Aug 04 2008
Your Body is Speaking - Are You Listening?
When Claire Laplante interviewed me recently for an article on working through injury, I was struck by how many injuries could be averted if we listened more closely to the signals our bodies were sending us - and we knew how to interpret them accurately.
Across the course of my bodywork and teaching career I’ve seen many therapists miss those signals. Then they end up hurt and either having to leave the field or spend a lot of time out of work.
That’s one of the reasons I’ve been so outspoken about encouraging people to slow down and listen. I narrowly averted a few potentially serious injuries myself by tuning into what my body was desperately trying to tell me.
I received one of the earliest signals only a year or so after graduating from massage school. At that point I enjoyed doing at all kinds of massage, but my clients really seemed to like the firm strokes of my deep-tissue work. Unfortunately, as my client base grew, so did a ganglion cyst on my left wrist. It was sore to the touch and would not go away.
When I finally stopped and tuned into my wrist, I clearly got the sense that my wrists and hands did not like doing deep-tissue work. That’s when I knew I had several choices.
I could have ignored what I was hearing and kept on working. That probably would have led to carpal tunnel syndrome or some other wrist-forearm-hand dysfunction. Then I might have been dealing with long-term recovery or worse, permanent burnout.
Or I could have medicated my wrist. But that could have caused the issue at the source to get more complicated as I dealt with the side effects of the drug that was silencing the voice of the inflammatory process.
As I listened further and experimented with what my wrists and hands did like (we’re talking months here), I finally discovered that the forearm strength needed to perform light-touch CranioSacral Therapy worked just fine for me. It uses different muscle groups yet in equally powerful ways, as I hold firm platforms for occipital-cranial base releases or I follow the tissue in deep fascial releases.
Because I listened to and honored the signals from my body, I switched directions in my career. Ultimately, it was a far more satisfying and rewarding path for me.
Today there are good articles on injury reduction coming out for therapists. The information they share can help you ask your body relevant questions.
Yet in the end, the biggest factor is whether you know how to listen deeply and communicate with your body. Everyone does this in slightly different ways. The core skill of knowing how to slow down, tune in, and listen to what your body is telling you is the key.
How do you tune into what your body is telling you? Drop me a line and let me know. I’ve just completed my book, Full Body Presence, that is designed to help you slow down and tune in. The eBook is available now and the printed copy is coming later this summer.
If you’d like to be one of the first people to read the book, I’d be honored. You can purchase and download the ebook or preorder the regular book by clicking here: Full Body Presence
And, enjoy!
Aloha Suzanne,
Your article is right on the mark. I have found that by slowing down and using different breaths help me to sink down in a quiet place that keeps me in touch with myself and how I am feeling as well as what my clients body is telling me. I do have to say that my hips and back are not liking carrying my table everywhere, but I am working on different ways of carrying it to eliminate that problem. To me, using the different ways of breathing helps the client to relax and deepen even though they aren’t keeping a rhythm of breathing with you. The Luna Breath is especailly helpful.
Talk to you later,
Marilyn
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