I haven’t got time…

 

Last summer, I wrote a post about an advertisement for a painkiller whose strapline was ‘For lives bigger than pain’. It was the perfect message for our modern adrenaline charged, time-strapped culture. We have more and more amazing devices to make our lives easier, more connected and faster, and yet we find ourselves busier and more stressed than ever! The inconvenience of a headache or a stiff neck is something that we just want to get rid of so we can get on with living and working. Any tiredness, discomfort or pain is an irritant, something that gets in the way. Painkillers are the obvious choice and of course, on occasion, there is no harm in taking them – but when they become necessary to get through a day or a go-to solution perhaps we need to ask ourselves why. My clients often say to me’ I haven’t got time to be ill. I’ve got too much to do’. I understand, I’m  busy too.  That’s why I would like to offer you a solution. Try to manage your health a bit at a time, small steps, but every day.

 Just imagine that you work in an office and every week you are supposed to submit a report. It takes you about an hour to do it and it’s the thing you dread most in your working week – well it would be if you ever did it. The thing is, you know that your boss only looks at these reports every six months when she has to write her own report for her own boss. So you leave it. The pile of print outs that you use to write these reports gets higher. You know you need to tackle them soon, but you keep finding reasons not to. Six weeks go by, then seven, then eight. Then one afternoon you are rushing out of the office for a meeting and whoosh…. the whole pile topples over and papers drift down to the floor.  Everything is mixed up and in a mess. It is going to take you a whole lot longer to write this report now. 

Ok, perhaps this is an unlikely scenario as most of our work is sent in digital format now, but you get my point! By leaving a minor weekly task or ignoring something important because we’d rather be doing something else, we know that eventually there will be something much more time consuming further down the line. In so many things, in so many ways, this is how life works. In the same way that we aim to keep on top of our work, our cleaning and our grocery shopping it is so important to carve out time for our health too –  especially if we really don’t have the time! In the end, by doing this, we save time. It’s much more pleasant to take time out for a 20 minute walk every day or have a monthly bodywork appointment than it is to take days or weeks out due to illness or pain. Many of my clients choose to come and see me for a monthly MOT and I find far fewer imbalances in their bodies than in people who come to see me sporadically or only when things hurt and they need me to ‘fix’ them. By making this a regular habit, they are boosting their body’s capacity to heal, remaining more balanced and raising their levels of vitality. They get ill less frequently, get better sleep and their digestion is more efficient.

We need to remember that it’s not that we don’t have the time (or money) for health, we just choose not to prioritise it – and yet, without it, nothing else is possible.  And if we really don’t have time for health, we have chosen and created a life that we can’t sustain. One of my favourite quotes is by a Buddhist teacher who says ‘If you don’t have time to meditate for 20 minutes each day, you need to do it for an hour!’ 🙂

I truly love life and I want to share what I know so that other people can feel well enough to love it too. So, my invitation to you is to give yourself the gift of time, every day in some way, to nourish the vessel in which you live – your amazing body. And who knows, maybe if you do have ‘enough time to be ill’ –  you won’t need it!

 

x

Living with back pain?

 

Your alarm goes off and you twist over to turn it on to snooze. Aargh! You feel that oh-so-familiar stab of pain in your lower back. You lie back on your bed, but now you are awake. You might as well get up. You push yourself up to a seated position and sit on the edge of the bed for a minute before boosting yourself up to standing by combining a push off with your arms and and an ungainly lurch forwards. You’re up, but you can’t stand up straight just yet. You stand by the bed with your palms pressing into your lower back. You’ll be alright in an a minute, you reassure yourself. But it’s like this almost every morning. 

You feel better once you’ve moved a bit and the shower always helps. Some days you barely notice your back and other days you just move slightly differently and you get a sharp jab that reminds you that the problem hasn’t gone away. It upsets you that you can’t just relax and do things that you enjoy without fear that they will cause you pain.  It makes you feel old. You wonder if you will ever be free of this pain and if it will get worse.

