sensing sensations

I have had a lot of clients wonder if they could ever get enough bodywork that they would no longer have any tension. How many times a week would it take?

I think this inquiry begs a few clarifications. I’m not talking about Pain. I want to distinguish between the discomfort of tension in the body and chronic pain or other neurological disorders. Pain due to tension is an expected signal from the body to the brain that it’s uncomfortable. Chronic pain is when these signals aren’t functioning as expected, in a constant feedback loop of discomfort that typically gets worse as the pain-signal lingers. Discomfort might be interpreted as painful, and the spectrum of interpretation within these very subjective words is vast. This discomfort causes temporary pain, and how we compare this acute pain from chronic pain is how long we endure it, and what ADL’s (activities of daily living) it impedes.

So, back to imagining a body beyond it’s tension. What is your baseline? It is a sticky question because our memory can be inaccurate, and our bodies are dynamic, meaning they are ever-changing, adapting in real time to the actions and stressors of our day-to-day. Often these adaptations can lead us away from alignment, or balance, which can lead to weakness from patterns of imbalance in repetitive motions. Another sticky question, is weakness perceived as pain?

2024 begins

It is a restorative practice to reflect on the past year, especially at the transition into a new one, as it can feel so futile. 2023 brought so much change: A new tattoo! A new space for my practice in Foster-Powell! A big surgery, and recovery! A haircut; lobbing off 15 years of long hair! Travel around the Salish Sea!

2023 was also a year full of various creative endeavours: performing with Extradition for a festival and our quarterly showings, performing with Linda Austin in 3 miles of possible and improvising with a large-scale installation at Building 5, and designing/building a beautiful tool shed for my backyard.

I imagine 2024 will be more of the same; performing, building, and continuing our work together at my studio. At the end of this month I will begin a new course, Neural Manipulation, with the Barral Institute. I am especially excited for this work, as it integrates the nervous system and how our bodies hold and/or process trauma, with manual therapies to address whiplash injuries and chronic neck and spine discomfort. 

waves

The ups and downs of these days have been a lot to manage. I have been ever-more reliant on my restorative practice of walking. Portland has a wealth of green spaces and parks in the city, and nearby. Recently, I have been thinking deeply about stress and anxiety, how these states show up for each of us, individually and collectively, and the entrenching of the semantics and pathology of Stress and Anxiety. (more on these ruminations soon.) 

 As we are well within our seventh wave of Covid19, I want to bring your attention to my Covid19 Protocol & Procedures and share a few resources I use to understand what is happening with the Covid19 pandemic, my own personal risk, and assess ways to keep my clients at the clinic safe.

a deep breath in 2021

 A year of Unexpected and Adapting has been challenging and, has in many ways offered small gifts. Since July I have found my way to a new, beautiful clinic in Laurelhurst, and found a way to return to this work that feels safe for me, and those of you who have ventured in to see me. This includes very strict procedures and protocols, and limiting the amount of clients I am currently seeing.

One of the bigger challenges this year is the shrinking down of who we can see, and who we are in close contact with. It is hard not to be able to see everyone, and yet a small gift has been receiving emails and texts from you all, checking in. I appreciate each and every one of you. I am grateful for the ways you are supporting me now.

Many of you who have been in, know I have been interested in how wearing masks, and our collective and individual worries around a global respiratory virus, a virus spread most easily by aerosolized particles, is affecting our breathing -not to mention how are nervous systems are reacting to all of the shift and stress. After the break find a diaphragm handout with an awareness exercise for those of you who are interested.

My hope is that this new year will allow us to eventually grow back our bigger circles, and step into our larger communities in some capacity, though in the meantime I hope you reach out if I can offer my support to you, or just to hear how you're doing.

new year, new moon, new offerings

It's not hard to come back to work after time away when the rewards of this work are experiencing the progress that it allows for my clients, and me. At the end of a very full week I treated myself to a workshop this past weekend called "Integrated Embodiment". This workshop allowed me to begin to integrate more fully my own somatic work through my Contemporary Alexander practice, and my deep myofascial massage.

