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As a student of physical therapy in the mid 1970's, I spent hours learning the anatomy of the many muscles, nerves and joints of the body. The fascia merely got in the way of the interesting stuff that lay beneath and was removed long before we were allowed to study the body donated for our learning. We were taught that muscles had origins and insertions and that their action was limited to the joints they crossed. This paradigm led to treatments that simply stretched or strengthened one muscle at a time. This limited view of muscle function and dysfunction was not very effective clinically, and I was soon searching for another model for how the muscle system really worked. Tom Myer's, "Anatomy Trains Concept” has helped me understand the multiple ways muscles link and connect to transfer forces and support the body. This concept of myofascial continuities has been a framework for understanding not only static postural support but dynamic and optimal movement. It facilitates clinical practice in that a local impairment in a line (either a restriction or inappropriate neuromuscular recruitment) far distant from the source of symptoms is easily observed. Subsequent treatment can then be directed at the source of the problem (the criminal) and not merely the painful tissue (the victim). Read more: Diane Lee See Also: T.E. Flemons

Connective Tissue
A Body-Wide Signaling Network

Understanding the temporal and spatial dynamics of connective tissue bio electrical, cellular and tissue plasticity responses, as well as their interactions with other tissues, may be key to understanding how pathological changes in one part of the body may cause a cascade of ‘‘remote’’ effects in seemingly unrelated areas and organ systems. For example, a patient presenting with a flare up of ulcerative colitis preceded by a two week exacerbation of knee osteoarthritis would probably be thought to have two distinct problems, one in the gut and one in the knee. Establishing the presence of a connective tissue ‘‘bridge’’ between these two medical problems would potentially have important repercussions on both diagnosis and treatment of these conditions. One of the greatest problems of modern medicine is its fragmentation. Connective tissue may be a key missing link needed to improve cross-system integration in both biomedical science and medicine. Read more: Helene M. Langevin, 12 December 2005

Postural Integration
Transformation Of The Whole Self

It seems that most of us want to change, that we want to be more relaxed, healthier, more alive. But here lies the basic problem of human transformation. Although we say we want a different kind of life -- and may even be involved in many projects for improving ourselves -- there is a part of us which stubbornly resists any fundamental redirecting of our lives.

This part of us, which refuses to let go, is our armor. We call it armor because it is that aspect of us which being afraid of possible pain and confusion, hardens and desensitizes our bodies and keeps our feelings and thought in careful control.’

Postural Integration is a bodywork in which the practitioner uses fingers, fists, and elbows to grip, twist, and shift layers of tissue and to reorganize the muscular system.

Whether armor takes the form of a hard defense or soft cushion, it is initially developed as a way of avoiding pain and dissatisfaction, but becomes the habitual means by which we unconsciously hold on to pain. For us to experience this armor is for us to liberate ourselves from past attitudes and postures, but this in no sense is an avoidance or destruction of our unique personal histories.

Encountering our armor is a distinct process in which we are freed from the past, and yet at the same time, make it a part of us. In order to be free from our armor we not only have to contact it and acknowledge its role in our lives, we also have to claim it as a part of us.

Equally, if it is "that backache," or "those aching feet," which controls us, we have not yet acknowledged or recognized our armor for what it is, namely our defense against ourselves. Read more: Jack Painter PH. D., 1985

Gravity And Grace
Bodywork's Basic Principles

Learning to work with the light system, learning to make it my ally has been an immense gift to my practice. Acknowledging this system, working with it, has made many things possible that were simply not possible before. The light body carries enormous healing potentials, as you will learn. Further, when we contact the light system in people, we also contact the deepest layers of intelligence. We awaken forces in people which have been unrecognized, or like sleeping beauty, asleep.

