The Body Linguist

23/01/2026

🧠 Trauma Bodywork, the good, bad and the ugly 👀

I’ve posted a few times on this topic in the past but Sandy Fritz recently posted about it too on her own FB page. 📌 Sandy is a long established massage educator and textbook author, best known for Mosby Elsevier teaching texts used widely in massage training. Sandy has given me permission to share her post, pasted into the comments.

⚠️ Sandy recently raised a clear concern about the current saturation of trauma related marketing in massage and bodywork. She points out how phrases like ‘trauma informed’, ‘nervous system healing’, and ‘somatic release’ are being used as selling points, and she warns that aiming to ‘release trauma’ can be more harmful than helpful.

The line that cuts through it is her reminder that ‘indicating that your specific skills heal someone’s trauma is more about you and your sense of self rather than the client’.

✅ I agree with her on this. It’s direct, it’s to the point, and it cuts through the noise.

Trauma informed language is everywhere right now. A lot of it is well intentioned. Some of it is marketing dressed up as care. The risk is that therapists start to believe they are doing trauma treatment, when what they are actually doing is touch based work that can be supportive, soothing, and regulating, but is not psychotherapy, not diagnosis, and not a substitute for mental health care.

⚠️ If you are a therapist who believes you can find, assess, and ‘release’ trauma or emotion from someone’s body, or if you are a client staying in care because you have been told trauma is trapped or stuck in your tissues and only a specific style of hands on therapy can remove it, please hear this clearly. That message is, at best, a misunderstanding wrapped in confident language. At worst, it is a claim that crosses ethical lines because it sells certainty where there is none.

🧠 Trauma is not a substance in fascia waiting to be extracted.
Emotional responses during bodywork do not prove that trauma is leaving the body. Touch can be calming, supportive, and grounding. It can help someone feel safer in their body. It cannot diagnose trauma, and it cannot replace appropriate mental health care.

✅ Trauma informed practice is not a special technique. It is a way of practising that supports safety, choice, collaboration, and trust, with an awareness that past experiences can shape how people respond to touch, power, and uncertainty. That fits with UK definitions of trauma informed practice, recognising impact and preventing retraumatisation, not digging into the story or trying to change it with bodywork.

🚩 The problem is the drift. Therapists are being taught, sometimes in short in person or online trainings, to target ‘trauma effects’ directly. That can go wrong fast. It can also create false expectations, where normal reactions like a sigh, a tremor, or a tear get labelled as ‘trauma leaving the body’. Those responses can mean many things, including simple relief, fatigue, discomfort, or feeling safe enough to soften. Labelling them as trauma release is guesswork, and guesswork is not a safe clinical strategy.

None of this is new. The massage world has cycled through versions of ‘somatic holding’ and ‘release’ narratives before. It flows through culture, beliefs, and gurus, raising its problematic head whenever simple stories start selling better than careful practice. It’s like an old tune that keeps getting remixed and marketed as a breakthrough.

🧭 So here is the line I want therapists to hold. Trauma informed care is baseline professionalism. It means we treat every client with the same respect for autonomy, pacing, consent, and non judgement. We do not need the specifics of anyone’s story. We do not need trauma disclosure to do good work. We do need clarity about scope.

✅ Scope clarity in practice looks like this. You ask permission often, not once. You explain what you are doing and why, in plain language. You offer choices, position, pressure, areas to avoid, whether they want talk or quiet. You watch for signs of threat response such as freezing, dissociation, agitation, sudden shut down, and you slow down or stop and check in.

🤝 You avoid process led dialogue and avoid leading questions that steer someone towards a trauma narrative. You do not frame touch as ‘releasing stored trauma’ or ‘unlocking memories’. You do not say to a client ‘that was a lot of trauma leaving your body’.

🔄 If someone presents with distress that is beyond your role, you refer, and you document clearly. 📝

🚩 It is also worth mentioning training and marketing that are prevalent in our profession. If a course teaches or implies that trauma is stored in fascia and can be released by technique, that is a problem. If it celebrates catharsis or crying as a treatment goal, that is a problem. If it encourages you to ask for trauma history, or to invite disclosure, that is a problem. If it claims you can heal PTSD, replace therapy, or provide trauma recovery, that is well outside massage scope and it is ethically shaky.

🧩 Polyvagal theory is part of the mess too. It gets misquoted, simplified into memes, then used to justify techniques it was never designed to endorse. A therapist does not need a nervous system brand to practise safely. You need good consent, good boundaries, good pacing, and a referral mindset.

