Pain: Where you think it is, it ain't (Ida Rolf)
Pain is a complex phenomenon that involves the brain as much as body. Most kinds of acute musculoskeletal pain that people suffer are glitches in the soft tissue. When this is the case, I've found that techniques in the direct myofascial release family are efficient and effective. For these cases, Targeted Knotwork is the way to go. Sometimes, and especially with pain that has gone on for a very long time, the tissue has already healed, but the pain remains - as if it's a program that the brain is running without regard to what is currently happening in the tissue. In these cases I've found it helpful to calm the pain first, and work towards showing the brain ways the body can move without reacting in pain. In such cases, Gentle Pain Calming, which is so much slower and gentler, is a much better choice.
Table Sessions for Intensive Troubleshooting
Short Sessions for a Quick and Dirty Debug
Tensegrity = tension + integrity
Islands of compression in a sea of tension
All structures, properly understood, from the solar system to the atom, are tensegrity structures. Universe is omnitensional integrity.
(Buckminster Fuller)
Once the threat level has been decreased, it can help to work on the balance of tensions in the body. I call the blend of modalities I use for that Targeted Knotwork for Muscular Pain Debugging, and it is based on a philosophy of tensegrity. The body's structural integrity rests on the balance among the tension members, so I am focused on finding places where tension is out of balance. It's more of an intuitive process than an analytical one - target areas are ultimately confirmed by the subtle nervous system reaction to the work. Once I've found the right places, the treatment itself is frequently a matter of generating slack so the problem areas can have room to change, and giving appropriate nervous system input to the problem areas themselves to encourage them to make the change.
