Have you ever wished you could achieve more? Be more efficient, more productive, creative, have a better body, a better life, a better outlook, a more unique this or easier time with that? 

We all probably have, the desire to achieve and to strive is innate, it is what we grew up remembering. It is what keeps us moving with purpose towards our goals. We remember when we made the try outs, or didn’t. When we won or lost, we remember. It has defined who we are in many ways, we have identified and placed value on ourselves dependent upon our success. And at certain times in life it was even more important, and we remember those times.

We set our goals, had desires and we moved forward and won, or we didn’t. We’ve had expectations, we faced challenges and we either made it happen or, didn’t make it happen. And often it was out of our control. When we get injured and hurt it becomes necessary for us to rest, to ice, to stop taking clients for a moment, to take time off. How well and fast you heal depends on how well you can stop doing and get the care you need. When we nurture and care of ourselves, we are more productive and heal faster. It becomes essential to not keep doing things. And this is the hard part, to make yourself stop being productive, to take the time to care for you.

Myofascial Release is a form of bodywork that releases restrictions in the muscular fascial system. The hydraulics and shock absorbing structural system that wraps every cell of the body and passes and carries information hydrating and informing cells. Connective tissue is the medium of the body. The density of fascia and consistency range from that of blood to bone. The fascia handles pressure and load as well as flexibility and pliability. When we are in alignment and balance this structural system is in center an integrity. When things are out of alignment the body has to work exponentially harder to keep things in center. When the tissue is injured, has surgery, or trauma the body has to recover and creates scar tissue and the fascia can become adhered, patch worked and put together in a disorganized fashion.

Myofascial release organizes tissue so that these parts have more blood flow, life force, energy and can pas nutrient rich materials for healing. The health of your fascial tissue means you’ve got more collagen and peptides, more amino acids and proteins, the building blocks of tissues are affected by the health and hydration of the tissue. If you have pain, swelling and limited range off motion, MFR Myofascial release will alleviate the symptoms and help you get back to living your best life. The results are the best I have seen in my 20 years of experiencing and practicing advanced bodywork techniques.

A client has been struggling with an injury, and the overwhelming sense of failing by being injured. Her mind can make sense of it, yes she’s done well in life and of course she’s human so she’s going to get sick, injured sometimes and yet accepting the loss has been hard. She can’t kick the feeling that she’s failed, and the judgements come rolling in.

And as we reflect on these feelings of disappointment, and feeling like a failure, this build up of expectation that started early in life and was reinforced by the value placed on winning, as well a strong aversion to the uncomfortable: sensations in the body, thoughts in the mind and feeling authentically (not only positive emotions) feeling the realness of the heart.

The problem with avoiding discomfort is that it can stack up. Just like the body stacks up in compensation during and after an injury. The mind can subconsciously route the body into avoidance of pain. Which lends itself to asymmetry and imbalance in the body because we avoid a joint and ultimately creates more limited ranges of motion above and below this joint.

There is a center for every part of the body, we need to open up lines of communication and speak to the body, presence in the body and listen. Check in on your position in space. Are you slouching, slumping, tense in one hip. Are you dumping all the weight into one side, are there places that are restricted? Does your structure feel aligned like you could draw a line though the center of your body running vertically, how much of you would be symmetrical? We always want even left and right sides and front and back.

How we talk to ourselves, the tone of voice, the ways we relate to our body as we reflect on the connectivity and pliability of our living tissues? When we have an injury and say I have a bad back, this can further exacerbate the way we relate to our bodies in a negative way. We can see the stress and tension in the body we can feel the way the body postures itself when we have insecurity, anxiety or fear, in the nervous system we can attribute this to fight or flight. Our system gets traumatized and we are on edge, we struggle to regulate the nervous system, how does this show up? We have a more trouble trying to relax, it takes longer, we become more easily upset or it doesn’t happen when we try. So we get worried about being worried.

Have you ever heard the phrase don’t should on your self? We can be hard on ourselves. We can have expectations that are unreasonable, our minds are so much faster at thinking about getting things done than our body is at actually doing them... and the stress and tension that builds up when we are hard on ourselves, can make the tissues even harder. Sometimes we notice, and sometimes it can become so habitual that we don’t even know the same tape in our head is playing.

My teacher Lee Joseph based his relentless, reasonless love upon this premise... We are all always doing the best that we can. When I first heard this, I challenged this premise immediately, which is what I do, in my mind I thought of all the people who could obviously do better. Did this premise make sense?

Let’s consider the source. He walked me through a circumstance, and really everyone’s circumstance and his perspective was the presence and centered awareness that is curious, available and accepting. If we consider a person and how they developed in Utero, from their ancestral bloodline and lineage, the traits and genetic expressions from their DNA codes, the behaviors, tendencies and motivations of the people who raised them, the experiences, the core beliefs and conditioning they received from their childhood, the way they were raised, spoken to, held touched, nurtured, nourished, their nature coming from.all of these things and their consciousness... They would be exactly as they are. They would have abilities and disabilities, based upon all of these circumstances they experienced. And this would lead us to believe they are doing the best they can given all of these things.

As children we learned how to do things by getting feedback, and it was either positive or negative. We perceived and were attracted to what was positive and we developed aversion to what we didn’t want and that was negative. The one who was in charge had the say, and we were there to take the direction. If we got criticized or the direction was demeaning, if we were scolded or yelled at, we may have picked up this way of talking to ourselves. When we were little we didn’t have expectations of ourselves as much as others had expectations on us.

Depending upon our upbringing and who our caregivers were, these expectations could have been through praises, or shame. We could have been asked nicely, or screamed and yelled at or hit, or worse. We could have sensed the needs of our family, felt the pain and suffering of our father or mother, and tried to contribute by taking on their energy. Depending upon the patience and ease (or lack of) our mother, father, sister, or brother, grandmother, grandfather, aunt uncle, neighbor, friend these caregivers passed on their unresolved ways of trying to get their needs met onto us. Even then our caregivers were doing the best they could.

Awe, this is how my teacher demonstrated so much compassion and understanding, he believed people were doing the best they could. So he wasn’t busy finding fault or blaming, and this is how I was raised as a bodyworker. To be accepting, and to bolster and support the awareness to notice the details to orchestrate the most ease support and love towards ourselves we can.

This is why I have so much joy and enthusiasm for the work that I do. MFR is helping people to move through chronic pain patterns to get back to an active healthy body, and living your best life. MFR is delivering amazing results.

Angela works as a Myofascial Release Therapist and injury specialist in Grass Valley at Sol Bodyworks.