I see so many people with back pain ranging from the low grade niggle to bent-over-double agony. The one thing that many of those clients have in common is that they don’t really know why their back hurts or at least why it’ went’ when it did. This is because pain is often the end result of a long and gradual process.

 Let’s say that ten years ago, you were involved in a car accident and you were hit from the side. You walked away unharmed other than a stiff neck and a bit of bruising so you don’t even think to mention it to your practitioner unless specifically asked. You’ve probably forgotten that having a stiff neck meant that you couldn’t turn your head for weeks, so you twisted your upper body when you wanted to look at things. You also may not remember that  you bashed your left knee pretty hard so you started to favour your right leg and put your weight on it when you were standing. You actually got in the habit of standing like that. As a result, some of the muscles around your pelvis tightened up and others became loose. You may have forgotten this, but your body hasn’t.  Some of those muscles that became habitually tight attach to the spine and pulled on your vertebrae slightly and imperceptibly to begin with, but maybe months or even years later, it hurts.

Maybe you’ve never had any accidents but work at a desk a lot and have done so for years. The principle is still the same. Even though there has been no impact, there has been the same posture, desk layout and lack of movement for many hours causing imbalances in your muscles. You’ve heard of repetitive strain injury? Well this is repetitive stillness injury!

 I’m not saying this to scare you! Our bodies are super resilient and amazing at functioning under less than optimal conditions. Even with all of the imbalances that we all have due to our lifestyles and habits, most of the time, our body copes just fine. But one of my missions in life is to try to inform people that come my way so that they can understand their body better and as a result, get out of pain and into wellness. I honestly believe when we start to understand and appreciate the interconnectedness or the ’cause and effect’ relationship of everything within our body we will have more self-compassion and make better choices. We will start to want to be kinder to our body instead of seeing it as something that lets us down. As a result, we will start to feel more vital and energised. 

As you’ve heard me say so many times, Amatsu is one of the few treatments that uses assessment techniques that take the whole body into consideration. As importantly, I also take a great interest in my clients’ lifestyle and habits so that we can work together towards your better health. And yes, if you have taken months or even years to ‘grow’ into a body position that causes you pain, it may well take a bit of time to grow back out of it. I ask clients to commit to a minimum of one month of sessions for every year that they have had the problem. I don’t think four hours of physical therapy to work towards correcting 365 days of adaptations is too unreasonable!

I hope this helps you to understand why you might be feeling the pain that you are, and also to reassure you that surgery and painkillers may not be the only option. Amatsu might take longer to get you out of pain, but it allows your body to make its own lasting changes, which in the long term makes for better results!

What exercise should I do?

Living in London means that I am lucky enough to be exposed to the very latest trends and ideas in exercise, health and wellbeing. I love it! I can go to yoga in a infra-red heated room, buy a cold pressed vegetable juice and have my movement analysed for optimal balance and spatial awareness. It’s exciting to see the world of health and nutrition becoming so vibrant and well received by more and more people!

But when people ask me what sort of exercise they should be doing to best maximise the benefit of Amatsu, my answer is quite simple.. walking.

                                                                  

 As much as I love all of these new concepts and ideas, my main form of exercise is still walking. It doesn’t sound exciting to most of us. We don’t need any special kit, we don’t break into a sweat, we can’t really compete in it and it’s not a team event. But when we walk, we do what we were born to do. Our legs swing like pendulums from our pelvis and ( as long as we are not carrying bags or talking on the phone), our arms swing freely too. This movement that involves top and bottom, left and right helps to send electrical brain activity between the two hemispheres of our brain, firing us up both mentally and physically. A slight twist is induced in the mid section of our body, stimulating the organs and the digestive function. Our diaphragm is stretched so we can breathe more deeply. Our legs and buttocks are toned and there is very little impact on our joints or chance of injury. It is almost impossible to come back from a walk feeling worse than before you set out!

