Visceral Manipulation: How to Relax and Listen to What Your Body Needs

Visceral Manipulation: How to Relax and Listen to What Your Body Needs

The body is complex and intelligent. It knows when there’s a problem and tries to communicate this through pain and discomfort. But all too often, we don’t listen or don’t have the time to deal with it. That is until we can deal with it no longer.

When we reach the end of our tether and cannot resolve the issue causing our pain, Visceral Manipulation may be the answer.

Visceral Manipulation is a skilled therapy centred on three core directives, relax, listen, and follow.

Relax

As a Visceral Manipulation practitioner, relaxing my mind and body is essential. My mind needs to be open to what my client’s body will show me that needs help, and my body needs to be relaxed to get a good feel through my hands to feel where to go to help them. If I am too stiff or tense, I won’t be able to help them as best I can.

For the client, it is similar. With a relaxed mind, the client becomes more accepting of the treatment. They can feel their body better, connect with it, know more of what is happening, and can provide me with feedback to help with the treatment.

For the body itself, a relaxed, loose body aids the treatment process. When a client is relaxed in their body, they tell the body to let go of their problems and restrictions. To gain a release, I have to move them in specific ways. When their body is relaxed, release may happen more quickly and easily; therefore, I can provide the best treatment in the smallest amount of time.

Listen

For myself, my job as a Visceral Manipulation practitioner is to listen to the clients’ body and take me to its area of restriction. Because the body structures are all connected, most tension is often away from where the client feels the pain or discomfort. If I only work on the sore part, the client will likely experience only short term results. However, if I listen to their body and follow the tension, the body will take me to the origin of the pain to provide longer-lasting results.

For the client, it is about helping them to learn to listen to their body again. It’s also about helping them understand why their body is giving them these messages, like pain, fatigue, and discomfort.

Most people tend to feel something, and unless it is a pain that they can’t ignore, they might push the feeling aside, ignoring the pain because other things in life are more important. Little do they realise, they’ve now collected several small problems over time. The body then goes about compensating for each of these problems.

Each problem strains, tightens or weakens the body, making it easier to collect the next little problem, creating new restrictions in the body. Eventually, so many little problems build up that finally, they can’t ignore the pains or problems any longer.

Visceral Manipulation practitioners then have to start the unwinding process to help get them back to their healthy natural state. By helping to educate the client about their body and how it works, we can help them have a better relationship with their body and know when they might be working outside their bodies ability. They are then able to make changes to their daily lives to reduce the build-up of these small problems and know when they need to seek help before they end up in pain.

Follow

As a Visceral Manipulation practitioner, once the body shows me where a problem is, my job is to follow the tension to the root cause, assist the body with how it wants to release the tension, and get out, leaving the body to finish adjusting itself. I only have to help with what the body can’t do, it will do the rest. Our bodies are amazing in this way!

For the client, follow goes back to the listening part. When a client listens to their body, they follow the feeling. If the body is saying it is tired, it needs sleep. If it is feeling weak, it needs rest. If you feel hungry, you need to refuel with food, and if you have a full bladder, you need to go to the toilet.

The body never lies to us with the messages it sends. Still, we tend to decide whether to listen or not based on what we are doing at the time, our self-expectations or what we perceive others expect of us. We then tend to fall into collecting those bad habits again, building up those small problems.

If we can learn to listen to what our body needs and follow what is telling us, we can be in more control of our aches and pains.

If you have ignored your small problems and have reached a point where you need help, visceral manipulation may be beneficial. Contact our visceral manipulation practitioner Andrew Ross to book an appointment today. You may book online or call our Gold Coast clinic on 07 5571 0001.

Find out more about visceral manipulation therapy on the Gold Coast by visiting this page.