The Work

Structural integration, and therapeutic bodywork and two trajectories, so to speak, that we can take in our work together.

Structural integration is a systematic way of addressing  a whole person (as opposed to say, a shoulder in isolation, which doesn’t actually exist), bringing structure into great ease and alignment. This kind of work tends to be quite good at relieving chronic patterns, the kind of patterns you may well have been moving from since you were a kid.

How are you carrying yourself day-to-day? How are you moving through the world (including rest, work, and sports)? And quite importantly, how does that affect your overall vitality and susceptibility to illness and injury?

Structural integration (SI for short) consists of 12 sessions, more or less, of 90 minutes each. In this series, what we do each session is tailored to your particular structure and its postural and movement patterns, and largely to what your goals, i.e., why you’re here. Each session will work with a specific territory of your body each time in a way as the series unfolds with a certain momentum and, in my experience thus far, a pretty profound intelligence.

The changes during an SI series are literally meant to last your lifetime.

For more on KMI Structural Integration proper, here’s a blog post you may find helpful.

We can also do a more “intro-to-structural integration,” that I often call a Structural Bodywork series, of three 90-minute sessions.

The therapeutic bodywork work we might do together will depend a lot on what you’ve got going on. There are two ways that, for me, this work differs in my mind from structural integration.

1. We’re tending to look more immediate and local. As in, if you’re recovering from a recent and acute injury, we’d want to start here anyway, get mobility and balance in the injured tissue. Then, if we wanted, we could go onto something like an SI series.

2. Each session is unto itself. Whereas with structural integration we’re counting to some extent on the momentum from session to session.

What’s best for you? Great question. If you still have it after perusing this site a bit, I’d be happy to chat with you over email or phone and tell you what I think would make the most sense for you as I see it.

If needed, I offer sports massage defined as pre- and post-event, or workout, massage for athletes. The primary goal of these sessions is to awaken and integrate the functional lines of musculature, and to facilitate removal of cellular waste (i.e. lactic acid). These sessions are usually 30 to 60 minutes.

In any given session, too, we may spend a little time with trigger point therapy—releasing specific taut bands in musculature—and various forms of muscle energy techniques like PNF stretching (really? okay, you asked for it … proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation).

Here are few more photos of what any session might look like.