Just finished teaching the first Lower Back- Stability and Mobility class.

It was local, in Ashland, Oregon, for my local colleagues and study buddies; 3 DCs, 3 PTs, 5 LMTs.  It was great.

I love teaching, I always learn something new. I have some new insights, thanks to Bill Esser, PT. The question, what happens when we attempt to manually traction the lower lumbar spine. I have always thought that when I distracted in the lumbars, I was aiming at the disc. What if; the L5-S1 and/or L4-5 facet joints are jammed into extension, and every time the patient bends forward, the disc is under abnormal pressures, because the back side cannot open. Maybe our traction (decompression) is really acting more on the posterior parts of the joint, the facet joints. Maybe opening those facet joints is what makes manual traction effective. When we use our hands, we can get to a particular spinal level more easily.  It’s harder to get a specific spinal level to open with exercise. Why? Because the stuck level won’t move easily, and the spinal levels that have some motion will move.

Also learned about a new restriction in the SI, on the ilio-sacral side, an anterior shear, thanks to George Lescher, PT. The shear is where the ilium shears directly anterior. Not an upslip or downslip, not an internal or external flare. We’ll add that to our pelvic section of the class.

-Marc Heller

Encountering a wild headache is similar to Forrest Gump’s proverbial life–box of chocolates metaphor: “you never know what you’re going to get”—although you know it will contain chocolate. That’s what makes it so intriguing.

You might say I’m a headache whisperer. For forty-two years, I have been relieving people’s headaches and migraines with a body-mind therapy I developed in 1970. (In case you think I’m ancient, like Dick Clark and my fellow baby boomers, I’m an eternal teenager.) After twenty-one years of informal experimentation, I decided to offer my therapy professionally and became a certified: massage therapist, energy worker, body-centered and conscious relationship therapist, and somatic coach and body worker. Deconstructing what I had been feeling on the head and in my hands all those years, I created instructions for client self-application, and I began documenting the results.

I realized that each time I relieved a headache with my hands, rather than working anatomically, I was working with a cycle of sensations on the head. Some of the sensations characterized the headache or migraine itself while others signaled its release (which also signaled pain relief in the headache sufferer). The combined physical and bioelectrical quality of these sensations seems to correspond to the current scientific research on possible mechanisms at work during a migraine.

The Mundo Method is about being present in each moment. You don’t personally take on the pain, you track it down and conquer it. It is meditation, touch biofeedback, and volitional intention all rolled into one. You follow the subtleties of sensation, pulsation, tissue quality, energetic makeup, and bioelectrical current of the headache, the head, and involved structures, letting them guide and inform your touch. Each palpation and touch response produces an effect, which then informs the next move. You follow them wherever they take you, again and again. Are these transitory qualities: indicators of pain, the headache, the parasympathetic nervous system in action, the power of touch to shift all of the above?

People in the midst of a migraine feel horrible and are often disabled by the pain in their head and a host of other symptoms permeating their entire being. It’s difficult to move, see, or speak; they feel nauseated; common sights, sounds, and smells become magnified and distorted, making their pain worse. In addition, chronic headache and migraine sufferers have a pain history, a history of dealing with the pain—often with medications and other therapies—and their mood around all of it. Thus, during a session, you are also working with the client’s mood, posture, language, attention, and breath while you are promoting calmness and trying to bring everything to neutral.

As you see, or perhaps already know, when you touch a headache sufferer, especially a migraineur, you are touching a whole person with a life history often filled with chronic pain or illness, accidents, trauma(s), fear, anger, and sadness. For these clients, touch therapy administered by an open, empowered, touch-aware practitioner is their first step in breaking the pain cycle, finally feeling relief, and catching a glimpse of the light of hope.

