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I use bodywork and movement coaching to enhance my clients' awareness of their bodies, and their ability to use their bodies with more ease and grace.
About massage
The health benefits of massage include improved lymphatic drainage, improved circulation, rehydration of muscle tissue, increased flexibility, and much more. However, my favorite benefits of massage come down to this:
- You feel better.
- Massage brings you in touch with your physical body.
- Massage, especially regular massage over time, improves your body's availability for movement, stillness and comfort.
- Massage based on the Aston-Patterning method in particular can help open up areas of holding that may have been slowing you down for years, bringing greater flexibility and balance to your body and reducing chronic patterns of pain.
About movement coaching
The simplest things - how we sit, walk, breathe, and do our work - have a tremendous impact on our ongoing experience of our bodies. I can work with you on movements you regularly do in your life, and teach you some very simple exercises, to address specific issues in your body, what might be exacerbating them, and what could relieve them. My movement work is based on using a balance between releasing into gravity and pushing up against it to find relaxation, tone and resilience throughout your body.
My movement training is based on yoga and Aston-Patterning. I find that a combination of bodywork and this kind of body-awareness training provides the most long-lasting improvement in my client's physical health.
About Structural Balancing
Think of your body, for a moment, as a series of segments stacked on top of each other, like a stack of blocks. If the stack is lined up you can press on the top (gravity) and the stack stays intact. If the segments are out of alignment, when you press down on the top the stack becomes wobbly. The sections with the greatest variation in alignment are the places in your body which have to work the hardest to stay up. They also take the brunt of the impact in walking, working and generally staying upright.
Re-aligning your body works best as a gradual unwinding of the holding patterns that are pulling you out of alignment, rather than adding new holding patterns on top in order to look "right". The goal here is a more supple, moveable body, which gets to work less to get more done.
It is important to have patience with the journey. In a way you are taking your body back in time, unwinding a lifetime of work, play, injuries, stresses, healing etc. As you unwind from what has become your familiar shape in space, even the subtle changes can seem huge, and take a while to integrate.
About Aston-Patterning
Aston-Patterning is a unique whole-body approach to human movement developed by Judith Aston, a pioneer in the field of body mechanics and the integration of body, mind, spirit, and environment.
For more information, see the Aston Patterning website.
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