Emotional Healing and Bodywork
I’ve been simmering about this post for a bit because I’ve been doing a lot of personal work as of late. It started as an attempt to grow this teaching business. I struggle with the marketing part of it. I want to get the word out, but don’t have a lot of skills in that area. So I signed up for a life coaching program online. It’s affordable and it sounded like it was going to help me to get my stuff together.
Before I could start working on the parts about building a business, the program makes you go through a self-mastery module, digging up the parts of you that are triggered by various behaviors of others. It’s making me take a deep dive into stuff I’ve worked on already quite a bit. I thought, I don’t need to dig this up again and look at it. I just need to build my teaching business.
I tried to hurry through the work so I could get through it quickly, and found that I was more stirred up than I thought I would be.
Turns out I still have more healing to do. Go figure.
My father passed away a few months ago, and I’ve been feeling the heaviness of grief, having moments of tears and pain… physical pain, even. In the beginning there was so much brain fog I could hardly focus on anything. That has finally passed for the most part. I fell a couple of times on the ice in the two months following his death, and I didn’t bounce back as quickly as I expected to.
I am finally on the other side of the falls, and in the middle of some deep emotional work. I got a lot of resolution yesterday during an Alexander Technique treatment/lesson from a very skilled practitioner here in town, Elaine Belle. I decided to take a little break from digging stuff up and enjoy the peace I have, just for a few days. Then I will dive back in.
This experience made me think about the connections between emotional and physical healing. The two so obviously go together, and most bodyworkers are aware of that. I want to write a post with some thoughts about ways to navigate these moments with clients, to help them the best way that we can, as we respect our scope of practice—we are not mental health counselors, but the issues really are in the tissues, so sometimes it’s a hard line to ride.
My experience made me more aware than ever about the need for a team of practitioners. In the last few months I have seen:
Lynn Christensen, LAc (acupuncturist)
Andrea Marie, LMT, DOMP (manual osteopathic practitioner trained in Canada)
Linda Kozora, PT
Ashley Dodd, LMT
Jerri Reynolds, LMT
Paula Bauer, LMT
Bevie LaBrie, Art Therapist
Lewis Huckstep, Life Coach
Shenice Peterson, LMT
Truly a team of helpers to get me through the worst of the grief, as well as the injuries. Each and every one of them gave me a piece that I desperately needed, sometimes as tears welled up in my eyes, either from feeling the grief and pain of loss and realization of weakness, or sometimes from the resulting joy of getting the relief from the deep pain I was having.
The question I want to explore is, How do we as bodyworkers help our clients to navigate these lifequakes?
There are all kinds of massage therapists, and we run the gamut from being scientifically driven to learn sophistocated techniques to not even touching the body, but instead using energy to help ground and center people as they work through their energetic blocks. No matter what our belief system is, we have to admit that they are all helpful, and often, necessary, for our clients.
How do we connect with other therapists and practitioners that are helpful, so we can know whom to refer our clients to?
WORK WITH OTHER PRACTITIONERS FOR YOUR OWN PERSONAL WELL-BEING AND GROWTH!
This is resounding inside of me so clearly, as I’m working through my own lifequake. I have my usual people that I go to for maintenance. But when something comes up that shakes us up, we need extra help. That is our a beautiful opportunity to try other practitioners with different skill sets. It was so important that most of the above-mentioned people who have helped me in recent months were already in my calendar, just farther apart than I needed. Only one of them was new to me and I found him on Instagram. One other I had been in classes with and had traded techniques in class, but I had never been in her office for a full treatment. She does a kind of work that I had not yet received. It was Lynn, the acupuncturist, who suggested to me that I should go see her, and it ended up being a big piece of my healing.
Here’s a tidbit for you that maybe you have noticed before, but if not, it will be helpful to hear: Anytime you introduce something novel to the body, you will get a far greater reaction from it the very first time it is done.
How can we apply this principle in treatment?
For one thing, don’t bust out every awesome technique you have ever learned in the first appointment. Save some for later, so that you can continue to get a big change each time the client comes in.
Another thing I have found helpful is to review my class notes regularly. Teaching does this for me. I study so much each time I write a new class, and then every time I teach a class, I also revise my manual, so I hit the books again to see what else I might want to include in the class. Also when I have a client that I am more challenged by, I will open up some class manuals, Netter’s Atlas of anatomy, or look online to see what else I might be missing. This gives me new techniques to try the next time they come in.
Lastly, I refer out. As I’m working with them in my office, I am racking my brain to think of other practitioners that I have seen or heard of, and who might be able to help them further. This is where getting worked on myself helps so much. Often our own pains and healing help us to help others.
To assist our clients to navigate their lifequakes, we need to be well-informed, well-treated, and present with them. We need to have a good network of practitioners that we see regularly, have seen in the past, and even ones we have heard about from clients. When clients tell me about another practitioner they have seen, rather than feeling competitive with that practitioner, I see the beauty in a variety of hands on our clients and I take the time to ask what kind of work that person does, and what in that work was helpful to them. This can lead us to want to learn more, go experience that person’s work, perhaps take a class in what they do. It doesn’t always do that, because we don’t have time to learn every single modality in the world of bodywork. We would have to live hundreds of years to learn it all. But the more we know about what other people do, the more we can help our clients to find what will help them the most.
So get some bodywork this week, or at least get it on the calendar. Get some personal growth work on your calendar, too. Find out about services available in your town, who does them well, and make an effort to get informed. That way, when you have a client in the middle of a lifequake, you will have some great ideas for how to help them get what they need.
