Why People Say Bodywork Therapy Is The Best Way To Heal The Body & Mind
An expert shares her personal experience of bodywork and facts about why it's so effective.
Kateryna Onyshchuk / shutterstock A while back, I had a coworker tell me that I was the most unhealthy, healthy person she knew. I exercised every day, ate well, didn’t partake in recreational drinks or other substances, got plenty of sleep, had a positive attitude, was a go getter, happily married, a mom of toddlers, and enjoyed my job at a start-up. Despite all of that, I had been very ill.
My coworker made this statement after a couple of brief hospitalizations I’d experienced with pancreatic inflammatory attacks — initially with no known apparent cause. She also knew I endured 3 to 5-days-a-week migraines consistently. After two years under several doctors’ care, it became apparent that I needed more than the prescribed drugs and recommended surgeries/procedures.
She was right, I was healthy. But something was missing. That's when I started exploring bodywork therapy to try to find the missing piece.
I traveled the road of alternative therapies at a time when people still considered it “kooky” to do so.
Some methods didn’t seem to work, while others gave my entire being the space to truly breathe and heal. Through these practices, I learned the root causes of my issues were more than stress and physical causes. They were deeper than that.
Since we, as human beings, our energy and all our thoughts and emotions have energy too, whatever we think and feel affects our physical bodies. The mind and emotions are linked to our bodies’ health and well-being. Bodywork helps to release that stored up, not-so-healthy, accumulated energy in ways that the physical body cannot, or in ways the physical body takes a longer time and often more uncomfortable method, to do so.
For me, bodywork helped not only to identify the emotional patterns associated with my illnesses, but also provided me the outlet to create productive avenues that addressed past mental and emotional patterns and trauma. I started to get rid of the things I didn’t realize I was holding on to.
From there, I developed methods to maintain and process thoughts, feelings, and situations regularly, so the conscious and unconscious accumulation of stuck or unwanted energy stopped accruing.
In a bodywork session, we can trust that our bodies will remove those slow-moving energy or blocks in our energetic systems.
We don’t need to know what is being moved out through our energy systems and it feels a lot better when they are not there. Just like therapy, exercise, and good sleep, ensuring regular bodywork sessions like massage, reiki, cranial sacral therapy, myofascial release, and acupuncture will keep us on a healthy and balanced mind, body, and spirit track.
It’s no secret that our repressed emotions eventually need to come out – whether through outburst or illness and disease. And we all have repressed emotions that can be dealt with. Sometimes our bodies reflect an emotional or mental imbalance that’s been ignored for many years. Without addressing it, a buildup of energy forms tends to show itself in physical ailments. Treating the whole body as a unit is vital to optimal health including the emotions and thoughts associated with our sickness. Our mental and emotional state is equally, if not more important, to care for and groom our physical wellness.
Bodywork, in its many forms, provides the ability for us to move stagnant and lethargic energy through our systems. These methods bring to the surface patterns that hinder us from moving forward – quite literally in some cases – due to fears, beliefs, and thoughts that are stored deep within our psyche and cells.
It is absolutely amazing when we consider the number of incredibly helpful medications and surgeries, we have at our fingertips to enhance our quality of life. However, we need to also attend to the full gambit of thoughts, emotions, and healthy expression of those, to promote full and complete healing, and model that for others.
Reiki worked best for me, but there are other options that may work best for you.
In my situation, after receiving minimal relief with traditional medicines, I sought various alternative options – chiropractic, nutritionist, acupuncture, reiki, kinesiology, and more. Fortunately, I hit the jackpot with reiki.
Prior to my openness to alternative options, all my stuffed-down energy and emotion had no place to go but inward. On some level I was attacking myself for not being good enough and for not addressing all the emotions I never knew how to address. Since then, I have been sure to incorporate a regular maintenance program of physical and energetic body health instead of just singling out only the physical body parts that need extra TLC.
I believe there is a moment we all have where we realize that the way we’re living, the thoughts we’re thinking, and how we’re responding to situations are patterned behaviors from our childhood stemmed from beliefs that were handed to us in a time where we couldn’t possibly know any better than to accept them as true. As adults, we know better. Plus, there’s more information for us to access than our parents and predecessors ever had.
We have the power to perpetuate good, wholesome, full-being healing at all levels if we so choose. Bodywork is one of the many pieces in that journey to wholeness.
Pamela Aloia is a certified grief coach, intuitive/medium, and author of inspirational books. Pamela supports people through change and helps them enhance their lives and experiences via energy awareness, meditation, and mindfulness.