I discovered that in any area of the body, pain depends on contraction. Tightness. These contracted area are additional gravity centers within the body. They pull everything down and in. Read more: Nishant Matthews click: “Artikelen” See also: The European Institute For Light Therapy Dutch: Europees Instituut Voor Lichttherapie

Wilhelm Reich's Orgone
A Specific Life Energy

Where psychiatry and psychoanalysis have failed to resolve the dilemma of destructive human aggression, Reich's sex-economy succeeded. Where mechanistic biochemistry failed to elucidate the riddle of the origins of life, or of the cancer cell, Reich's bion experiments, and discovery of a specific life energy, has brought forth their solutions. While neither mechanistic science nor mystical philosophies have shed any light on the longstanding problems of sadism and warfare, or on the world-wide human fear and hatred of nature, Reich's work pinpoints their origins in specific traumatic, sex-negative social institutions which damage the young, and from which sadistic urges develop. Indeed, his sex-economic work has withstood the most rigorous cross-cultural testing, and explains the genesis of destructive human aggression and violence better and more completely than any other theory. Moreover, his work demonstrates the preventable nature of such violence, exposing its roots in our awful treatments of babies, children, and adolescents. My own geographical research extended his findings to show exactly when and where violent, patristic human societies first appeared on Earth, the exact conditions under which they arose, the means by which they spread, and from which their modern-day political expressions developed. Reich's complementary discovery of a specific life energy, the orgone, is likewise founded upon sound, verifiable experiments. Even his orgone accumulator, dismissed by know-nothings as a 'quack' appliance, turns out to be a potent therapeutic device, capable of beneficially stimulating the physiology of plants, animals, and people. The orgone, as a directly observable and measurable atmospheric energy, also plays a fundamental role in our weather, as proven by many experiments with the cloudbusting instrument, a device which has already been used to break many droughts, and bring rains to deserts. For many years I have researched and tested Reich's various discoveries, and found them to be sound, and worthy of our most serious considerations. He has laid the foundations for an entirely new functional science and world view, which has already borne significant and badly-needed fruits. Read more: James DeMeo, PH.D., April, 1987.

The Energy Of Bioenergetics

I think what we in bioenergetics analysis have to offer are two things: One, a sane and sensible understanding of what human nature and life are about - pleasure, and the enjoyment of living. Not money, not power, not success, not making it - there's nothing to make in the world. We have that to offer. And strangely, we also even have a way to help people achieve that. Read more: Alexander Lowen See also: About Alexander Lowen

Lisbeth Marcher
Individuation, Mutual Connection and the Body's Resources

Our basic drive is toward being connected to other people, what I have called the drive toward mutual connection. This means that people who come to me are ultimately struggling to be in relationship. Opening relationships is the essence of therapy, and of life, so I can't abandon that goal. And I can’t separate my understanding of relationship from the body and body awareness. It is through body awareness that we sense ourselves in relation to the other. The more body awareness we can attain-— which includes an awareness of sensation, energy and emotion — the more we are able to establish deep connections to others. So these two things, mutual connection and body awareness, are inextricably linked for me. Therapy that doesn't deal with body awareness will always lack something. Body awareness work that leaves out relationship will always lack something. I see some people make the same mistake Reich made when he focused so strongly on sexuality. They forget what it is to be a person.

For me the goal of therapy is not the orgasm, not nirvana, but the experience of having choice. I believe that we have the greatest choices, the deepest choices when we are in touch with our bodies and our emotions and our thoughts and our spirituality, and when we don' t confuse them. If I were to be a junkie about anything, it would be for body awareness and body experience, because for me, that is how I know myself the best.

PB So we might call it your quest for "body reality."

