“What just happened?” - Myofascial Release
There is often a distinct sense of something different or novel about the afterglow we feel following a Myofascial Release treatment, that sets it apart from other treatments.
A Myofascial Release treatment can make a difference to the tightness or pain that we seek help with – even after one session. But it can also leave us feeling distinctly lighter in ourselves, more spacious, as if an invisible burden has been lifted from us. It’s this felt sense-recognition of the body and mind being brought into equilibrium that can leave new clients pleasantly baffled. Tempted as I might be to explain why they might be feeling this way, I mostly stop myself, encouraging them to rather stay with, and become curious about their subjective, embodied, present-moment experience.
Here’s why I avoid the usual de-brief after a session…
We are so habituated to living in a world that splits body and mind that we hardly pause to question it. With our minds so firmly at the helm of things, we can easily end up feeling upended when our bodies present with pain and tension. Confused, we might seek out a manual therapist to help us decipher what is going ‘wrong’ with our ‘chaotic’ bodies. We seem to have lost our ability to make meaning from the way we feel – we’ve forgotten the language of our feelings. Yet this has not always been so. Our language is peppered with clues that hint at something different.
Compare the following paragraphs and see how they resonate differently for you:
1. “John suspected that Jane’s relationship had ended as soon as he saw her. He knew the reason and it made him furious. It was time to speak to her about it.”
2. “John had a gut feeling that Jane had had her heart broken as soon as he laid eyes on her. He knew why her relationship had soured and it made his blood boil. It was time he got it off his chest.”
While both passages describe the same scenario, one hints at something more deeply felt, more truthful, beyond the factual. It does so by referencing the body and the senses.
We have always relied on the body to make sense of ourselves and the world. It was all we had, before we had language. Sadly, we seem to have lost our capacity to listen to our bodies. We are socialised to discredit our feelings in favour of our intellect, so we rarely refer to our feelings to navigate life, and neither do we explore the connection between emotional and physical health. In Fascial Release sessions, we do both!
When we contact the tension we hold in our fascial (connective) tissue during a session, we naturally engage our interoceptive awareness. (Interoception is the ability to be conscious of internal sensations and emotions in our bodies. It’s the sense that helps us answer the question ‘how are you feeling ?’ on a moment-to moment basis). This is because the fascial tissue system is deeply innervated with receptors specifically geared to help us feel. One could say Fascia is the sense organ we use to listen to ourselves on the inside.
Restricted fascial tissue can hold and store unprocessed emotion, so it is not uncommon for a client to come into awareness of some supressed emotion when they feel a corresponding release in the tissues during a session. Dr Robert Schleip, a leading researcher in the field of Fascia wrote in a 2017 paper: “Myofascial as well as visceral therapists should also not be surprised when encountering psycho-emotional responses or emotional release which may include changes in internal body perception, in self-awareness or affective emotions. These may be triggered by their stimulation of interoceptive free nerve endings in the skin, in visceral connective tissues as well as in muscular tissues”.
Coming into a deeper relationship with oneself in your body is one of the many benefits of Myofascial work and it is a core principle of why I think it can reach further than many other manual therapies. It helps us develop an intelligence that lies beyond the rational, thinking mind. Carol M Davis, keynote speaker and fascial expert, sums it up when she recalls a client who commented after her session: “I had hoped that you would make my knee feel better, but I never expected that you would help me feel more at one with myself!”