Embody Health

11/26/2025

The Tears That Heal

Within bodywork, the smallest tear can change the entire room. It glimmers at the corner of the eye, slips free down the cheek, and tells you something the client’s words never could. Tears are not random or dramatic. They are physiological expressions of nervous system change, chemical shifts within the limbic brain, and emotional imprints dissolving within the fascial web. The body carries stories long after the mind forgets them, and tears are often the first language the body uses to speak its truth.

Some tears emerge when the vagus nerve finally softens after years of holding. As the parasympathetic system reclaims its place, the heart rate slows, and breath expands into spaces that had been guarded. This tear is warm and quiet. It falls when the nervous system recognizes safety, when a steady hand and regulated presence give the body permission to stop bracing.

Other tears rise from the limbic system, where unprocessed emotion has been stored in muscular patterns, diaphragmatic tension, or the viscera themselves. When myofascial work, diaphragmatic release, or craniosacral stillness unwinds these old patterns, the amygdala sends its signal. The tear comes before the narrative. The body discharges the charge it could not release during the original experience.

There are tears born from interoception awakening. The brain begins to feel the body again through the insular cortex. New signals travel through the fascia’s mechanoreceptors and interstitial fibers, reminding the nervous system that it has a home to inhabit. Clients often describe this as a sudden recognition of themselves. It is a reunion, not a release.

Touch can also stimulate oxytocin, the hormone of trust and connection. Oxytocin changes the fascial matrix, softening collagen fibers and reducing sympathetic tone. When oxytocin rises, shoulders lower, jaws soften, and breath deepens. Tears appear as the body recognizes safety, not just mentally but chemically. This is the tear of belonging.

Some tears come from memory without words. Trauma often embeds itself in posture, breath, or fascial densification rather than in conscious recall. When the tissue unwinds through slow, sustained pressure or visceral contact, the body releases the emotional charge without needing the story. The tear is ancient and often quiet, like something resurfacing from a place older than language.

There are also tears shaped by resonance. Human beings are wired for co-regulation. Our nervous systems synchronize through breath, heart rhythms, vocal tones, and subtle cues detected by the vagus nerve. When a bodyworker holds steady, coherent presence, the client’s system often entrains to that stability. A tear falls not out of sadness but relief. It is the tear that says, “I don’t have to hold this alone anymore.”

And then there is the tear of completion. In polyvagal and somatic research, this appears when a survival cycle finally finishes. A freeze state thaws. A breath that never completed finally exhales. A protective pattern dissolves. The fascia shifts from rigidity to fluidity. Blood flow increases—electrical coherence returns. The tear marks the moment the body finally emerges from a story it has been carrying for years.

Tears are not signs of weakness. They are signs of regulation, adaptation, neurological reorganization, and emotional integration. In bodywork, tears reveal the exact moment when the fascia, the nervous system, and the emotional body agree to let something go. They show us where safety has been restored. They show us where the story is changing.

And perhaps the most sacred truth is this. The fascia speaks long before the mind does. It speaks in breath and tremor, in warmth and softening, in the shimmering trail of a single tear. And we, the ones who listen in silence, learn to hear what it has carried through years, through lineage, through time.

11/21/2025

This exactly…

The Fascia Speaks

As bodyworkers, we touch a system far more intelligent and responsive than most people realize. It is a living memory field, a sensory fabric that holds the echoes of every emotional contraction, every bracing pattern, and every unspoken moment the nervous system didn’t know how to resolve.

We explore these imprints every day. We feel the places where the tissue thickened in response to a moment of fear, the areas where breath stopped during heartbreak, or the subtle density of someone carrying a responsibility too heavy for their age. These are not just restrictions. They are records.

Science is beginning to describe what practitioners have long sensed with their hands. Fascia is densely woven with interoceptors, proprioceptors, mechanoreceptors, and nociceptors, creating one of the most information-rich sensory networks in the body. These receptors do not just relay physical sensations; they respond to emotional states, autonomic shifts, and subtle changes in internal chemistry. When someone is afraid, lonely, overworked, grieving, or carrying unresolved tension, fascia receives that information before the conscious mind can interpret it.

