Bodywork & Yoga
Bodywork & Yoga are two complimentary forms of healing and when combined become even more potent and powerful for each person. Bodywork is used to open up local restrictions like scar tissue, chronically tight muscles, or adhesions within the connective tissue system. Yoga is used to re-educate the body's intelligence to reorganize and undo old problematic patterns by building news lines of communicating structural support. Simply put, Bodywork opens up in quicker time than Yoga the areas locked short, but Yoga is much better at strengthening muscles groups that have been disconnected, disengaged, & atrophied. But beyond this, Bodywork and Yoga teach individuals better how to feel inside and relate to and regulate tension and energy in the body. As people begin to get bet better at feeling they get better at responding which enables them to get better, heal injuries, and clear old muscular/emotional patterns. This is what I have come to know over from my past 17 years practicing Bodywork & Yoga, and this is what I teach.
Bodywork
Bodywork is a general term for multi-disciplinary hand's on techniques that explore the moment to moment relationship of breath to muscular/fascial tension and nervous system defense mechanisms by sensing the tissue directionality, angle and depth of pressure appropriate to each person's needs. Bodywork is not simply a massage protocol that applies general pressure overall to the body. Bodywork is about feeling the uniqueness of each person, understanding their edge and their rate of release and exploring their tensions and fascial restrictions at levels that they can receive. Many forms of Therapeutic Hand's-on technique can be considered Bodywork including MyoFascial Work, Structural Integration, Shiatsu, Tuina, Cranio Sacral, and many many more.
Yoga
Yoga is an ancient healing practice, Forrest Yoga is a contemporary version that was created to address modern day injuries, emotional stress, and postural problems. Forrest Yoga sees each person as unique and thus requires a unique approach in their yoga practice and their life. Forrest Yoga is about, how do you make the pose work for "you"? With every breath, in every pose, how do you make the pose work for you? It is very similar to bodywork in that you have to honor your edge. If you go to deep too fast, you will end up tightening against your own efforts. In these cases, people usually stop breathing and come out of the pose early. Rather, if you back off a bit, find your comfortable edge, then establish active lines of support that run from your feet up through ankles legs and knees and thighs, then you can stay in the pose longer and learn how to run lines of energy through your legs.
The form of Bodywork I practice and teach is about honoring the edge and each body's rate of release. It is appears near impossible to be in defense and release simultaneously, so for me bodywork is about fascinating upon the edges and learning how to convert tension into pleasure by not going over and violating their pain thresholds causing more tension. I find if my goal is to get into deeper stuck layers, I can get to the deepest if I am not overly pushing into the more superficial layers.
