Wellbeing and health

Whenever anyone comes through the door of any doctor or health practitioner wanting some form of treatment, it is always because they feel that there is something "wrong" that needs attention. This universal and very reasonable fact has contributed to a whole philosophy of medicine based around pathology and illness, which is enshrined in our mainstream "healthcare" system. If you read or watch anything on "health" in the media, you will usually be confronted by a description of illness, disease and ill-health.

In fact, the paradigm of "health" as a progression of inevitable illness through life described above is NOT the only way of viewing the human body. There are other paradigms - based on principles of Health and Wellness as being our fundamental birthright.

Although this debate was originally about disease, the principles apply equally well to physical aspects of the body such as skeletal structure.

The principle of Health/Wellness ("Vitalism") is very useful when applied to treatment...

• It is possible to treat in such a way as to encourage health - rather than paying attention to the illness. This is a VERY effective and efficient way to work - since we look at where and how the body is expressing health and then help that to also heal the areas that are not doing so well. This way of working is commonly called a Holistic approach. In practice - from my point of view as a bodyworker - it includes attention to mobility of tissue and fluid (including the local blood and lymphatic circulation). It is also possible to totally ignore a particular "problem", and instead reduce the load that the body has to bear due to other minor things - e.g. old scar tissue and injuries - so that its adaptive capacity is more free to work. Craniosacral Therapy (CST) in particular applies this principle of Wellness, and all of the techniques I apply are designed to help the body's innate capacity for Health to express itself more fully.
• I have seen so many cases of incomplete healing being caused by an incorrect relationship between mind and body. Often a small change in how you relate to your body (which is easy to teach as part of the treatment session) can make a vast change to how easily the body repairs itself. One example of this is during remedial work on broken bones that are not healing. Usually there is some residual fear of the pain or the accident, or some degree of shock still in the body (this may not necessarily be conscious) - which may literally be the only thing that is preventing the tissue healing.
• There are also ways to be embodied which cultivate an experience of physical lightness rather than heaviness. This has profound effects on posture (and therefore both physical and emotional health), and I can teach these on a one-to-one basis in the clinic as part of normal treatments. They are particularly important for athletes and sports people, but also apply to dance, martial arts, yoga, running and even ordinary walking! The Alexander technique teaches posture from the neck down. Based on my experience of Taiji and Qigong I teach a similar while-body usage, but from the feet up.
• The fundamental approach to treating PTSD (shock, or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) is to re-orient a person to feelings of safety and health. I integrate these techniques very simply into every treatment session, and will invite you to apply them more directly for a few sessions if this appears to be necessary. They are also excellent life-skills (I think of them as part of the user manual that we should have received when we were given a body) and I can teach these so that you can apply them at home.