🔎 How do you vet trauma informed training properly, before you spend money or start using the language in your clinic? My line is simple. Take your time to research and critique any short or online course claiming to resolve, release, or treat trauma.

🚪 If their marketing is bigger than their comprehensive training, grounded evidence and scientific credibility, walk away.

07/01/2026

🌍 Feet on the Ground, Heads Out of the Clouds
Listening carefully to big ideas about fascia and consciousness

I recently watched a conversation on the Anatomical Gangster podcast hosted by Sue Hitzmann, featuring Carol Davis, John Sharkey, Jean-Claude Guimberteau, and Stuart Hameroff. It is an ambitious discussion that moves across fascia research, embryology, consciousness studies, quantum theory, and clinical observation. It is also the kind of conversation that many therapists will find compelling, provocative, and affirming of things they have intuitively felt for years.

Big questions are being asked. Is consciousness confined to the brain, or is it distributed throughout the body? Does fascia play a role beyond structure and support? Could microtubules, quantum processes, and cellular organisation be part of how awareness arises? These are not silly questions. They reflect genuine curiosity and a desire to understand the human organism more fully.

👂 There is value in listening to conversations like this. There is value in hearing different disciplines think out loud together. Progress does not happen by staying inside tidy, already settled boxes.

But listening with interest is not the same as accepting everything we hear as established fact.

🧠 What the conversation brings to the table

Several core themes run through the discussion. One is the idea that fascia is not passive tissue, but an active, responsive, sensory rich network that interacts continuously with the nervous system. Another is the proposal that microtubules, particularly within neurons but also within other cells, may be central to consciousness through quantum processes, as described within the Orch OR framework.

These ideas are then woven together. Because microtubules exist in many cell types, not just neurons, and because cells are embedded within the extracellular matrix, the suggestion is made that consciousness itself might be a whole body phenomenon, not just something that happens in the brain.

At a conceptual level, this is intriguing. At a scientific level, it is where we need to slow down.

🧩 What we already know, without quantum explanations

There is strong evidence that the body shapes experience. Fascia is richly innervated. It contributes to proprioception and interoception. It interacts with the autonomic nervous system. Changes in tissue tone, hydration, inflammation, and load alter sensory input to the brain and influence how safe, threatened, calm, or alert a person feels.

All of this is well supported. None of it is controversial. None of it requires quantum explanations.

Where caution is needed is when physical properties are presented as explanatory mechanisms. Collagen can show piezoelectric behaviour. Hydrated tissues have complex electrical and mechanical responses. These facts alone do not justify claims that fascia functions as a body wide signalling network for consciousness, or that it operates as a biological semiconductor in any meaningful functional sense.

A property is not the same as a pathway.

🧪 Local and global consciousness, and where interpretation creeps in

The discussion introduces the idea of local versus global consciousness, with examples such as wide awake surgery, where a person remains alert while sensation from a region is chemically silenced. This is interesting language, but it is not new biology. Peripheral nerve blockade and central integration already explain this phenomenon very well.

Adding an additional layer of tissue level consciousness does not improve the explanation unless it adds predictive power or clarity. At present, it does not.

Jean-Claude Guimberteau’s observations of living tissue and cellular behaviour are genuinely fascinating. Watching cells move, cluster, and respond within the extracellular matrix naturally invites questions about coordination and organisation. But organised behaviour is not the same as consciousness. Structure, responsiveness, and adaptation do not automatically imply awareness.

🔬 On claims that consciousness lives in fascia, or transfers between organs

One part of the conversation that deserves particular care is the suggestion that consciousness, memory, or aspects of identity might live in fascia or be transferred between organs. This appears most clearly in references to cellular memory, trauma imprints, and anecdotal reports following organ transplantation where recipients describe changes in preferences, emotions, or behaviour.

It is important to acknowledge why these ideas persist. They are not pulled from nowhere.

Organs are not inert. They contain dense autonomic innervation, immune cells, endocrine signalling pathways, and complex sensory feedback loops. Transplantation involves profound physiological stress, long term medication effects, immune modulation, altered autonomic signalling, and major psychological adjustment. Changes in mood, perception, and behaviour after transplantation are therefore not surprising. They are expected.

Memory, however, as understood in neuroscience, is not stored in tissues or organs as discrete transferable units. There is currently no credible evidence that memories, preferences, or conscious traits are encoded in fascia, collagen, or non neural cells in a way that could survive transplantation and integrate into another person’s identity. Anecdotal accounts are powerful, but they are not evidence of mechanism.

