Many of you have reached out to learn more about the work that I do: reiki & qigong, craniosacral therapy, path finding and teaching pilates--all of it about helping you to live fully, joyfully and healthily.
Reiki and Qigong are two types of energy work that I use together during sessions, depending on which techniques are more applicable at the time. At times, I will blend energy work into a CranioSacral session, which is light touch manual therapy and helps to melt away physical restrictions, pain and open up an ease of movement and being.
Path finding is my newest addition! Somewhere between life coaching and arts therapy, I teach you how to cultivate inspiration, guide you into personal growth and help you add richness and fulfillment to the life that you already have. It's much less about making drastic changes than about finding ways to weave in joy and passion into the life that you do have and moving from there. You have to grow yourself before you can grow your career, business or relationship and I help you to do that.
For more information, you can find me here or here. And please! drop me a line if you have questions.
Showing posts with label craniosacral. Show all posts
Showing posts with label craniosacral. Show all posts
Sunday, January 26, 2014
Friday, January 24, 2014
Cohesion of being
I have this rib that slips out of place. When it does, I get a sharp and lasting pinch where the vertebrate it should articulate with is, and sharp pinches at the front, where the rib wraps around my liver and connects with my sternum. It's annoying and makes everything from bending forward to moving my arms to carrying a backpack harder so I usually get myself into see my osteopath as soon as I can.
This time, though, I was trying to wait until my new health insurance kicked in (February 1st) and over the past three weeks, I witnessed my body shift to compensate for its new position. My rib slipped out and then my right shoulder tightened up. My right illium slipped up and rotated back and then it felt like my ankle fell apart. Like a pile of blocks had been knocked over, it felt like all the bones that make up the ankle joint collapsed in a shapeless pile. This week, when another rib and two cervical vertebrate went out of alignment, I could hardly stand so I finally called my osteopath.
Osteopathy, is, in my opinion, divine medicine. It is just heaven. Like CranioSacral therapy, it is light touch manual therapy, and osteopaths work with the body holistically and interact with the body rather than impose correction on it.
Anyway, I went in and Dr. Scholars, who I have been working with for awhile now, slowly worked out all the shifts my body made after my rib slipped. When she finally circled back to my rib, she suggested that it was my over-taxed liver (nope, not because I am having that much fun but because of all the meds I have taken over the past year to keep Lyme in check) causing it to slip. Vertebrate (so ribs too) correlate with the organ that is on the same neural pathway and together, the organ and vertebrate can create negative feedback loops: when an organ is under stress or not functioning well, it sends distress signal up the neural pathway and the correlating vertebrate and/or rib responds with pain or movement, sending new signals down the nerve to the organ.
It makes sense to me, actually, especially as I was just reading about the spine-organ connection a few days previously but to witness it in my own body, through a doctor's input, really shifted, once again, my understanding of my body and bodies in general. So often, when I have studied anatomy or physiology or learned any method of training, the education addresses individual muscles, muscle groups and the skeletal system, as if we could understand musculature in isolation from the rest of the body, when the body actually works cohesively at all times.
This time, though, I was trying to wait until my new health insurance kicked in (February 1st) and over the past three weeks, I witnessed my body shift to compensate for its new position. My rib slipped out and then my right shoulder tightened up. My right illium slipped up and rotated back and then it felt like my ankle fell apart. Like a pile of blocks had been knocked over, it felt like all the bones that make up the ankle joint collapsed in a shapeless pile. This week, when another rib and two cervical vertebrate went out of alignment, I could hardly stand so I finally called my osteopath.
Osteopathy, is, in my opinion, divine medicine. It is just heaven. Like CranioSacral therapy, it is light touch manual therapy, and osteopaths work with the body holistically and interact with the body rather than impose correction on it.
Anyway, I went in and Dr. Scholars, who I have been working with for awhile now, slowly worked out all the shifts my body made after my rib slipped. When she finally circled back to my rib, she suggested that it was my over-taxed liver (nope, not because I am having that much fun but because of all the meds I have taken over the past year to keep Lyme in check) causing it to slip. Vertebrate (so ribs too) correlate with the organ that is on the same neural pathway and together, the organ and vertebrate can create negative feedback loops: when an organ is under stress or not functioning well, it sends distress signal up the neural pathway and the correlating vertebrate and/or rib responds with pain or movement, sending new signals down the nerve to the organ.
It makes sense to me, actually, especially as I was just reading about the spine-organ connection a few days previously but to witness it in my own body, through a doctor's input, really shifted, once again, my understanding of my body and bodies in general. So often, when I have studied anatomy or physiology or learned any method of training, the education addresses individual muscles, muscle groups and the skeletal system, as if we could understand musculature in isolation from the rest of the body, when the body actually works cohesively at all times.
Monday, February 4, 2013
Learning to listen with my hands
Learning CranioSacral therapy has really been about learning to listen with my hands.
It's learning to touch again and to become aware of the space where the palms of my hands and your flesh connect and to let your body speak. Rather, to learn how to listen to what it has been saying.
