Just ask a mother who had a C-section? Very often, she won’t even think about touching her scar.
Just ask a victim or survivor of a crime, of a traumatic accident, of self-harm. Looking at a scar can bring out thoughts and feelings
The scar is not just there, it is in your mind, and anchored deep into your inner being.
Have you ever been so tired, frustrated, angry, or unhappy after a day of work that you felt like it wasn’t for you anymore?
Have you reached the point where you couldn’t reason yourself anymore, and decided you’d need to do something really drastic to address the issue?
Well, that’s me sometimes in 2018. I never thought that would happen, but yet, I was there. Yet, you can’t just close the door and move away if you haven’t a plan, right? You still need a steady income to keep you going, right?
So I reasoned myself to stick with it. In the back of my mind, I started thinking about a financial back-up though. A little cushion that would give me a bit of breathing time. I looked at my debts (thank goodness for my parents who taught me to spend only the money I had), my expenses, my lifestyle, and I adjusted to a more frugal way of life.
In parallel, I still needed to think about what I would do instead. It’s not like I had reached retirement age, though it felt like that in my mushy brain, that’s for sure. Shall I turn to hobbies? I had always loved sewing. Fabrics were offering so much in terms of colours, texture, and magically being transformed from a 2-D object to a 3-D design. But could I make a living out of it? Hum, not sure.
So I kept plodding along, tap-tapping on my keyboard, praying and hoping a solution would miraculously enlighten me.
And one Saturday, somehow, the drop made the glass overflow. Things got “so much” that I could only think about one thing: writing my resignation letter. That’s it. Enough was enough.
No idea what I would do AFTER, but I was so low when thinking about work that I couldn’t carry on pretending the job I had was still the job I loved.
I handed my resignation letter in, with a heavy heart, but I felt liberated when I came back home that evening. Inside, I guess I had the feeling that things would sort themselves out, that everything would be okay.
A few days later, my son came back from football training. As a 17 year-old something, he would give it 100%, whether proper matches or training sessions. Now, those of you with teenager sons will know ONE how much they eat, TWO how physical they get, THREE when they ask for something nice from you, you better jump on the opportunity, or you’ll lose it.
“Mum, can you please do something on my calves, I think they’ll get sore tomorrow”. So I ask him to lay down on the carpet, I take one of his leg in my hands and WHOA.
That’s it, I know what I want to do:
From then on, everything seemed to flow smoothly. I first spoke to Sophie, a local physiotherapist who had a wealth of knowledge on manual therapies. I mean, I was in my mid-fifties, it might just be a silly idea, don’t you think? Who would take me seriously?
Sophie took me seriously, she explained all career paths I could choose, from the length of the studies before being qualified to prospects for work. Osteopath vs chiropractor, physiotherapist vs occupational therapist, secondary care vs well-being therapist. Fascinating. And then Sophie mentioned all different kind of manual therapies, and I instantly liked the idea of powerful therapies that were delivered through gentle touch.
Hearing from a renowned therapist that soft-touch could be as effective, if not more, than those muscle kneading techniques, that was a revelation. My epiphany!
Meeting Ivana, an EMMETT practicioner and Diana, a Bowen therapist was critical in understanding how people could help someone in pain and achieve excellent results by using only their finger tips. I really wanted to know more, and to do as they did. There was no stopping me.
This sent me on a quest for information. I was back to my young self, in the days where I could spend hours and hours in the University Library, gobbling information, cross-checking references, taking notes, understanding. Bless the Lockdown. Bless the Internet: nowadays, libraries are at your finger-tips. There was literally nothing else I could do: scrawl webpage and webpage and learn so much about the human body from reputable sources.
So, YES, YES, YES. There is such a thing as effective soft-touch. No-one really knows exactly how it works, but the connective tissue, or fascia, which is like a web throughout the body, connecting any given point to any other one, is packed with nervous cells. Sending sensory messages after sensory messages to the brain. Temperature, pressure, orientation, and so on. A constant flow of information, interpreted by your brain, and acted upon by your body as a results. With the occasional misfiring. After all, we all know things can go over-drive in the body