Similarly, the idea that consciousness lives in fascia risks confusing influence with origin. Fascia undoubtedly influences experience. It shapes sensory input, interoceptive signals, autonomic tone, and emotional state. These inputs affect how the brain constructs perception and meaning. But influence is not the same as generation.

Why do these ideas take hold so easily?

Partly because we do not yet have a complete theory of consciousness. Gaps invite narrative. When science does not yet offer satisfying explanations, metaphor steps in. Fascia becomes an attractive canvas for meaning because it is everywhere, continuous, difficult to define, and poorly taught. It feels like a cloak that surrounds and connects, which makes it symbolically compelling as a home for consciousness.

There is also a language problem. Reductionist explanations often fail to capture lived experience. People feel emotions in their chest, gut, throat, and tissues. Trauma is experienced bodily. Touch can evoke memory and feeling. When biology struggles to explain experience in a way that feels human, stories fill the gap.

But stories are not mechanisms.

⚖️ Where I land, and where I draw a line

I listen to this conversation with interest. I respect the perspectives offered by all involved. I am glad these discussions are happening.

But I also think we need to be firmer than polite curiosity at the end, because therapists will take ideas like these and repeat them as if they are established science.

It is reasonable to say that embodiment matters. The body shapes perception. Tissue state influences nervous system processing. Experience is not disembodied cognition floating above biology. That message stands on solid ground.

What does not stand on solid ground is the casual slide from ‘fascinating hypothesis’ into ‘this is how it works’. Claims that fascia participates in quantum signalling, or that fascia functions as a coherence field, or that consciousness might live in fascia, are not conclusions. They are speculative frameworks. They may one day be supported, but right now they are not supported at the level implied.

The same applies to grand statements like fascia being ‘the foundation of life’. It is poetic. It is memorable. It sounds profound. But it is also vague. If everything is fascia, then nothing is fascia, and we have stopped doing biology and started doing branding. Fascia is essential connective tissue, yes, but it is not the only essential thing. Nervous tissue, vascular tissue, immune cells, endocrine signalling, epithelial barriers, and metabolic systems are not supporting actors. They are equal partners.

And here is the key point for therapists. When quantum language enters clinical conversation without clear definitions, measurable predictions, or direct evidence, it does not elevate our profession. It makes us easier to dismiss. ‘Quantum’ becomes a costume word, not a mechanism. If we cannot explain what we mean in plain biology, we should not use physics terms to make it sound more credible.

So yes, let’s listen.
Let’s stay curious.
But let’s keep our feet on the ground, and our heads out of the clouds.

Because curiosity without rigour does not move a profession forward. It just gives it better stories.












Watch the podcast here. https://youtu.be/02bAidTpO8Q?si=gSnoz2RT5FiuY45k

28/12/2025

Cool New Research on Low Back Pain 😎 – and Why It's Time to Move on From the Alignment Narrative

As many of you know, I’m a bit of a pain science geek 🤓, which is why I offer a full course called Pain Science for Yogis for members of my yoga platform.

Understanding the foundations of modern pain science is such an important part of teaching and practicing yoga in an evidence-based way.

I’m sharing this post today because a new, noteworthy study just came out that fits right into this bigger conversation, and I wanted to share a quick breakdown of it here!

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THE STUDY AT A GLANCE

This study just came out in the January 2026 issue of the European Journal of Pain: “Association Between Systemic Immune-Inflammation Index and Low Back Pain in American Adults.”

This study looked at the relationship between low back pain and something called chronic low-grade systemic inflammation. Before we talk about the findings, it helps to understand what “inflammation” means in this context.

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LOCAL INFLAMMATION vs SYSTEMIC INFLAMMATION

Most of us hear the word “inflammation” and think of the classic scenario of a sprained ankle that becomes swollen and tender. That is local inflammation that happens at the site of an injury.

But chronic, low-grade systemic inflammation is very different.

It refers to a subtle, body-wide state where the immune system is a little more activated than it needs to be on a regular basis. It’s not dramatic, and you wouldn’t see or feel swelling, but it shows up in the blood as a pattern in certain immune cells.

This low grade inflammatory state is linked with poorer general and metabolic health and tends to be influenced by things like stress, poor sleep, sedentary routines, smoking, nutrition patterns, and other common lifestyle factors.