In addition, as walking requires little or no technique it has the unique ability to be both mentally refreshing, invigorating and inspiring as well as relaxing and calming. Our mind can be free to ponder, to wonder, to notice and be present. Often great breakthroughs in our thinking, new ideas or options become clear when we are walking, where before we could only see a fog of uncertainty or difficulty. In his wonderful lecture on the subject of walking, the great naturalist and thinker Henry David Thoreau said ‘ You must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking. When a traveler asked Wordsworth’s servant to show him her master’s study, she answered “Here is his library, but his study is out of doors”‘

As beings who like to be stimulated by novelty, it’s only natural that we want to find the new, the latest, the Next Big Thing. But our bodies haven’t evolved enormously in the last few hundred thousand years – what we need hasn’t become more complex, advanced or progressive. We still functional physically and mentally in much the same way as our ancestors did. So although I get excited when I read about underwater treadmills and holistic stretching programmes, I have to remind myself that sometimes the simplest things are the most important, sometimes the most obvious is the most necessary. 

As Thoreau says ‘ If you would take exercise, go in search of the springs of life. Think of a man’s swinging of dumbells for his health, when those springs are bubbling up in far-off pastures unsought by him!’

Demystifying an Amatsu session: Creating space

People often ask me how Amatsu works.

Even after more than five years of working with this form of therapy, I am still learning and exploring the answer!

 

I think it’s partly because one of the key factors is less about how it ‘works’ and more about how, by having a global view of the body (and mind in fact!), we can trace through clues to find the key area or areas that are causing the problem, the restriction or the pain and then deal with them.. It’s like any form of problem solving really – by gaining information through asking questions, observing and feeling, by using previous examples and learnt knowledge, it is possible to start a process of deduction. This part of Amatsu is very practical and measurable. Does your head turn better and more freely to the right or left? Do you get pain mainly when you are walking or sitting? Are your muscles tighter on one side of your spine or the other?

But, say my clients, stop dodging the question – HOW does it work? How can your light touch, a press here and there with an elbow, a pull and stretch of my limbs… how does that make a change? Why do I feel better?

So today, I am going to attempt to explain a little more deeply…

Our body works best when it has space. Our joint capsules are filled with an oily fluid that stops things rubbing together. Our organs are designed to slide and glide over each other with minimal friction. Our brain is bathed in a  nutritious bath that also allows it to partially float in our skull. We are semi-solid, semi-liquid entities. Nothing in our bodies is entirely rigid. We are amazing and complex beings.

However, if our fluidity is compromised and things start to stiffen up, dry up or rub together, it hurts.

A poor posture that causes your shoulders to round and hunch will lead to those nasty knots that your massage therapist will have told you about. Those knots are little areas of tissue that are no longer fluid and therefore they are not receiving enough nutrition or waste removal which makes that area sore.

A twisted ankle causes other muscles and connective tissue in the lower leg to tighten up to protect the joint. Even when the issue has resolved, those muscles may forget to let go, so you end up with stiffness and aches.

If  you sit for too long, your hip flexors shorten, tighten and pull on your lower back and pelvis.

The role of Amatsu is to create space. Those light (and sometimes not so light!) touches help to release whichever area it is that is pulling you out of balance. An elbow pressed into the buttock frees off a deep, horizontal muscle called the piriformis which can be a real culprit in sciatic-type pain. This allows your pelvis to have enough space to move freely when you walk, run and sit. It no longer needs to twist and slip causing you back pain so…. no back pain.

A slow, deep pulling stretch of your arm and shoulder allows the muscles around your collar bone to release. Your collar bone is no longer pinching into the muscle so…..better range of movement of your arm and less discomfort.

When I use my thumb on the outside of your shin bone, I am loosening any knots up the gristly tissue that holds your lower leg bones in place so that your ankle can move freely, so….you can walk without limping!

It’s all about dealing with restricted movement  in one or more places that stops something else from moving freely. It’s about creating space. When we restore space, we restore flow – of nutrients, of blood, of energy.  It’s one of the reasons why it may take a day or two to feel the full benefits of a session, as the body begins to restore the wonderful, natural processes that keep us well.

Because, like all of us, the human body functions better when it has some space.

I hope this has helped to deepen your understanding of how Amatsu works. Let me know your thoughts!

Photography: Anders Gramer