Every therapeutic situation is unique – culturally and psychologically – such that the best therapist is able to morph him or herself to match a variety of client needs and presentations. Therapists who, for reasons of capacity or personal choice, do not modify their mien to meet the client are subject to the tendency to limit their client base to those who naturally fit with the their style. This limits your effectiveness in your community, and impoverishes the diversity of experience in your practice.

Though there are probably other aspects I am unaware of, or forget right now, I modify
my speaking voice in terms of volume, pitch, rhythm, and tone,
my body posture (e.g. dominant vs submissive),
my language in terms of visual, auditory, or kinesthetic imagery,
the space I keep between me and the client,
my mode of taking a history,
what I allow them to do in my office,
and of course the manner of my approach and touch.

For the past several days, I have been a guest and resident therapist in the house of a great artist and difficult man. I have been working with him – he was recently subject to a debilitating injury – as well as his wife, and his gardner / handyman.

Not unlike other artists we know, this man is right next to impossible – contentious, brilliant, isolated, self-obsessed, and the restriction of movement imposed by an operation on each shoulder has not improved his mood. To approach such a being with nonchalance or any avoidance behaviour will be immediately sensed and (there’s no other word for it) pounced upon. Matching his intensity without falling over into arrogance or confrontation is akin to staying on a surfboard, requiring anticipatory reflexes.

Afterward, I was careful in eliciting his response to the intervention, using my questions to indirectly focus his attention where I wanted it to go. It’s always better if the ‘good idea’ is apparently the client’s.

His companion, equally sensitive but shy, retiring, and inwardly focused, required the tone with which you coax the cat out from under the bed. While her husband required strong stimulation to perceive change, with her a little goes a long way, so I sought to stay under her stimulatory threshold, using primarily cranial and visceral motility work, proffered with a soft voice and hand.

Afterward, I never mentioned the session again, waiting for her to come to me, which, in fact, she did not – but with this type of person there is no value in digging up the seed to see if it has started growing yet; it is best left in darkness.

The handyman, working class and a member of an oppressed minority whose native language was not English, required yet a different approach with a lot of eye contact, little direct touch, a lot of explanation and self-help exercises.

Afterward, I engaged him every time I saw him – “Done those exercises yet?” and letting him ask as many questions as he needed, joshing and teasing him into compliance.

Each of these relationships would have developed if I had been resident, so that the initial approach is modified with the development of trust and familiarity to deepen the bond.

Beware of any client you dismiss, “Oh, he just doesn’t want to change…”, it may be your approach that needs modification. If shifting your demeanour feels like being unfaithful to yourself, I would gently remind you that your precious self is a construct anchored in culture and familial values, and could probably use a little shaking up. In my opinion, expanding your repertoire of approaches is one of the best opportunities for expansion offered to therapists.

-Tom Myers

Axel Dell asks:

Hi, all!

I was asked this past weekend how you apply the Anatomy Trains to people with amputations, and wasn’t sure how to answer the question. I know Tom talked about it at the teacher training, but I am pretty sure my little brain was overloaded by that point.

Could you give me an idea of how to apply AT to amputees?

Amputations fall under the category of things you cannot change, so cultivate serenity that leads to observation, as each of these cases are different. Surgical hardware can also create this, “And now, what?”

The Anatomy Trains describes one map of force transmission that is as even throughout as a guitar string (palintonic) in the ‘normal’ person. We all have minor deviations. But an amputee or traumatized person or severe scoliotic creates their own lines, which often do not follow the course of the chains of muscles, but cut across fascial planes or muscle fiber directions.

Seeing and teasing these out is bodyreading beyond the given trains into individuality, which can then be carried back to the normal bodyreading to see the deviations in the lines.

Specifically with an amputee, no matter how good (at least so far) the prosthesis, the weight transfer is much more down the ‘good’ leg than the replacement. So in this case, both Spiral Lines might be tracked down one leg. Then look and see how exactly they do it for treatment.

-Tom Myers

Add fascial and myofascial release techniques to your practice. Study directly with Tom Myers at your convenience over the internet.

Tom says: “I have been really pleased with our new venture into webinars – pleased with your response, and pleased with the innovations in webinars we’ve been able to make. Video, slides, PinP, and a two-camera shoot integrate these webinars like a TV show or a DVD – but with an interactive twist.” This series of 6 x 1-hour webinars will focus on key release techniques around the body and conveying them to you in an understandable, usable manner. Each webinar will explain and demonstrate around 10 techniques – the intent, the anatomy, assessment, your body use, hand position, and how to know when you are done.

Each webinar counts for CEUs (check for which professions are covered), but they are worth it just for the addition to your practice. Tom Myers has been doing bodywork for 40 years, and describes himself as a ‘lazy’ man who can teach you how to make deep change with a minimum of strain and fuss. Learn strategies for how to open hips, shoulders, feet, and the spine. Online education worthy of the name.