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WHAT THE RESEARCHERS FOUND

This new study found that people with higher levels of this systemic inflammation marker were more likely to report having low back pain.

This is a correlation, not necessarily a cause and effect relationship, but it adds to the growing body of research showing that pain is connected to our whole physiological state – not just to what is happening in one localized tissue.

In other words, this pattern suggests that our broader health and lifestyle factors may play a meaningful role in how pain shows up for us. (Hint, hint: it’s not all about *how we move*! 🚶‍♂️)

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WHY THIS MATTERS FOR US AS YOGIS

For our science-based yoga community, this reinforces something we often talk about around here. 😃

Pain and injury are complex, multifactorial experiences. They are not simply the result of doing a yoga pose with the exact “right” or “wrong” alignment, having “good” or “bad” posture, or moving in “correct” or “incorrect” ways.

Besides, yoga is a low load movement practice with low injury rates (according to research on yoga injuries! (https://jennirawlingsblog.com/blog/how-common-are-yoga-injuries-the-science-weighs-in)), and the idea that tiny variations in alignment on the yoga mat are main drivers of pain does not reflect what research shows.

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A QUICK REMINDER OF THE BIOPSYCHOSOCIAL MODEL OF PAIN

The experience of pain is often described as a biopsychosocial (BPS) phenomenon.

The “bio” part includes much more than biomechanics, which refers to how we move. When we talk about the “bio” part of the BPS model, it’s more helpful to think in terms of biology rather than biomechanics.

This “biology” includes our immune system, stress hormones, sleep, nutrition, genetics, metabolic health, and general physiology. 🧬

The psychological part of the BPS model includes things like our beliefs, expectations, and emotions. The social part includes our environment, support system, socioeconomic status, and overall life context.

All of these factors interact in a way that is unique to each person.

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THE BIG PICTURE TAKEAWAY

So this new study doesn’t change anything we already know in our science-based yoga community here, but it gives us another piece of evidence pointing in the same direction.

Pain is not a simple alignment or movement problem. It is a whole person experience shaped by both our inner physiology and our outer life circumstances.

And in low load contexts like yoga, thoughtful practice, movement variability, and empowering, exploratory teaching tend to matter much more than striving for “perfect” alignment.

It’s always exciting when new research helps us see the bigger picture of the human body and movement a little more clearly, and this study adds one more meaningful piece to that puzzle! 🧩

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P.S. I created a blog post version of this write-up here in case you’d like to save or share! 👉 https://jennirawlingsblog.com/blog/low-back-pain-and-systemic-inflammation-why-alignment-isnt-the-full-story

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Reference:

Yuyang, Chen. "Association Between Systemic Immune‐Inflammation Index and Low Back Pain in American Adults: Evidence From a Large Population‐Based Study." European Journal of Pain 30.1 (2026): e70179.

25/12/2025

Healthcare professionals routinely manage pain, medicine's most common complaint, yet receive critically inadequate pain education, often less than 1 …

16/12/2025

🟣 Is the word ‘trauma’ being overused in massage and bodywork?

The word ‘trauma’ seems to be everywhere just now. Trauma is real, and it can be life changing. The problem is the way the word is being stretched to cover almost any difficult human experience. When that happens, it loses precision. It also shifts expectations, clients start looking for ‘trauma work’ in places that were never designed to offer it.

📰 A recent article in the Guardian describes how ‘trauma’ has become an everyday label, and it warns that when a word covers everything, it stops helping us understand what’s actually going on. It also highlights how trauma language has become marketable, something that can be packaged, branded, and sold. This matters because the wellness and complementary healthcare professions responds fast to whatever people are searching for.

📈 Our profession is now seeing a surge of ‘trauma focused’ CPD aimed at massage and bodywork therapists. Some of this training is genuinely useful when it teaches safer practice, consent, pacing, client choice, and how to respond if someone becomes distressed. The questionable part is where courses imply that therapists can ‘release trauma’, by locating it as dysfunction and restricted tissues and then releasing it with specialised techniques. That turns the session into a therapist led and technique driven practice rather than client centred care.

🛑 Scope matters. We can’t diagnose trauma. We can’t assess it. We can’t decide what a client’s emotional response means. If someone becomes tearful, shaky, quiet, or overwhelmed during treatment, that tells us they are having a response in that moment. It does not tell us the cause, and it does not give us permission to interpret it.

