29/10/2025
Lessons from the Treatment Table:
Just passing down some lessons from my experiences of 26 years practicing touch therapy and bodywork. To help clients and therapists alike.
When you first start in Bodywork as a therapist, it's very 'nuts and bolts'. Your touch first registers tension as a knot, here and there.
Given a few years, you see patterns emerging over hundreds and thousands of clients you see and feel. How the body has adapted its shape to accommodate a job, a lifestyle, a dominant hand, the people you look up to.
You also begin to see how these adaptations have formed around internal reactions to stress and stress responses. The shoulders up to ears, the rounded backs. These types of adaptations tell a story of how a person is not only moving through life, but feeling through it previously.
Over more years, you develop a sensitivity to types of tension - what is through force, trauma or stress. You can differentiate between them through your fingers. You can feel and sense where their lived experiences are and where they are held, down to what type it was/is.
You can tell through touch whether someone is overburdened, waiting for the next bombshell to drop, walking on eggshells, over working, or over cooked the gym or the garden.
Beyond that, you literally feel what is a block or movement internally. Your touch sensitivity moves deeper to a 'felt sense'. Your mirror neurons as a therapist, detect every micromovement or emotion happening in the body, whether it's through our own hands, sight, our intuition. Even down to hearing a response with a slightly different toned voice from a client, or a held shallow breath, tells us a lot from within us.
We are not using a psychic power in these instances. We have listened to so many bodies and beings through our hands, that our whole body hears and sees the client.
We feel the map your body holds and have a felt sense of your story, both the spoken and unspoken narrative.
From here the work begins. Lx