Sign up for the webinars!

Just got this photo of the group I worked with at Esalen over this last month. Taken at Porter’s Yurt where we worked, high above the Pacific, it includes (from left) Daphne, Nikki, Lars, Rio, Jamie, Peter, Isabel, Jane, BanghHan, Thomas, Geno, Alicia, Marie-Jorge, and Nicole. It was great to work in the loving embrace of Esalen, and great that these folks showed up ready for deeper healing, a kind of work I don’t get to do in my usual ‘professional’ workshops.

Peace, love, and tie-dye to all of you spiritual travelers, now dispersed back to the seven countries you represent, or staying there in the waves of people that wash over Esalen and leave with scarcely a ripple – unique place. Long may it wave!

Spent yesterday and today with 50 personal trainers brought in through PTA Global – first a day where I showed them fascia in a dissection lab, and a second day at Athletes Performance.

A major point of Rodney Corn’s on this day was how much your inner attitude and your outer ‘attitude’ (posture, non-verbal communication) affects your performance. New research supports the idea that body positioning – even ‘fake-it-tip-you-make-it’ body positioning (I mean holding a pencil in your teeth for two minutes to make you smile) will help your cortisol levels go down and your testosterone levels go up.

This has strong implications for the Structural Integration idea, and for the concept of body tensegrity, biotensegrity. We will be discussing this research and the practical application of tensegrity in our 4th tensegrity webinar coming up in a couple of weeks. Meanwhiile, catch up on the first ones and take in this Ted Talk by Amy Cuddy.

Ida Rolf was originally and fundamentally a chemist. Chemistry has finally caught up with her basic structural idea, which I expressed in the KMI tagline: Change your body about your mind.

-Tom Myers

The upright human posture and plantigrade gait requires a delicate balance to keep the ventral cavity operating at its functional best. Solving problems in the abdominopelvic region has focused primarily on the horizontal belt surrounding it: the transversus abdominis and its fascial connections to the thoracolumbar fascia and neural connections to the levator ani of the pelvic floor.

The concept of ‘core support’ has ramifications to proper sacroiliac stability, lumbar support, pelvic floor health and continence. and a good foundation for respiration – and even on up to shoulder balance and neck strain.

While support in this outer belt is important, and the exploration has produced positive results for patients, less emphasis has been placed on a primary myofascial relationship which is of equal importance to human function, which could be termed our inner ‘cobra’. The cobra lurks inside the belt, and is essential for easy lumbar support of the rib cage, and links the rhythm of breathing and walking.

Our inner cobra is made up of the psoas major muscle and the diaphragm considered together as a functional unit. While these are often depicted as separate in the anatomy books, in the dissection lab the fascial connections are very clear between the diaphragm and the psoas major.

The posterior diaphragm is rooted into three structures: 1) the crura, which blend from the aortic arch into the anterior longtudinal ligament along the front of the lumbar vertebrae, 2) the psoas major (and, if present, the minor) which reaches down from each diaphragmatic dome to the lesser trochanter of the femur, and 3) the quadratus lumborum rooted down to the iliac crest and iliolumbar ligament (and in fascial terms beyond into the iliacus and iliac fascia).

There are two cobras, one on either side of the spine. The tail of the cobra is the lower end of the psoas, curled around the neck of the femur parallel to the pubofemoral ligament. The cobra’s ‘body’ goes forward of the hip joint itself, and then retroperitoneally back behind the organs to lie of either side of the lumbar spine. The ‘hood’ of the cobra is the spreading dome on each side of the diaphragm. In the image, the cobra’s face would be at the front of these domes, approximately at the end of the 6th and 7th ribs.

Considered as a functional whole, the balance of these two muscles is essential for respiratory and spinal health. Get the balance and function of these two cobras correctly, and it will matter less whether your patient has ‘washboard’ abs or ‘washtub’ abs. With a strong and balanced cobra, tight abs are less necessary to upper body support.

When the cobra gets too short, the cobra lifts up and exposes its throat, so to speak – in postural terms, the lumbars get more lordosis and the rib cage tilts back, restricting breathing in the back of the diaphragm. When the cobra loses tone, the head of the cobra dips, the lumbars fall back and the rib cage falls, restricting breath in the anterior part of the diaphragmatic domes.

Learning to read and correct the position of the cobra offers a new aspect to core support that supports the upper body easily, dynamically, and with less residual tension than just slamming down those abs.

Endlessly tightening the TvA, though it does offer increased support, also restricts movement, especially respiration and the organ excursion from respiration essential to their health. Your organs are ‘massaged’ neatly 20,000 times per day by the breath – restriction of the ‘abdominal belt’ and the ‘abdominal balloon’ may create support at the cost of essential function.

Learning to see, assess, and treat the ‘cobra’ of the psoas-diaphragm complex renders core support truly at the core, linking pelvic neutral and lumbar neutral with an easily functioning diaphragm.

-Tom Myers