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Scoliosis, Can Massage Help? – Part 1

Helping Our Clients with Scoliosis

If you have being involved in bodywork for any length of time you have had your hands on more than a few clients who were scoliotic and offered you quite a challenge!
In my training at the Rolf Institute there was one axiom that I was taught that made the work very simple to understand. Our work is involved in the lengthening process. It is the only way you can straighten a body.

So, if we can lengthen the body, we can give support to our clients whose scoliosis creates often constant painful conditions in their bodies. Given enough time, we can assist in making some wonderful changes in this idiopathic condition (a condition of unknown origin). You will definitely need to sharpen your body reading skills, and allow yourself enough time to make these changes in your client’s body.
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Building a Massage & Bodywork Practice: Part 2

Well, I hope you have gained a wee bit of insight into building an ongoing practice that fulfills your expectation and needs from the first part of this blog post. I left you with the idea of referrals, or as I call it “planting of the seeds“ for a bountiful bodywork practice. It doesn’t matter what discipline you practice. I am a Rolfer and and Cranial Sacral therapist, but it doesn’t matter what you practice. Let me give you an example. Let’s say you are a member of a local gym where you regularly take care of the most important aspect of your health. Now, in the one I was recently a member of, every discipline that you can imagine is represented. I’m talking yoga, Pilates, weight training, swimming, running, tennis etc. Pick one or all and have a very simple attitude, what I do is of benefit to each and every one of you! Do you think that your work would have a benefit on every one of those disciplines? Of course it would!

Your Work as Its Own Advertising

Now you can spend your money on print advertising. I have done this, but have gained very limited benefit from my efforts. What I have found a much more successful strategy is to simply give services away with a smile knowing that your “advertising” efforts will continue to reap you benefits well beyond the initial “costs”! Its very much like creating residual income. Your consistent efforts sharing what you do in a hands on way is much more powerful than language used to describe its benefits. [Read more…]

Building a Massage & Bodywork Practice: Part 1

So, you have your newly acquired Certificate from an accredited massage school and its time to fill the coffers with the steady flow of economic support that you dreamed of when you first decided to embark on the bodyworker’s journey. Or you have been at it for awhile and things aren’t going quite like you expected and you are wondering why? There is no “how to” blueprint that will apply to everyone and all their needs. There are obviously too many variants in goals and desires for that to be accomplished in one template.

So let’s explore the one question that was posed to me as a teacher of deep tissue massage and cranial work in the three schools where I taught. “How do I get my practice built?” And for the seasoned players, “How do I turn up the heat a little bit on my my tepid practice?” There are many underlying thoughts flying under the “conscious radar” which I believe need to be addressed.
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The Tensegrity Model and the Massage Therapist

Rolfers have for many years the incorporated the concept of the tensegrity model of Buckminster Fuller, a friend of Dr. Ida Rolf, into their conceptualization of bodywork. Fuller gave the world these insights from his architectural concept of the geodesic dome. We see the concept also displayed in structures like tents and sailing ships. What defines this model is a continuous tensional network (tendons) supported by a discontinuous set of compressive elements called struts. What is important about this for us as bodyworkers, beyond the obvious, is the discovery by Dr. Ingber of the Harvard medical school in 1993. He and his colleagues demonstrated how tensegrity is involved in the regulation of cell and tissue architecture. His work describes a network of structural systems and energy informational systems and how the body and its numerous parts including the cells are in actuality a tensegrity system.

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States of Consciousness

Changes that Accompany Our Work

Many times since this journey of mine has begun, I have experienced changes in the consciousness of people on my table though our hands on work. I would say the most powerful aspect of our work is its impact not only on the physical ease of our clients’ bodies, but the changes in awareness that inevitably accompany the work.

We know that various forms of trauma, both physical and emotional, reduce the functionality or plasticity of the tissues. It’s unavoidable playing in the gravity fields! Our job is to sort that out through a series of sessions that restores plasticity to the connective tissues and creates a more economical and fluid organized structure. Hopefully, that gives folks a greater sense of ease of motion that is clearly recognizable because of our client’s relationship with our work. That is often the most obvious change that happens quite quickly. But, for those of us that have been on the “trail” for awhile, we are also very aware of the states of consciousness that accompanies those physical changes! Dr. Rolf’s beliefs revolved around the concept that the more fluidic and aligned a body was in space, the more the inner states were available to the client.
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