Over time, these repeated emotional signals alter the collagen matrix itself. The ground substance thickens. Elasticity decreases. Glide diminishes. The tissue becomes a physical representation of an emotional history. What began as a moment of bracing becomes a pattern. Eventually, the pattern becomes posture, and posture becomes identity. This is how fascia stores emotional imprints that influence how a person walks, rests, reacts, and protects themselves. What clients feel as stiffness is often the residue of old vigilance. What they call tightness is often the body’s attempt to hold a story that never had a chance to be expressed.

When we work with fascia, we are not simply lengthening tissue or improving mobility. We are entering the emotional architecture of a person’s life. Gentle compression rehydrates the ground substance and makes the dense places permeable again. Slow stretching reorganizes collagen fibers that have been shaped by years of guarding. Pacinian and Ruffini receptors detect the warmth of our touch and signal safety along the vagus nerve. Interoceptors begin to update the brain’s perception of the body, allowing long-muted emotional signals to come into conscious awareness. As the layers soften, the nervous system begins to trust, and trust is the first doorway to release.

This is why clients often experience tears, trembling, laughter, heat, or a sudden memory during a session. The fascia is not only releasing; it is reorganizing the information it once held tightly. Electrical coherence returns. Circulation improves. Sensory accuracy sharpens. The body stops running old protective commands and starts rewriting its operating system. What once felt like a lifelong pattern begins to dissolve in the warmth of contact and presence.

Fascia is a sensory intelligence that interprets experience. The mind does not lead this process. It follows it. The mind interprets what the fascia feels and explains it long after the body has already changed. When we help clients reconnect to their fascial landscape, we are guiding them back to the body’s original language, the language beneath thought, beneath story, beneath habit—the language of emotional truth.

We, the ones who listen in silence, can hear what the fascia has carried through lineage, memory, and time.

11/18/2025

All of this💫

How many of you incorporate Eastern and Western theories and techniques into your bodywork? An integration of two worlds.

There are many ways to understand the human body, and none of them tells the whole story on its own. We inherit different languages of healing from various cultures, sciences, and traditions, each one describing the same living terrain from its own unique perspective. Some people become stuck believing there is only one correct map. But the body has never lived by a single map. It is a crossroads of systems, histories, pathways, chemistry, memory, and electricity. It takes a multilingual healer to truly see it.

In Western anatomy, fascia is the continuous fabric that surrounds, suspends, and connects all structures. Researchers such as Stecco, Langevin, and Schleip have demonstrated that fascia is richly innervated, mechanically responsive, and deeply intertwined with proprioception, interoception, and autonomic function. In Eastern medicine, the same connective web is understood through meridians, which are considered rivers of communication that run through tissue planes, muscular seams, and fascial corridors. These are two different words from two different cultures, yet they speak about the same underlying structure.

The lymphatic system, described in physiology as a fluid network for immunity and detoxification, feels like a tide that moves or stalls in response to our inner state. Myofascial adhesions are described mechanically as restrictions; however, in somatic and energetic traditions, they are experienced as blockages, stagnations, and areas where the body has held unresolved tension. Both perspectives recognize the same truth: the body needs flow, and stagnation comes with consequences.

Emotions also have multiple lenses. Neurobiology speaks of vagal tone, interoceptive signaling, stress chemistry, and autonomic shifts. Traditional Chinese Medicine associates emotional patterns with specific organ systems, describing grief as a lung condition, anger as a liver issue, and fear as a kidney concern. Ayurveda describes these tendencies through the doshas and elemental imbalances. Trauma science describes them as somatic imprints and unfinished survival responses that take shape in muscle tone and breath patterns. All of these perspectives describe how the body holds experiences and reflects what we have lived through.

Even the chakras, often dismissed as symbolic, align closely with anatomical hubs in the body. These regions correspond with nerve plexuses, glands, fascial membranes, vasculature, and the interoceptive pathways that inform emotion and meaning. When someone feels tightness in the chest, a knot in the gut, or a lump in the throat, they are not speaking figuratively. They are describing true embodied sensation shaped by physiology and emotion.