I will start to offer one-hour sessions of somatic alignment. This work is done clothed on the table, and includes body awareness, breath and movement cues, repetitive passive range-of-motion and intrinsic muscle engagement (small structural muscles, ligaments and tendons) to help reset joint/bone alignment, proprioception (how we orient ourselves in space) and our nervous systems -which are very busy in our current world. This work is subtle, small, yet profound. It is patient work, requiring a lot of listening to your own body, and may not be for everyone.

One Hour Somatic Alignment with Stephanie Lavon Trotter, LMT $70

I additionally am planning to offer a handful of Structured Rest + Vocal Sound Bath workshops throughout 2020. This so perfectly brings together my two passions and practices:  self-care through deep listening to our bodies, and the voice. These workshops will be 75-minutes, limited to 3-6 people and offered in SE Portland. I will facilitate body awareness through a walking and resting meditation, hands-on work to help support each body to find structured rest (through an abundance of props), and a 20-minutes acoustic vocal sound bath. More details forthcoming.

I am excited to offer more 'integrated embodiment' into my massage work. I believe somatic work helps us to heal our patterns that inhibit us from more fully living in our bodies. 

stillness and reframing productivity

learning how to hammock in Colombia

I am learning how to relax. I've not very good at sitting still. I can keep myself busy, and master a check-list and perfectly arrange my time to fit as much as I can into my days. There are very few moments I have allowed myself to truly rest, not through the action of meditation, or Constructive rest, or the container of a nap, but just having stillness in my body and setting aside the rambling list of things-to-do. This is my radical act.

We live in a society, and I was raised within a household, where productivity and how much I do are significantly valued. It is hard to stop when you feel like your self-worth is intrinsically tied to continuing to do. As I struggle between my value and my time, time to wander in thought, to ignore the forever-long list of doing, I find more freedom in relaxing. Unwinding the impulse to continue doing allows me to slow into the taskless oblivion of living. Life doesn't have to be all of the things we do, it can also be all of the things we sense and perceive, the things we feel and find.

a somatic practice

I have been practicing massage since 2010. In this time I have learned that the more awareness we have of/in our bodies, the deeper impact the work can have. Sometimes change can't happen through force, but the gentle reminder that transformation occurs in ways we often don't see. I have been practicing Contemporary Alexander since 2017 and have begun to take more courses that integrate this somatic awareness into my massage work. Many of my clients have experience this integration in real time, as I share my own practice of finding my bones, my alignment, explain self-care practices (like Constructive Rest) and commiserate on the struggle of deep movement and stillness patterning and how to remind our bodies that there are more choices for us to make in movement, that we can find less restriction and stiffness through very subtle and gentle practices of listening. I am grateful for the openness and acceptance of this subtly profound practice as it weaves it way onto my table. I look forward to sharing more of this work as it integrates into my shared bodywork.

Laziness and our ability to be curious

We live in a complex world that asks a lot of us. We have many ways of showing up to our living. What if we strive to be curious about comfort and discomfort? What if we investigate the ways our bodies respond in situations that are comforting or discomforting? Can we give our minds and hearts a break as they are struggling to find comfort in the chaos of living? Some people suggest 'focusing on the joy', but I want to expand that to focusing on all of the feelings and sensations beyond our pain, discomfort, hopelessness, doubt, ambivalence. Be open to feeling it all, but know that you get to determine what of those sensations to focus on, to feed.

"Traditionally, laziness is taught as one of the obstacles to awakening. There are different kinds of laziness. First, there’s the laziness of comfort orientation, we just try to stay comfortable and cozy. Then there’s the laziness of loss of heart, a kind of deep discouragement, a feeling of giving up on ourselves, of hopelessness. There’s also the laziness of couldn’t care less. That’s when we harden into resignation and bitterness and just close down." -Pema Chöndrön