What
​Functional Somatic Integration
This practical manual therapy focuses on supporting clients through three main axes of their personal health: Tissue Health, Postural & Gestural Reconfiguration, and Embodied Emotional Experience.
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Drop in with your therapist so they can meet you where you are today
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Expert insight gives you deep understanding of your functional body
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Skillful manipulation of your muscle and connective tissues will open up your access to movement and function, flush out stagnant fluid, and bring in fresh nutrients and oxygen, and restore healthy space to nerves
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Leave feeling refreshed and more able to move, breathe, and rest than before
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Take home practices which empower you to build the therapeutic work into lasting change at a deep level
Our bodies are an incredibly intricate set of relationships; mechanical, adaptive, and dynamic. We have a variety of systems which maintain basic functions, whether that is your breathing and heartbeat, or keeping us standing upright and aware of where we are in space relative to other objects.​​​​​​​​
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The primary health of our tissue can be understood as the tissue's ability to perform its function (whether that is metabolic or mechanical), while the secondary health of our tissue resides in the contextual ability to transfer nutrients in and wastes out. The structure of our tissues (anatomy) will influence the behaviors of our tissues (physiology) at a variety of scales. Manual manipulation can help clear the supply lines which bring in fresh nutrition and remove waste materials, as well as facilitate the movement of the fluids which contain both. Structural and mechanical tissues can also be rearranged and adjusted through external manipulation in ways that exercises and stretches will not accomplish. In other words, a skilled therapist can create changes in the structure and behavior of your tissue that you cannot, under your own power and initiative.
Our muscles and connective tissues also adapt to the habitual patterns of how we arrange our body and how we move it, which is to say our Postures and our Gestures. As one example, when a muscle spends the majority of its time in a shortened state, it shortens its structures to accommodate this position, which in turn resists elongating again. Stretching your own body does not always satisfactorily resolve this as the your habitual patterns, which fill the majority of your time, will reinforce the familiar shapes and patterns. Stretching also can be a poor answer to this situation as the stretch will occur where the body is more willing to stretch, even with skillful positioning. A therapist can both provide an external perspective on how you are standing or moving and what that will mean for the structures in your body. With skilled manipulation, that therapist can also liberate freedom across the whole of the tissue which you can then use to reconfigure the postures you adopt in a way that endures. This is unlike when we pull ourselves into a shape that we believe is "good" posture, but feels strained and artificial, and promptly goes away the moment we stop paying attention.
The way we feel is expressed in our body in overt and subtle ways. Consider for a moment how a sad person stands compared to a happy one. This relationship is a two-way street. Acute emotional experiences and the emotional states we regularly inhabit can rearrange how we position our body, and the position of our body can predispose us to associated emotional states. This is one way in which our habitual feelings can become persistent moods. By attending to how our body is arranging itself, we can identify unexamined emotional tendencies to bring them to our attention, but we can also create shapes that support desirable emotional and mood shifts. Our lived experience cannot be discounted from the health of our tissues nor from how we stand and move. By attending to how we are feeling, to how we are moving, and to how our tissues are functioning, we can create meaningful, profound, and persistent change towards greater resilience, and a radiant internal experience.