How will Integrative Acupressure help?
By Will Stamell, Integrative Acupressurist
Integrative Acupressure helps ‘unlock’ and unwind deeply held chronic stress patterns. Let’s face it, our lives are full of different stressors: environmental toxins, complex or unsafe emotional relationships, physical injury or trauma, not to mention the daily wear-and-tear of just being in a human body. And yet the body is so smart - when faced with cumulative stress, the body will create a unique tension pattern as a compensation. This avoids any one system becoming over-worked too quickly, ostensibly delaying your need to heal the original stressor. (It’s a bit like drinking coffee when you desperately need to get through a day of work; it helps in the short term to delay the need for rest, but ultimately steals energy from the future). Sooner or later we have to pay the piper and give ourselves enough space to heal our unprocessed past.
It’s only natural to try to know precisely how our health got to this point, that is, to piece together a timeline and gain a sense of “this is what happened to me and why I’m now having this chronic tension.” This may be a useful first step, but often isn’t sufficient to start to heal. The next step, critically important, is beginning to really notice how the stress is manifesting in the body – most often as stagnant and congested energy in specific areas. As Bessel van der Kolk wrote, ‘the body keeps the score’ — our unhealed ailments remain held in our cells and tissues, meanwhile compensations occur in our energy channels, muscles, bones, and organs. This is why Integrative Acupressure is so effective - it allows your body to recognize, both consciously and unconsciously, where it is out of balance, what the no-longer-helpful stress patterns are, and what it feels like to really start unwinding them.
As a healing touch therapy, acupressure is unique among hands-on modalities; using the Chinese energetic meridian system as its foundation, the goal of this work is to help your system relearn what balance feels like.
Acupressure’s most common description “acupuncture without needles” is somewhat accurate, but doesn’t tell the whole story. In fact, perhaps my favorite strength of acupressure as a healing practice is that the whole session is an in-real-time assessment. If stagnation is felt in one area of the body, we work in that area until your system responds by calling for touch in a different place. Using hands to listen to the body allows us to follow and adapt to the constant shifting flow of energy. At the end of the energetic chain we find the body at ease, with systems working calmly and fluidly as they should.
If it’s personal healing you’re interested in, or you’re curious to explore your own system’s modus operandi, I’d encourage you to try Integrative Acupressure. Ideal for reducing chronic stress and returning balance to “systems gone haywire,” acupressure is helpful for a wide range of ailments. Book an initial session and know for yourself how acupressure can help you return to feeling like your best self!