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Alchemena Identify & relieve pain patterns
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A Strategic Approach To Aligning Your Life. Bodywork - Coaching - Movement

Here is some useful information if you live with chronic or persistent pain.Your fascia is not a storage container for o...
05/16/2026

Here is some useful information if you live with chronic or persistent pain.

Your fascia is not a storage container for old emotions. It is the structural tissue that adapts to whatever postures and bracing patterns your nervous system has been holding. It can look like years of suppressed anger, grief that got stuck or fear that became your baseline. None of that lives in your tissue. But the protective tension that your nervous system organized itself around gets structurally reinforced over time, and your fascia builds itself accordingly.

This is why stretching alone rarely resolves chronic pain. The restriction is not the problem. It is the architecture your body built to support a nervous system that’s hijacked.
Lasting release requires changing the pattern at the level of the nervous system, not just the tissue.

The full newsletter walks through exactly how this works, and what that means for healing.

Subscribe to Alchemēna at https://www.alchemena.com/email-sign-up

05/15/2026

It doesn’t always have to rhyme, look good, or even be in sync with anything else.

The most important thing is TO MOVE! And to move with abandon, spontaneously, to be silly, and to enjoy the process of being silly.

There is way too much tension in the world that ends up living in our bodies.

We have the option to change our states and our moods at our very whim. That’s how powerful we are!

So, this week, join me in shaking a leg, twirling around, being off beat or not knowing the words of a song. Nobody cares! Just bust a move, my friends and be free!

Dance your way into the weekend like nobody’s looking because really….nobody is!

ONWARDS!

I came back to the gym last week after nearly four months away, my foot finally healed enough, and several people came u...
05/14/2026

I came back to the gym last week after nearly four months away, my foot finally healed enough, and several people came up and put their arms around me. Before I understood what was happening, I was crying. Not a small cry. The kind that takes you by surprise and makes you totally vulnerable.

It got me thinking about something I have watched for thirty years in my practice. Women cry on my table, often. Men, mostly, do not. I had a sense of why, but the research surprised me, and what I have come to understand about what tears actually are surprised me even more.

The short version: tears are not catharsis. They are not pressure being released. They are the body's signal that the conditions for something else have finally arrived.

I wrote about all of it this week, the gym, the data (which is fascinating), what I have seen under my hands, and what I think we have been getting wrong about why bodies cry.
If you have ever cried somewhere unexpected and not quite known why, I think you might find something here.

💜 Full piece on Substack. http://substack.com/

You have probably heard it said that emotions are stored in your tissues.It is one of those phrases that sounds beautifu...
05/12/2026

You have probably heard it said that emotions are stored in your tissues.

It is one of those phrases that sounds beautifully true, and it has helped many people make sense of what they feel during bodywork. But the science tells a more precise and, in some ways, more interesting story.

Emotions are not stored in your fascia. They are stored in your brain, encoded as implicit, body-based memories. What your fascia does is adapt structurally to the protective patterns your nervous system creates to manage those emotions. The chest collapses around chronic worry. The braced jaw around unspoken truth. The locked psoas around years of low-grade fear.

So when fascial release brings emotion flooding back, you are not unloading something the tissue was holding. You are changing your body's state in a way that finally allows your nervous system to process what it stored away.
This week's Alchemēna newsletter walks through how this actually works, and why it changes everything about how chronic pain releases.

Subscribe and read the full piece — https://www.alchemena.com/email-sign-up

05/11/2026

There are friends in your life who become extended family without you even noticing. It just fits somehow, and over the years, you find yourself in a relationship of deep love and appreciation.
This is my extended family. I met my sweet friend Hedy in 2010, when I was working with Fela! on Broadway as their bodywork and somatic practitioner.
I loved her right away. An immediate connection, her lovely disposition, gentle, kind, resourceful, always fully present. Some years later she met her handsome man, and the rest is history.
"Our" little family expanded, and their first son was a joy and a wondrous addition. I fell in love instantly, only to fall in love again last year when their second son was born.
Their presence in my life makes me a better woman, a better person. I feel more alive, more full, more connected to the deeper meaning of my life and life in general.
And I guess, in many ways, as time moves on and we go through the ups and downs, losing loved ones, separations, divorce, all the unpredictabilities of life, I just want to focus on being happy, feeling good, and choosing to live full out now. Not tomorrow. Not in a few months. Now.
The beauty and privilege of aging, I think, is the letting go. Not focusing on what didn't work out, but on what is going right, and what has been going right for my entire existence.
Can you relate? Do you have an extended family that brings you so much joy they make everything better? I hope so. And if you don't…it's not too late to adopt one. 😉

"My body's pain is not punishment but communication. My fascia has been protecting stored emotions until I'm ready to fe...
05/10/2026

"My body's pain is not punishment but communication. My fascia has been protecting stored emotions until I'm ready to feel them, and I'm creating that safety now."