🧠 This is why therapists need to become much more discerning at critiquing course providers, and why professional organisations need to be more careful about what they badge as CPD. A diploma, certificate or an accredited course ⚠️doesn’t guarantee⚠️ you have the best professional training, and it doesn’t protect you if the content encourages you to work outside scope.

✅ A simple filter before booking trauma themed CPD
• Does it clearly define scope and limits, in plain language?
• Does it avoid diagnosis language and ‘release’ claims?
• Does it teach consent, pacing, choice, and what to do if someone becomes distressed?
• Does it include realistic signposting and referral guidance?
• Does it stay away from blaming specific tissues, especially fascia, for storing trauma?
• Does it stay away from claims of specific techniques to treat, release or resolve trauma?

🤝 What we can do is provide calm, consent led, predictable work that supports comfort and safety. If emotion shows up, we keep things calm and clear, offer choice, keep the person in control, and know when to signpost onwards.

In Touch Education, Helping therapists move from stories to standards.

Read the Guardian article here - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/dec/14/trauma-mental-health

08/11/2025

SPINAL MANIPULATION – WHAT’S REALLY HAPPENING

There’s this ridiculous idea floating around that a simple thrust can “realign” your bones. Let’s be clear — that’s not what’s happening. You cannot push vertebrae back into place with your hands. The spine isn’t dislocating and relocating every time someone cracks your back. If it were actually misaligned the way some claim, you’d be in hospital, not on a treatment table.

When a practitioner performs a spinal manipulation, the movement is extremely small — a few millimetres at most. The joint surfaces briefly separate, creating a rapid change in pressure within the synovial joint. That change causes gas (mostly CO₂ and nitrogen) to form and collapse inside the joint fluid — the audible “pop.” That’s all the noise is. It’s not bones moving back into place. It’s cavitation — a pressure change in the joint capsule.

Physiological Effects

Manipulation affects the body mainly through neurophysiological responses, not through physical repositioning of bones. The quick stretch activates mechanoreceptors within the joint capsule and surrounding tissues. These receptors send a flood of sensory input to the spinal cord and brain. This temporary barrage can reduce the sensitivity of nociceptive pathways (pain signalling) and alter muscle tone via reflex mechanisms. That’s why after a manipulation, patients often feel “looser,” “lighter,” or notice an improved range of motion — it’s not because their bones were realigned; it’s because their nervous system has momentarily adjusted how it’s interpreting movement and pain.

The effect can also increase local blood flow and help restore normal joint motion if it’s been restricted by protective muscle guarding. Again — that’s a functional change, not a structural one.

Why the Realignment Myth Persists

The “realignment” myth continues because it sounds dramatic and easy to sell. It gives people the impression something was out of place and the practitioner fixed it. It’s a neat story — but it’s nonsense. The vertebrae are held in place by strong ligaments, discs, and deep stabilising muscles. A single thrust cannot overcome that structure and magically shift things back.

13/10/2025

Pain is caused by a combination of physical, emotional, and environmental factors, which makes treatment and diagnosis difficult.

10/10/2025

✋ Manual therapy is a controversial topic in the rehab world, with many contrasting claims about what it does.

🤔 Want to learn once and for all what manual therapy CAN and CANNOT do?

In this well-balanced blog we clarify exactly that for you.

Not based on opinion or anecdotes, but based on what the EVIDENCE has to say.

👉 Read it now: https://www.physio-network.com/blog/what-manual-therapy-can-do/

02/09/2024

“Analogous to letters of the alphabet, which can offer no clue by themselves as to how they should be assembled to make a poem, self-esteem, wellness, and positivity are scraps of feelings that cannot be addressed in isolation and assembled in a way that can restore a person’s mind to wholeness or happiness.”

The caring industry’s wellness and positivity products cannot provide self-esteem to those who do not already have it.

17/02/2019

Changing the pain paradigm. Encouraging and educating clients to observe and modify is a giant step towards moving them back into an activity routine that serves them. Lots of folks are convinced that if they aren't following a pre-set structure in their activity designed by the "experts", that somehow they are not benefiting from the effort....this is just not so. One body, one pursuit....and there are no two alike!

Many people with ongoing pain fear that exercise will make their pain worse. But when done right, exercise plays a vital role in recovering from pain and living well again.

21/12/2018

Important work, no fear.

We’ve all heard them and we’ve probably repeated quite a few but research doesn’t support any of them. Is it time we changed the dialogue around Pregnancy Massage and tossed these…

24/11/2018