Stillness is the Move.
Fascial maneuvers & the posture of resilience
Lesson number one when working with trauma: Don’t call us, we’ll call you. Things come up when they’re good and ready. By all means go looking, but be prepared to be set back by forces unknown, in keeping with right timing.
Sometime during Gemini season I was directed by a beloved bodyworker to a California-based health clinic-turned-educational mission called “Human Garage.” In 2020 they started making a ton of their work available for free in how-to videos on YouTube and thru other social media. Their main focus is teaching fascial maneuvers for reducing physical tension and healing emotional trauma.
The team of practitioners suggest you do their movements every day, first thing in the morning (or as close to that as possible; I do mine after my Morning Pages). You can get their app (lots of community support available there), use their website, or just DIY via YouTube, tailoring it to specific areas you want to release (jaw, shoulder, pelvis, etc). I chose to sign up for their 1-day Reset, then their 3-day, which led to their 7-day… & at time of writing, am entering the second week of their 28-day reset, which is what they recommend for everybody. All of it is (for now) completely free.
They start by teaching three main moves, together called the Stress Reset, that take about 15 minutes to do altogether. These will make you feel high and smooth-brained (you’ll want to pause the video between each move to “walk it off”). Once you are used to these (~5 days regular practice), they introduce something called the Fetal Trauma Reset, which will make you cry a lot, then feel really light and free.
During the maneuvers, emphasis is on pinning and locking fascia, counter-rotating the body, and breathing deeply into the positions. You breathe in and out of your mouth to move pressure and release tension in the lower half of your body, and you breathe in and out through your nose to work on the upper half. Garry, founder of the system, describes it as “using breath as your own chiropractic.”
Fascia is what holds everything else in our body in place. The idea is that by manipulating fascia and releasing tension trapped in its webs, you allow the body to relax back into alignment: muscles, organs, bones, etc. (that are all suspended in fascia) are free to return to optimal working order only after the accumulated maladaptive stress and deeper trauma are loosed from where they have been frozen and stored (for years, if not decades, in most people).
I’ve been doing these maneuvers daily for over a month now and am not sure how to explain the changes1, except that they are global and overall positive. Basic observations are improvements in energy levels, mood, posture, digestion, and most significantly for those of you who know me, the menstrual cycle. In defiance of diagnoses of PMDD and dysmenorrhea that have defined me since puberty, this month I experienced zero PMS symptoms and had a 100% pain-free bleed. Instead, amazingly, I experienced intense surges of bliss and pleasure, which punctuated four days of meditative stillness so deep it felt like I had died (and gone to Heaven—you know how the masters say “practice Zazen like you’re about to die”...).
Find here a series of videos designed to unlock the upper body: Basic Stress Reset is the first video.
More specifically (it’s also in the Upper Body), here is a video (16min) on releasing the hands, wrists, elbows, and shoulders, which has been great to counteract hours logged sitting at the computer working on my dissertation. Here’s one targeting the hands alone (7min), though as Garry explains, in the process you will also experience release in your shoulders, neck, and jaw. You’re basically just tugging on your fingers while twisting your torso and breathing. Let me know if you give any of this a try, I’d be curious to hear how it goes.
Speaking of sitting, I wanted to append a few related quotations from two books on sitting by Will Johnson. His classic is The Posture of Meditation (Shambhala, 1996) and the follow-up book is Aligned, Relaxed, Resilient (2000).
The author is a Rolfing practitioner whose emphasis is on the place of the body in meditation. Whether or not you have a regular meditation practice, I recommend both books—you’re in a body.
“Transformation always occurs through accepting and feeling deeply into the existing situation, and it always radical in its influence.”
“Yielding to the current of sensations that wants to move and pass through your body is the practice of resilience.”
“The fully liberated river of sensations will cleanse both the body of its pain and holding and the mind of its limiting belief systems about who you are.”
Wishing you good feelings and a gooey spine as summer keeps on keeping on.
xx
KK
The effects are hard to describe in the way a psychedelic trip is hard to describe, both the during and the after. There’s been significant emotional/spiritual/physical/psychological softening and massaging going on each time I practice the maneuvers. There’s been flashbacks, age regression, flu-like symptoms, bone-deep soreness/tenderness (i.e. grief), cathartic releases of negative emotions, outbursts of uncontrollable giggling—all kinds of things that might happen during a journey with MDMA, psilocybin, or LSD—both during the maneuvers and in the hours & days afterward. More to come on how this ‘healing journey’ gels with the other modalities out there.