Many people believe that Structural Integration is deep tissue massage and this couldn’t be farther from the truth.  I’ve always believed that how you strategize and make sense of your work is most of what makes Structural Integration effective, not the tools. After all, we only use three or four techniques. It’s what we do with those techniques that makes them effective.  Since I started my practice 10 years ago the big question has always been, “what is the organizing principle”. I’ve felt from the beginning, that if I knew the organizing principles for how the body works, I could makes sense of what was ailing my clients. In other words, if all you have is one technique, but you have a wealth of knowledge on how to apply it, you will be successful as a physician. A thousand techniques and no understanding of how to apply them will get you nowhere.

In Osteopathy there’s the concept that what we’re really looking for in the client is what organizes them, or their health.  Culturally we are so oriented towards finding problems, reading news stories about calamities and seeing therapists and doctors to find out what’s wrong with us, that it has become hard to orient ourselves towards how we’re doing well, rather than how we’re failing.   I believe that it is how we organize ourselves successfully that creates profound healing.  Knowing what’s wrong with us, well, any client can tell you what’s wrong with them.  It takes a healer to discover what’s working and how to harness that.  This is where I like to start: asking, “how is my client organized that makes them healthy”.  By orienting to what makes our clients whole, we are able to see their potential for healing, and ultimately see them in a more human light.

In light of this hunger for the organizing principles of the human body, my work in structural integration has evolved dramatically in the last 5 years.  While I’ve studied with a lot of SI practitioners who have filled in gaps in my understanding around movement and our relationship with gravity, I’ve often been stumped by more profound and stubborn restrictions that came from deeper in my clients makeup. Studying visceral manipulation got me closer to being able to work with these clients, but it was a bit like having a thousand techniques and no conceptual framework.  In osteopathy, the focus is the “least secondary restriction”, rather than understanding what helps the client  find support or organize themselves in gravity.  There’s nothing wrong with this, but my clients often come to me with real musculoskeletal issues. If I can’t help them to find integration working with the fascia, the underlying cause is often in the viscera, but how do we know what to work on to create the change we’re looking for?  In the past I would keep working on organs until I got the right one. The osteopathic technique for finding how the organs connect to a specific part of the body is mostly a process of elimination without much sense of the inter relatedness of the organ systems to each other or the musculoskeletal system.   So in the last 5 years I began looking for the system that would connect structure to visceral function.  At the time I was doing trades with several acupuncturists and realized many similarities between my work and theirs. At least around the organs, we were speaking the same language, they just had more sophisticated tools than I did.

My big breakthrough came when I was working on a particularly stubborn fixation in one of my clients feet and remembered that in reflexology the organs were mapped on the foot.  I figured out which organ the stuck spot must correspond to and did a motility release on that organ. Eureka, when I returned to their foot, it had released.  “There must be a structural connection between the fascia that supports that organ and the foot that creates that imbalance/balance.  After success with this on several of my clients, I moved on to mapping the TCM meridians in the rest of the body.  Unlike a chinese medical doctor though, my premise has always been different.  What I wanted to know was, “how do the meridians relate to how the client supports themselves in gravity?”  What I realized eventually is that, well…they don’t.  The meridians aren’t at all interested in gravity, they’re a reflection of the person’s internal state, almost regardless of gravity, but they have a huge effect on how we support ourselves.  Put simply, if your liver or your heart isn’t working perfectly, it will borrow slack from the musculoskeletal system to support it.  What this means is that your organs can still work perfectly in a compromised state, if you are hunched over to support them.  This is how your body will continue to find health in a less than healthy environment.   To me this seemed like the holy grail of structural integration, the big piece that tied the organs and the musculoskeletal system together.  It was leading me to a kind of conceptual gestalt about how we relate to both what’s inside of us and what’s outside of us and how that is literally written in our tissue like a story of our experiences.  Last year I began mapping the organs and their consequences on structural balance in the body.  3 months ago I made it all the way around the wheel of the 5 element cycle and I’m excited to share my discoveries.  While this work is still in it’s infancy for me, it shows promise to develop a framework that allows us as practitioners to accurately pinpoint how our metabolic and visceral function are effecting our alignment, posture, function and movement.  I’m am excited to share this work.

-David Murphy david@integratewellness.net