LM: Yes, body reality. Reality is very deep for me. I really want people to be in their reality because it is the only place from which you can make a clear choice. It is our defense system that creates illusions. Then these illusions create new illusions and so on. Read more: Peter Bernhardt

Subtle Energy Work
Basics

Energy is Infinite. Living in a scarcity culture, the basic rule says there isn't enough to go round. This is only true of cultural artifacts like money which have scarcity built in. It's not even true of food, only of its distribution; and it's not remotely true of love, breath or energy. Working with energy we are working with ABUNDANCE, with PLENTY- which is itself a powerful healing message. To 'give energy' to someone is not to impoverish ourselves; if we can overcome our fear, we are an open channel, letting energy flow through us from the six directions, absorbing what we need as it flows. 02 Oct 95 Read more: Nick Totton

Alternative Medicine Quotations

For instance, he [Fulford] regularly cured young children of recurring ear infections by simply, in his words, 'freeing up their breathing and getting their tailbone [sacrum] unstuck' so that it could get back into normal respiratory [craniosacral rhythm] motion. When this motion is restricted, fluid backs up in the ear, providing a perfect breeding ground for bacteria. -Andrew Weil, M.D., writes about Bob Fulford, a retired osteopathic physician and instructor of craniosacral therapy. Read more: ThinkQuest Internet Challenge

Ina May Gaskin, Spiritual Midwifery

Well known for the seminal work, Spiritual Midwifery, her new book, Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth, is now available. It inspires women to take back the fear of childbirth by regaining confidence in their bodies and assuring them - your body still works! Read more: Ina May Gaskin

Holistic Pregnancy Retreat
Southern Spain

Birth is an intimate time to share and there are no time constraints for the mother to conform to. I have been away from my home and family for 4 days while coaching a woman through a tough labour of a 10 pound boy with no tears. She is one of many women who I believe would have been a cesarean statistic in a modern hospital. Guided and empowered by love and trust of their natural ability to birth, women are often to exclaim that they feel they could rule the world shortly after this kind of birth which is a good way to start the path of motherhood. Read more: Da a Luz

Alternative World Healing Centre
Southern Spain

A conspiracy theory surrounding the disappearance of a multitude of children ranging from 2-15 is happening, because the Governments want more power and control over people. They know that people are now beginning to think for themselves and breaking free from the old traditions from the past. Many people are finding themselves more on a spiritual level than a Religious Level. The Governments fear this. What better way than to create fear and hysteria within society. A continuing increase in missing children are reported the world over. Why? The only way in which the Governments can have control over us is to implant the human race with microchips. That way no child will ever go missing. No human will be able to hide. No animal will be lost. Implanting microchips in humans is a planned idea. If this goes ahead, our free will no longer exists. Every piece of information about each human will be known about. It is no longer a scifi movie script, but something very real. Read more: Jason Ritchie

Gestalt Therapy: An Introduction

The goal of Gestalt phenomenological exploration is awareness, or insight. "Insight is a patterning of the perceptual field in such a way that the significant realities are apparent; it is the formation of a gestalt in which the relevant factors fall into place with respect to the whole" (Heidbreder, 1933, p. 355). In Gestalt therapy insight is clear understanding of the structure of the situation being studied.

The Gestalt therapist works by engaging in dialogue rather than by manipulating the patient toward some therapeutic goal. Such contact is marked by straightforward caring, warmth, acceptance and self-responsibility. When therapists move patients toward some goal, the patients cannot be in charge of their own growth and self-support. Dialogue is based on experiencing the other person as he or she really is and showing the true self, sharing phenomenological awareness. The Gestalt therapist says what he or she means and encourages the patient to do the same. Gestalt dialogue embodies authenticity and responsibility.

Commitment to dialogue. Contact is more than something two people do to each other. Contact is something that happens between people, something that arises from the interaction between them. The Gestalt therapist surrenders herself to this interpersonal process. This is allowing contact to happen rather than manipulating, making contact, and controlling the outcome.

Even though Gestalt therapy discourages interrupting the organismic assimilating process by focusing on cognitive explanatory intellectualizations, Gestalt therapists do work with belief systems. Clarifying thinking, explicating beliefs, and mutually deciding what fits for the patient are all part of Gestalt therapy. Gestalt therapy deemphasizes thinking that avoids experience (obsessing) and encourages thinking that supports experience. Gestalt therapy excludes the therapist's narcissistically teaching the patient rather than being contactful and expediting the patient's self-discovery. Read more: Gary Yontef PH.D. See also: Fritz Perls

Fritz Perls
What is Gestalt Therapy?

