layered (or multi-dimensional) situation. You are not the single traumatic event in your life, and it will take more than one approach to have a lasting effect throughout your system. It’s not until we look at all these levels, from multiple viewpoints, that we can shift your paradigm to truly help your body heal itself, and continue to heal itself.
Your body is your messenger to get you back in alignment with your truly powerful self.
My sessions with clients go deeper, addressing body, mind and spirit. We work together through bodywork, energy work and wellness coaching to find the underlying patterns in your body and help you create a customized daily practice for bringing wellness to all 5 levels – physical, mental, emotional, spiritual and energetic.
Click here to request your complementary 20-minute consultation to discover the next step on your path to wellness.