Hypnosis: Bodywork & Massage Therapy
Alchemical Bodywork Article PagesListening to the Body's Wisdom
Alchemical Hypnotherapy for the body worker
Alchemical Bodywork: The Sacred Marriage
Excerpts Follow
Listening to the Body's Wisdom
by Surja Jessup
If the body could speak, what would it say?
The body reflects our thoughts, emotions and spirit -- my hands have intuitively felt this for as long as I have practiced massage and acupressure. A stiff shoulder carries the weight of the world, a locked jaw holds unspoken words, an injured disk reflects a lack of support.
Could this body language be revealing the subconscious mind, and could it possibly hold a key to the healing process itself?
Several years ago when I began my private practice as a holistic health educator and massage therapist, I attended a workshop called Alchemical Bodywork.
Although I couldn't imagine how hypnotherapy could relate to a bodywork practice, I was intrigued with alchemy, which I understood (from reading Carl Jung) could be interpreted as a metaphor for "transforming lead into gold" in a person's consciousness.
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Alchemical Hypnotherapy for the body worker
by Nick Ardagh
For the last ten years, I have been stretching, kneading, pressing, squeezing, rocking and soothing other people's bodies. I've learned countless techniques from Swedish to Japanese, from the ruthlessly deep to the most subtle, to create powerful changes in bodies and energies.
This kind of work can be very fulfilling; tight muscles relax, pains disappear, headaches dissolve, people feel better. However, some force within the client often brings tensions and imbalances back again. The important question for me is, what creates the problem in the body and what recreates it again?
Over the years I have become increasingly convinced that our tension, postural imbalances, aches and pains and weak joints, originate in our subconscious fears, attitudes and feelings. If the subconscious is not addressed and directly worked with, the discomfort in the body will be recreated from within, in the same or similar form, as fast as we can heal it.
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Alchemical Bodywork: The Sacred Marriage
by Nick ArdaghIn previous articles, I've discussed some of the benefits of alchemical hypnotherapy for the body worker. Now, I would like to describe the steps and techniques which may be useful to a potential practitioner, as well as to share a few of the many case studies which support the effectiveness of this work.
To a large degree, we accumulate tension in parts of the body in order to cut off feelings. At certain critical moments in our lives, we've been faced with choices: whether to feel, to contain uncomfortable, seemingly dangerous feelings; or, to numb ourselves through tension. Hurt, hopelessness, and despair for example, may be stored and obscured by contraction of the pectoralis muscles in the front of the chest. A weakened sense of identity, being overpowered by the will of another, could be reflected in a weakness in the ankle joint. The fear of being dominated, the desperate need to maintain control of ourselves, we find in the occipital ridge.
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