You don't need to stay twenty years on the couch or have year in, year out therapy. We can do the whole thing in about three month. From neurosis to authenticity. And the solution is the therapeutic community: where we come together, work together, and do the therapy together. The core of the therapy is learning to confront your opposites. Once you know this way of confronting yourself with opposites, next time you might be able to do it easier. If I give you, for instance, an example of what is the most frequent opposite inside people, then you'll see what will happen from this. The most frequent opposite example is the top dog and the underdog. Read more: Adelaide Bry

Stanislav Grof
The Multi-Dimensional Psyche

Non-ordinary states of consciousness are certainly a unique source of deep insights into the deepest recesses of the human psyche. In my opinion their potential significance for psychiatry is comparable to the importance of the microscope for medicine or the telescope for astronomy. It is hard to believe that this area has been largely ignored by traditional psychiatrists and psychologists. I myself have been particularly interested in two aspects of non-ordinary states. First, it has been their extraordinary therapeutic or healing potential, naturally, if they are used properly and under supervision of an experienced guide. Since I am a clinical psychiatrist, this was my primary area of interest. Second, it has been their heuristic potential, that is, what we can learn in or through these states about the psyche, the unconscious, human nature, and the universe.

In the alternative system of medicine known as homeopathy, the symptoms are the seen as expressions of healing, not the disease. Therapy in homeopathy consists of a temporary intensification of the symptoms to achieve wholeness. This approach results in profound healing and positive personality transformation rather than the impoverishment of vitality and functioning that accompanies pharmacological suppression of symptoms. The emphasis on constructive working with symptoms instead of their routine suppression is the first major difference between the strategies based on modern consciousness research and those used in mainstream psychiatry.

Traditional psychoanalysis explains spirituality as a regression, as a fixation on the infantile stage -a step backwards in development rather than a step forward. In this context, the concept of God is interpreted as projection of your infantile image of your father to the sky. Interest in religious ritual is seen as analogous to obsessive-compulsive behaviour of a neurotic and explained as a regression to the anal stage of libidinal development.

In non-ordinary states, the material world is experienced as a dynamic process where there are no solid structures and everything is a flow of energy. Everything is perceived as patterns of energy and behind patterns of energy there are patterns of experience. Reality appears to be the result of an incredibly precise orchestration of experiences and the observer plays a very important role in the creation of the universe. This is exactly the picture that is now emerging from various areas of new paradigm science. It has become apparent that consciousness has a very fundamental role in the cosmos. It is not a side-product of inert, dead, and inactive matter that somehow appeared in the universe more or less accidentally after billions of years of evolution. Consciousness and creative intelligence permeate all of nature and the entire universe has an underlying master blueprint. This is also an image that comes very close to the mystical worldview and to the understanding that one finds in the Eastern spiritual philosophies.

The psyche and consciousness of each of us commensurate with "All-That-Is", because there are no absolute boundaries between the bodyego and the totality of existence. In this sense, we can experience ourselves as anything between the bodyego and the totality of cosmic consciousness, or the creative principle itself. That is very reminiscent of the message of the Upanishads, "Thou Art That" (You are Godhead, identical with the creative principle of the universe).

We are Newtonian objects, highly developed biological thinking machines, but we are also infinite fields of consciousness that transcend time, space, and linear causality. These are two complementary aspects of who we are and each of them manifest under different circumstances, the first in the ordinary state of consciousness, the other when we enter a non-ordinary state of consciousness.

Strictly speaking, Western psychiatry has pathologized the entire history of spirituality. Many people who have transpersonal experiences are automatically treated as psychotics, people suffering from a mental disease, because psychiatrists do not make a distinction between a mystical experience and a psychotic experience.