Your nervous system has been holding memories and
emotions that weren't safe to fully process, shaping your fascia into the patterns it knows. Your chronic pain is the body's way of finally asking for your attention and care. This incantation helps you shift from frustration with persistent symptoms to appreciation for your body's communication, recognizing that pain is a messenger rather than an enemy. Use it when chronic pain feels overwhelming or when you're tempted to dismiss what your body is trying to tell you.

💥 Newsletter Link: https://www.alchemena.com/email-sign-up

Here is what changes when science finally takes fascia seriously.Your knee pain might not actually be a knee problem, yo...
05/09/2026

Here is what changes when science finally takes fascia seriously.
Your knee pain might not actually be a knee problem, your headaches might not start in your head, and your digestive issues might be tied to how your diaphragm has been holding stress for twenty years.

For decades, the medical model handed you off to specialists who each looked at their isolated system. The orthopedist for the knee. The gastroenterologist for the gut. The neurologist for the headaches. Nobody was looking at the connective tissue running through all of it, because for most of medical history, nobody believed it mattered.

It matters. The research is now overwhelming.
This week's newsletter explores why conventional treatment so often fails for chronic pain, and what's actually shifting in hospitals and research institutions right now.

Read the full piece and subscribe to Alchemēna at https://www.alchemena.com/email-sign-up

05/08/2026

I had a bunionectomy in December 2025 and one of the things that I’ve missed the most out of my life are my spontaneous dance parties.

So, my friends, dance parties are BACK ON!

Every Friday, I’ll share a short, funky good time with you in the hopes that you’ll join me in complete surrender to music and movement! If nothing else, I hope that these will make you smile and remember to MOVE YOUR BODY.

Let go and let loose! This is basically my entire philosophy with my work and in my life.

JUST HAVE FUN and no matter what hiccups, pauses, surgeries, shifts, and changes present themselves to you, DANCE IT OUT!

Give me a thumb’s up and maybe share your own dance moves with me. I would LOVE to see it!

Epppp-aaaaa!!!! 🎉

The most common kind of vertigo has a five-minute fix.Last week I wrote about Ménière’s, the inner ear condition that ha...
05/07/2026

The most common kind of vertigo has a five-minute fix.
Last week I wrote about Ménière’s, the inner ear condition that has resisted a cure for 160 years.

This week, the more common cousin: BPPV. Benign paroxysmal positional vertigo.

If you have ever rolled over in bed and felt the room lurch sideways for ten seconds before settling, you have likely met it.

Inside each inner ear there are tiny calcium crystals called otoconia. Real crystals. Beautiful under a microscope, like grains of salt. They sit on a gelatinous membrane and help the brain sense gravity.

Sometimes, through aging, viral infection, head trauma, or simply lying still too long, a few of them come loose. They drift into a place they do not belong. And every time you turn your head a certain way after that, they tumble through fluid that should be still, and your brain reads it as the world spinning.

The Epley maneuver, developed in 1980, is a sequence of four head positions that uses gravity to guide those crystals home.

Five minutes. Cure rates above 90% in well-selected cases.

It is not for everyone. Severe cervical spine disease, recent neck or back surgery, certain eye and cardiovascular conditions all require a different approach. BPPV also needs a proper diagnosis first, because vertigo can have other causes.

What continues to be true in this work is how well the body knows what to do, when given the right conditions.

The Epley is not a treatment in the way a medication is. It is a sequence of positions held in the right order, allowing gravity to return small crystals to where they belong.

The body does the rest.

💥 Full essay on Substack. https://substack.com/

For most of medical history, fascia ended up in a bucket.Surgeons cut through it. Anatomy students scraped it away. It w...
05/05/2026

For most of medical history, fascia ended up in a bucket.

Surgeons cut through it. Anatomy students scraped it away. It was the white webbing in the way of the "important" anatomy underneath, dismissed as biological packing material for centuries.

Then in the early 2000s, imaging technology finally caught up. Researchers could observe living fascia in real time, and what they found rewrote the rulebook. Densely innervated. Responsive. Communicative across the entire body. A continuous web that integrates every system you have into one coherent whole.

The tissue surgeons threw away is now the subject of international research conferences.
This week's Alchemēna newsletter walks through the fascia revolution and what it means for anyone whose chronic pain has refused to respond to conventional treatment.

Subscribe to Alchemēna at https://www.alchemena.com/email-sign-up to read the full piece and receive each new issue in your inbox.

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