Index Previous Next V. Dynamic Alignment through Imagery
When you begin to change something, you may go through a state of sensory “confusion” or disorientation. This may be a good sign, signaling that “rewiring” is taking place in your nervous system. — Eric Franklin, Dynamic Alignment Through Imagery
As bodyworkers, we have assumed an implicit responsibility to, with gentleness and understanding, help our clients and culture to better integrate touch and meaningful nonverbal interaction into our interpersonal and intrapersonal repertoires. The context of touch therapy goes beyond removing the dents from fascial fenders into exploring the full possibilities of life in a human body. Our own kinesthetic presentation and modes of nonverbal communication become the role models for our clients and students. When we choose to become bodyworkers, it becomes time to examine our own unconscious kinesthetic scripting that has outlasted its usefulness and unnecessarily limits the possibilities of our lives.
Story and touch share a common thread of reconnecting us to our forgotten selves. They both dive deeply to the core of our realities, avoiding the facades we build around us. At times they reawaken both us, and the internal dragons we must face to realize who we truly are. Story and touch are the two edges of the magic sword that we discarded before we knew its power. The sword of awareness discarded because our culture and the major and minor traumas of our lives made it too painful to sustain belief. Yet sometimes, when often we least expect it, perhaps when listening to the falling rain or when touched by the warmth of a fire upon our face, the old stories return to grace our minds, bringing with them the hopes and wisdom of all the ages of humanity. Bringing with them the innocence of our earliest childhood.
Perhaps, our unconscious stories are just words and images. If so, they are images that speak both to our dreams and bodies. Dancer and movement educator Eric Franklin (1996) notes the importance our mental imagery plays in organizing and reorganizing the sub-cortical neuromuscular patterns that facilitate the ease or strain of our posture and conscious movements. We have only to think of movement or conflict and our body has responded, beyond the speed of our conscious thoughts. If, in our mind's eye, we visualize pictures facilitating ease and alignment of our bodies, our patterns of neuromuscular activation fall in step to accomplish this goal. If, on the contrary, the images we chronically play are those of conflict, fear, and tension, the corresponding tension and positional stress in our bodies will take its toll in energy lost and wear and tear.
As an example of the use of imagery, Eric Franklin's dance colleague Irene Dowd (1995) gives us an exercise to balance the pelvis while standing with the knees slightly bent and the feet parallel. The sacrum is imagined to be extremely heavy and sinking downward, no explicit action being done. The effect is to release the holding in the psoas and lower back without activating the gluteals as an explicit tuck (retroversion) would have done. The effect is to achieve an effortless balance of the pelvis within the field of gravity. Another exercise from Dowd is to have someone stand facing away from you. Place your hands on the person's hips. Now have them think (nothing more explicit) about shifting their weight to one or the other leg. You can feel the muscles activate as they do this. And what happens when, for up to 30 years, our self-image doesn't let us own our space or move too powerfully? If imagery can act to tune our responses, can it not also act to inhibit them?
What Franklin and Dowd and their colleagues and predecessors have learned through observation and clinical use is that voluntary movements activate previously learned neuromuscular patterns. In contrast, such use of imagery, termed ideokinetics, causes the body to reset and integrate new patterns of movement. By working with a client's physical body, we can alleviate the effects of tension and injury already experienced. By working also with their body awareness and body image, we open the door to even greater and more lasting change.
In discussing the benefits of imagery, Franklin emphasizes that “for any improvement in alignment to be permanent, the changes need to become part of your body image—the new alignment pattern needs to become part of your identity, or you will always slip back into old habits”. Using imagery is a very direct method to achieve a repatterning of body and body image. Such imagery extends beyond the visual to the tactile/kinesthetic and auditory modes. This realization is a key to understanding the effectiveness and sometime failures of massage in initiating somatic changes.
When we work on someone, we act to increase the ease and comfort with which they can inhabit their body. Amid the gentle stretching of fascia and facilitation of muscles, we send countless sensory signals throughout their nervous system. We focus intently on them, pacing, nurturing, and supporting their emotional needs. We can surmise that in this process, we provide many clients with a new sense of themselves as embodied human beings—input and nurturing that can help them to shift their unconscious images of their own bodies. This concept of the images and maps we build and use, moves us onward to the next place we will visit.
© Keith Eric Grant — The RamblemuseSM, November 1999. All rights reserved.
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