The touch is like melding with the surface tension of water--not breaking through the surface tension and not merely touching the very superficial skin of the surface tension but melding with it. When the touch is right, when my hand is melded then all the life within the water, everything below the surface tension in the body of water, explodes into communication with my hands. It is exquisite to experience.
I have been giving a lot of sessions lately and I absolutely love it. As the sessions go on, the sensitivity of my hands increases--it is almost as if the your body and my hands are developing a clear language between the two. This is really different than Reiki. With Reiki, when I give a session, my hands are on the person before me but the work is in allowing the energy or light to pass through me and into the receiver. I take no information from the person before me so every body feels exactly the same to me though the sessions feel different in how the energy moves. CranioSacral sessions, on the other hand, are exactly about me reading the body and I am learning just haw incredibly uniquely different we all are.
Today, I worked on a dancer with some low back pain. Towards the middle of the session, I was working on her sacrum and ASIS and all of a sudden, her sacrum settled into my hand and it began to breath and it felt like holding harmony. She had a huge sigh and said that that was an incredibly release and I moved on to work on her head. This is why I love craniosacral work--because it is so gentle and yet produces such incredible ease of being for people.
It's learning to touch again and to become aware of the space where the palms of my hands and your flesh connect and to let your body speak. Rather, to learn how to listen to what it has been saying.
The touch is like melding with the surface tension of water--not breaking through the surface tension and not merely touching the very superficial skin of the surface tension but melding with it. When the touch is right, when my hand is melded then all the life within the water, everything below the surface tension in the body of water, explodes into communication with my hands. It is exquisite to experience.
I have been giving a lot of sessions lately and I absolutely love it. As the sessions go on, the sensitivity of my hands increases--it is almost as if the your body and my hands are developing a clear language between the two. This is really different than Reiki. With Reiki, when I give a session, my hands are on the person before me but the work is in allowing the energy or light to pass through me and into the receiver. I take no information from the person before me so every body feels exactly the same to me though the sessions feel different in how the energy moves. CranioSacral sessions, on the other hand, are exactly about me reading the body and I am learning just haw incredibly uniquely different we all are.
Today, I worked on a dancer with some low back pain. Towards the middle of the session, I was working on her sacrum and ASIS and all of a sudden, her sacrum settled into my hand and it began to breath and it felt like holding harmony. She had a huge sigh and said that that was an incredibly release and I moved on to work on her head. This is why I love craniosacral work--because it is so gentle and yet produces such incredible ease of being for people.
Saturday, January 5, 2013
the best book club ever!
We did it! We began our book club on movement and I am looking forward to taking my learning to a whole new level.
T. is a good friend of mine--she managed the first studio that I worked at in California and is still teaching pilates herself. We met up in the midst of the holidays and she brought up this idea of hers: to start a book club where we take the times to explore different movement modalities (like Alexander technique, Franklin Method, Feldenkris to name just a few), various healing techniques (Qi Nei Tsang, Ayurveda and Craniosacral, among others) and study anatomy in-depth. How much fun and how valuable!
I have done so much continuing ed since I started teaching pilates and personal training. I have taken four day human dissection labs at a chiropractic college, immersed myself in qigong for a year, spent weekends reviewing anatomy and physiology in an effort to understand chronic injuries and how to structure training sessions, attended pilates and mind-body conferences and, of course, taken countless pilates, yoga, capoeira, dance and gyro classes. From every class, I have learned so much about how to teach, about my own limits and places to push myself and about the body, health and healing but there is only so much that can be taught and learned in a week or weekend. And the idea of exploring on our own and getting deep into these topics is really exciting.
So we did it. T. and I met up today and went over our interests and what we want to learn to fold into the work that we do. Naturally, I am really interested in anything that will support my Craniosacral work right now and we decided to start with anatomy with a focus on the fascia. We'll be reading Anatomy Trains by Thomas Myers first.
T. is a good friend of mine--she managed the first studio that I worked at in California and is still teaching pilates herself. We met up in the midst of the holidays and she brought up this idea of hers: to start a book club where we take the times to explore different movement modalities (like Alexander technique, Franklin Method, Feldenkris to name just a few), various healing techniques (Qi Nei Tsang, Ayurveda and Craniosacral, among others) and study anatomy in-depth. How much fun and how valuable!
I have done so much continuing ed since I started teaching pilates and personal training. I have taken four day human dissection labs at a chiropractic college, immersed myself in qigong for a year, spent weekends reviewing anatomy and physiology in an effort to understand chronic injuries and how to structure training sessions, attended pilates and mind-body conferences and, of course, taken countless pilates, yoga, capoeira, dance and gyro classes. From every class, I have learned so much about how to teach, about my own limits and places to push myself and about the body, health and healing but there is only so much that can be taught and learned in a week or weekend. And the idea of exploring on our own and getting deep into these topics is really exciting.
So we did it. T. and I met up today and went over our interests and what we want to learn to fold into the work that we do. Naturally, I am really interested in anything that will support my Craniosacral work right now and we decided to start with anatomy with a focus on the fascia. We'll be reading Anatomy Trains by Thomas Myers first.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)