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I got an unexpected jolt and scare a few weeks ago, a low back spasm that immediately got my attention, after slouching in a squishy lounging chair for about 45 minutes at one of my morning coffee hangouts, it bashed me like a bolt of lightning as I tried to straighten up from sitting. It was low back pain that I have not experienced in approximately 40 years.
So, I'm immediately asking myself how this could be happening to me, regularly working out with weights three days a week, maintaining a strong core, keeping aerobically fit and a healthy body weight. What am I supposed to learn from this?
This is the message I got from the pain :
1. Slow down, take a few time-outs, and an occasional nap.
2. Quit competing with the youngsters (30-50 yrs).
3. Practice good posture habits, not in cushy lounging chairs.
I'm grateful that by using some of the home self-help techniques I teach my clients, and getting some good therapeutic bodywork from an associate, my condition improved everyday until I was totally pain free in less than two weeks. Also, throttling back my client workload, and limiting my workouts to walking and doing the elliptical machine, contributed to my rapid recovery.
The experience definitely reminded me to be grateful for my good health everyday.
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Frequently Asked Questions:
1. How many sessions are required to eliminate carpal tunnel symptoms? It depends on the individual's motivation to improve his or her condition, how severe the condition, and how strong the client's belief that it's possible to become symptom free.
2. Can a frozen shoulder be resolved with therapeutic bodywork? Absolutely, I learned a painless technique for restoring full range of motion, usually in only 1-2 sessions, from James Waslaski, a therapist who teaches Orthopedic Massage internationally; The crux of the treatment consists of using the head of the humerus as a massage tool, providing friction to heat the fascia in the joint capsule, and subsequently breaking it loose.
3. What is your opinion regarding analgesics and other health care products, such as magnets, copper bracelets, rollers, etc. that are claimed to relieve pain? I used to discount them before several clients shared their positive life changing experiences using them. Now I have an open mind and encourage my clients, who ask, to try whatever they think might help them.
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Releasing Fascial Restrictions
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Emotions and Pain
Recent scientific research has begun to indicate that positive emotions such as gratitude, compassion, and love have beneficial effects on health. They do so by strengthening and enhancing the immune system, which enables the body to resist disease and recover more quickly from illness through the release of endorphins, the body's natural painkillers, into the bloodstream.
There is no sensation or emotion that is not translated into a muscular response of some kind; these feeling states are the primary bases of our habitual postures and our individual patterns of behavior.
Bodywork, by using tactile input, can actually re-educate and re-program the organism into becoming more coordinated, more flexible, and more appropriately responsive--literally more "intelligent." A body/mind system that is integrated in this fashion will be more able to resist depression or disease, more able to attend to and repair itself in times of stress or injury.
A Handbook for Bodywork - Job's Bodywork, Deane Juhan
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Treating Frozen Shoulder Painlessly
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Chronic Pain
One of my biggest challenges working with chronic pain clients is to help them believe they can become pain free. After months and sometimes years of living in pain, their strong negative conditioning is difficult to breakthrough.
Clients who are highly motivated to improve their condition and resume an active symptom free lifestyle, are able to let go of their unconscious resistance to moving beyond their chronic condition, believing they are in the process of becoming pain free, are the ones who recover.
Not only your psychological form but also your physical form--your body--becomes hard and rigid through resistance. Tension arises in different parts of the body, and the body as a whole contracts. The free flow of life energy through the body, which is essential for its healthy functioning, is greatly restricted.
Bodywork [Zero Balancing] and certain forms of physical therapy can be helpful in restoring this flow, but unless you practice surrender in your everyday life, those things can only give temporary symptom relief since the cause--the resistance pattern--has not been dissolved.
Practicing The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle
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Treating the occiput for headache
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Why Bodywork?
It's not uncommon for individuals after surgery or serious injury not to recover their full range of motion or their normal levels of comfort. These soft tissue dysfunctions can also happen as a result of a wide array of overuse, disuse, spasm, injury, illness, fatigue, aging, poor habits, or innumerable physical strains that various occupations demand of us.
Bodywork has been used for thousands of years to relax muscles, eliminate spasms, diminish fatigue, soften connective tissues to make it more supple, and so free up the joints, restoring a fuller range of painless movement.
A Handbook for Bodywork - Job's Bodywork, Deane Juhan
Skilled in the latest knowledge of anatomy, physiology, and pathology, today's bodyworkers are professionally trained to help you maintain your health and support you in your healing process.
Espousing a noninvasive approach to health, they offer you the luxury of uninterrupted attention to your body's needs. As Dr. Tiffany Field reminds us, 'Before drugs, there was massage therapy. Massage therapists and bodyworkers are schooled to talk and listen with their hands. It is their mission, and their joy, to serve you with the gift of touch communication.' I encourage you to experience this gift, often, for yourself.
Bodywork, Thomas Claire
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Special Offer Through February
Prepay Series of Five (1 hr) Sessions
Only $400 - Save $75
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Why 20% Don't Heal
As long as you make an identity for yourself out of the pain, you cannot become free of it. As long as part of your sense of self is invested in your pain, you will unconsciously resist or sabotage every attempt that you make to heal that pain...the pain has become an essential part of you. This is an unconscious process, and the only way to overcome it is to make it conscious. Practicing The Power of Now. Eckhart Tolle
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