My wife Christina and I wrote a book ‘The Stormy Search for the Self’, in which we expressed our belief that the possibility of spiritual emergence - spiritual opening, growth, and development - is something inherent to human nature. And that the need for spiritual experiences represents a very strong force in human personality. Read more: Russell E. DiCarlo

Personality Theories

Personality psychology, also known as personology, is the study of the person, that is, the whole human individual. Most people, when they think of personality, are actually thinking of personality differences - types and traits and the like. This is certainly an important part of personality psychology, since one of the characteristics of persons is that they can differ from each other quite a bit. But the main part of personality psychology addresses the broader issue of "what is it to be a person." Read more: Dr. C. George Boeree

Transactional Analysis

Transactional Analysts are specialists in human communication in psychotherapy, in relationships and at work; in particular the transactional methods that people use to obtain much needed strokes. Transactional Analysis psychotherapists task is to help people identify their ego states and evaluate and improve the ways in which their ego states function, to recognize the inner dialogues between a person's ego states, especially those that involve a harsh demeaning Parent, to recognize the games that people play and to help them stop playing games and get strokes in a spontaneous aware and intimate and manner. The potent therapist provides permission to change and protection against the anxiety that change creates. Stopping the playing of games is the first step in eventual replacing them with direct and honest interactions and eventually abandoning the dysfunctional life script. Transactional Analysis' efficient, yet insightful, contractual method makes it ideally suited for brief psychotherapy. Likewise as consultants, educators, counselors and coaches transactional analysts with their skills in analyzing transactional patterns are able to understand predict and help improve dysfunctional, unproductive, toxic, uncooperative interactions between people and can quickly help people communicate clearly and effectively at the three levels of the Parent (values,) the Adult (rationality) and the Child (emotions, creativity.) Read more: Claude Steiner

Julie Diamond
Dreaming Body

Process Work is a modality for working with people that works with the whole person, which means in the language of conventional therapy, the unconscious as well as the conscious parts. But "whole person" also means all the different arenas in which people operate and live, like relationships, body symptoms, group life and conflict, movement and physical expression, creativity, spirituality. Really it follows where people go, so it's a very broad ranging modality, but it has a very basic theoretical foundation and the same theories and methods work with all those different applications. The basic idea behind Process Work is simple and complex at the same time. It's basically the idea that there is a "dreaming process" underlying the forms and structures of consensus reality. So behind the symptom, behind the group conflict, or behind the relationship difficulty, is a river of meaning that we call the dreaming process. It's very much in the homeopathic tradition in that the solutions themselves lie within the conflict or the problem. So that by going more deeply into it whatever it is that manifests as the problem, we connect with that dreaming process, and that dreaming process is creative, healing, helpful, more whole. Instead of just being identified with the forms and structures of consensus reality, or our problems, we also connect with a deeper level of meaning.

Every modality has its way of doing things. In Rolfing for example, I am thinking you have a client make a lot of changes in their body, in their posture. How about giving time to process what that means for them to have such a body experience? What would it be like to live like that, how would it change their life style? How would they be political like that, for example? What would it be like to have an attitude of mind that follows this body experience? We could process the clash in a role play, and we'd come back to whatever brings that up-tight body state back, and what it would be like to integrate it.

I want to help make people more capable of democracy, and that to me is my goal. Yeah, how to speak up, and speak out, and be open to what you yourself are thinking, and facilitate others, and be up to that immense dialogue that is democracy. Democracy for me is like the ultimate relationship work. It is divergent needs competing over world systems and scarce resources and ideological positions. It is a massive dialogue, and it requires a lot to be up to that big debate, not just shouting down your opponent, or using voting to silence one side, or being more right or wrong. It requires really being open, listening, talking, taking your position, helping the other part express its side, understanding where it's coming from, that whole thing. I feel when I am working with people, that is what I am actually trying to do -help myself and others be capable of a democratic process. Read more: Til Luchau

 

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Schaegen & Sweerts Bodywork
Massage and Advanced Bodywork
Los Naranjos de Marbella, near Puerto Banus
Marbella, Nueva Andalucia 952 907 506