Body Sense

SPRING | 2018

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www.massagetherapy.com—your resource for all things bodywork 9 3 STEP THREE: Practice visualizing and moving the structures you have learned, imagining the desired outcome, for 10–20 minutes per day. Keep a short daily log of any changes you experience so you can chart your progress and stay inspired. BRING IT HOME Few changes last without consistent practice. Commit to 10–20 minutes a day focusing on visualizing and feeling the movement pattern that is causing pain, and it will undoubtedly result in improvement. Your massage therapist can email pictures to you so you can look at them before each visual meditation and remember what to focus on. Athletes have used visualization techniques to improve athletic performance with great success for a long time. Studies in brain patterns tell us the same patterns that activate while performing a physical activity are activated when simply envisioning the activity and not actually performing it. From personal experience, I can say that combining images of anatomical structures with a visualization practice devised to alter those structures (such as softening a muscle, releasing a trigger point, or improving blood and lymphatic flow to an undernourished area) can be nothing short of miraculous for the healing process. Many of my clients have engaged in this process with amazing results as well. DOES IT REALLY WORK? Does understanding how the compromised parts of your body are structured and function help you to heal them? I absolutely believe it does. Is a massage therapist's educated work alone enough to cause lasting results? Perhaps in a few cases, yes. But, in most cases, each individual who finds their way to a massage table carries more power to heal themselves than the therapist. Knowing this extends your therapist's role from practitioner to educator. I invite you to open yourself to this knowledge by asking your massage therapist to teach you about the parts of your body that hurt: showing you pictures, charts, and models, and explaining simply how that part of you is designed to move. In this way, you will increase your body awareness and your healing power. B S Cindy Williams has served the massage profession as a practitioner, school administrator, instructor, curriculum developer, and mentor since 2000. She enjoys the challenge of blending structure with creative flow to provide balance in her classroom, bodywork practice, and life.

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