Bodyworkers live in the space where these worlds meet. We feel fascia shift under slow, patient pressure. We feel lymphatic rivers begin to move again with gentle redirection. We believe that organ mobility returns as breath and presence create space. We feel the nervous system settle from a state of vigilance into one of safety. We feel emotions rise and soften in tissue that has held them far too long. None of this is mysticism. This is what happens when touch meets anatomy and anatomy meets the story of a human life.

The issue is not that there are too many frameworks. The issue is believing that only one can be correct. Healing thrives in the integrative space where research meets intuition, where tradition meets science, where fascia meets meridian, where lymph meets energy, and where the nervous system meets the stories woven into our tissues. Bodyworkers blend these perspectives every day with remarkable outcomes, because we are not limited to a single language for understanding the human body.

We are translators of the body’s many dialects. We listen to the places where systems intersect and stories converge. We honor all the ways healing can speak.

11/18/2025

Amazing💥

The human body holds its stories in layers, each one woven through a different depth of fascia. The superficial fascia, the deep fascia, and the visceral fascia form a trilogy of emotional memory, nervous system response, and structural intelligence. Together they shape how we feel, how we move, and how we heal. In the Body Artisan approach, we honor each layer with its own language of touch, because each one carries its own form of truth.

The superficial fascia is the most expressive layer, rich in sensation, lymphatic flow, temperature shifts, and emotional reactivity. This is where we feel social emotions, fears, overstimulation, and the subtle “weather” of the nervous system. It responds instantly to the world. Myofascial Flow is the perfect modality for this layer, because its slow, wave-like movement speaks the language of safety. It invites the skin, the lymph, and the surface nervous system to soften their grip and settle. When we work here, we aren’t just treating tissue; we are calming the emotional atmosphere of the body.

The deep fascia carries a different kind of story. Dense, fibrous, and linked to the musculoskeletal system, it houses compensations, postural patterns, protective contractions, and the emotional imprints formed through repetition, stress, and survival. This is where responsibility, pressure, identity, bracing, and long-held fears often live. Myofascial Trigger Point Therapy is the medicine for this layer. It listens for the hyperactive points where the nervous system has built its strongest defenses. With sustained pressure and clear intention, these points release not only pain but old patterns, the ones the body created when it didn’t know another option.

Then there is the visceral fascia, the deepest layer, wrapping the organs like silk. Here we find the emotional roots that run through the autonomic nervous system. Grief in the lungs, worry in the stomach, fear in the kidneys, anger in the liver, and the quiet survival instincts stored in the gut. This layer controls breath, digestion, circulation, immunity, and the deepest rhythms of life. Myofascial Release is the gateway here, because its stillness and depth allow the body to unravel from the inside out. Working with the visceral fascia is less about pressure and more about presence —a listening so deep that the organs respond with ease, warmth, and restored mobility.

When these three layers are understood and treated with intention, the body becomes coherent again. The superficial layer calms, the deep layer reorganizes, and the visceral layer unwinds. The emotional body stabilizes, the physical body finds balance, and the inner systems return to their natural harmony. This is the art of fascia, the art of emotion, and the art of healing woven together. This is the essence of what it means to be a Body Artisan.

09/12/2024

All of this…feels so good!

08/16/2024

Open for business and thriving…

08/01/2024

People! Do this!!

04/20/2024

Are you drinking enough water? Dehydration can creep up on you slowly if you forget to keep sipping, and before you know it, you're left feeling lethargic, lightheaded, and achy with headaches or muscle cramps impending.

Make sure to always have a (reusable) water bottle handy and refill throughout the day. If you're prone to forgetting, set alerts on your phone or watch. There are lots of apps out there designed to help build the habit that have a reminder feature.

However chaotic your day might be, there's a way to take care of you along with everything else. If you need help finding it, let me know and we'll look together.

01/11/2024

So interesting!

12/26/2023

Feeling full of gratitude for all the kindness, generosity, and support this year! 💚

Embody Health all year long…
Come see me in 2024!

11/29/2023

▶️ Watch this reel https://www.facebook.com/reel/330488916279948?fs=e&s=TIeQ9V&mibextid=qKMyX5

11/28/2023

Feeling grateful feels so good!