WHAT IS STRUCTURAL INTEGRATION?
"Structural integration" is a style of bodywork where we look at your body's structure and posture, the way the bones of your skeleton relate to each other, to see what patterns your body is holding onto. I let your body be the map to tell me why you're hurting where you are and to show me what I can do to help. Then, I work to release the specific muscles that bind you into those patterns and postures that are no longer helpful to you. The goal of this work is to improve mobility and reduce pain by helping your body into better, more balanced alignment.
WHY STRUCTURAL BODYWORK?
I practice and offer therapeutic structural bodywork because it is so effective and makes so much sense. When we look at and work on the body through this structural lens, we begin to see why your body hurts where it does by looking at how each of its parts relate to each other.
Think about this: if someone tied your head down so your chin touched your chest, and told you to walk around all day, your neck and back would start to hurt and fatigue, right?. If you then came to me and said "my neck hurts, please massage it" and I dutifully rubbed the back of your neck, you would feel better for a while but tomorrow would just yield more of the same misery. If instead I said "hey, how about I remove that tie around your head?" and then let you pick your head back up to a normal place, tomorrow would be so much better! This is exactly how structural bodywork goes--I look not for the places that directly hurt, but for the ties that cause those places to hurt.
WHY WORK WITH ME?
The kind of work I provide is very different from your standard "massage." Whether you are dealing with chronic aches, pains, and stiffness, are recovering from an injury/accident/surgery, or are just curious to learn more about your body, I encourage you to give structural work a try. One of the things my clients love most about this work, aside from pain relief, is new-found freedom in their bodies. Many people leave a session saying "It's just easier to stand" or "It's just easier to move." The other thing I have found my clients appreciate is the time I will take to assess you and your body. Your body is a new puzzle every time you visit, and every time we'll take a good look at it and then tailor the session to address what you most need on that day. I am not a miracle-worker (no matter what they say!) and I won't lie and promise you'll be fixed when you walk out my door. What I can promise you is my attention, expertise, and time, and that one way or another you will have new information about and a new kind of experience in your body if you give my work a try.
MY BODYWORK PHILOSOPHY
As phrased by my mentors at Integration Nation Bodywork, the intent of my practice is to be holistically focused and anatomically specific. I have been drawn to wholeness, balance, and integration since my youth, even before I recognized my inclinations in those terms. While approaching my life and work from this place of trying to understand a complex web certainly makes mastery more difficult, I feel it is also the most interesting, enticing, and honorable way to interact with any given system. I believe recognizing the way that pulling one string affects the whole thing is key to being able to effect both lasting and positive change on that system. In that way, I suppose I might as well have been an ecologist as a bodyworker! It is with this whole-system view in mind that I then seek to address very specific muscles of the body to ease the patterns that cause pain and stiffness within that system. As I grow in my practice, I aim to explore the emotional and energetic aspects of structure as well.
