Messages from the body
Bodywork therapy is a highly valuable tool to have in your mental resilience toolkit. The power of touch can be both therapeutic and healing, with many people using it alongside other therapies to help manage trauma or to alleviate the side effects of chronic pain or cancer treatment. An experienced bodywork therapist uses touch to pick up emotional distress and help the client understand themselves and their bodies on a much deeper level.
Think of your body as a complex messaging and feedback system, constantly receiving and storing what the brain feels - negative emotions, fear and trauma are in many ways like physical wounds. As we deal with ever more stress in our lives, we become prone to body imbalances, which often show up as anxiety and pain, sometimes even disease.
By paying close attention to our emotional and physical conditions, we reduce the risk of unsettling our body’s equilibrium. Hands on therapy comes with myriad benefits, including:
- Improves sleep
- Promotes connection with your body
- Lowers cortisol levels and eases stress and anxiety
- Reduces muscle tightness
- Improves circulation
- Promotes deeper breathing
- Stimulates the vagus nerve (lowers heart rate and fight or flight response)
- Promotes digestion
- Diaphragm and rib cage release (for deeper, slower, breathing)
Bodywork… it’s more than a simple massage
The body-mind-breath trio is a very powerful self-care tool. Noticing and bringing awareness of the body into the present helps bridge the mind-body gap. Working with a qualified bodywork therapist enables people to self soothe, calm down the nervous system and restore more of a sense of inner peace. Treatments like shiatsu, cupping and reiki can really strengthen our mental wellbeing. These therapies help us combat stress and anxiety, while also improving sleep, boosting immunity, increasing mental clarity, easing the side effects of medications like chemotherapy, alleviating headaches and reducing low mood.
Bodywork is an umbrella term that incorporates all types of massage therapy, including reiki, cupping, sports massage, remedial work, acupuncture and shiatsu. The individual treatments all have a slightly different focus but essentially use strokes and muscular manipulation to target specific problem areas or to bring about a more relaxed state.
Regular bodywork helps you connect with your body on a deeper level. From a physical perspective it increases circulation, helps to eliminate toxins, encourages good digestion and stimulates your lymphatic system, but it can also help release tension or heal trauma that has previously been suppressed.
A good bodywork therapist will learn to read your body, your breath and your cues and move the direction of the session accordingly. For real, lasting change, we advise making bodywork part of your regular wellness regime to alleviate longstanding pain and tightness, prevent new injuries - and soothe old ones - and even correct bad postural habits.