There’s a saying in the body work world that motion is lotion. It’s a simple concept, when we move we push and pull fluid into our tissue which tends to help the tissue move better, lubricate it if you will.
If motion is lotion and lubricates the tissue then the way to work with tissue that’s not moving is to add motion to it. Easy right?
If you’ve ever trained with me I talk a lot about tissue hydration being the key to making changes in the body. When we find a “spot” on the body that’s not moving and palpate it we will find a lack of hydration there. The key to releasing this spot is to bring more motion to it, each little bit will build to bring more motion and more motion…
Natural Frequency
Dr. Rolf saw fascia as a crystalline structure. Crystals, like all things, vibrate at a natural frequency. In the early days of radio crystals were used as the tuning device—real actual crystals. If the transmitter and the receiver had the same crystals they could communicate. Radios were advertised by how many crystals they had, which implied they could pick up more stations.
When a crystal—or a bridge—vibrates at it’s natural frequency it presents little resistance to energy moving through it. At resonance the atoms all vibrate in the at same frequency and resistance falls close to zero.
All material has a natural resonant frequency, and all complex systems have a resonant frequency. The tissue of a body has a resonant frequency as does the body as a whole.
We can hear this natural frequency in a baseball bat hitting a ball, CRACK. And when the bat breaks we hear the disruption of the energy transfer. We tune musical instruments to get the correct vibration.
Obstructions
When a wave of energy encounters a block to it’s moving through an object there is a reflection of the waves energy back towards the origin of the wave. This reflection has less energy than the original wave and is out of phase with the original. Out of phase simply means that when the original wave is high the reflection is at it’s low point. This is what happens when we drop a pebble into a closed pool, the wave hits the side of the pool, the block, and reflects back. If enough waves are produced the reflected waves it encounters will add at some points and subtract at others producing a roiling mess.
The way to remove these restrictions in the body is to assure the tissue is hydrated. Hydrated tissue doesn’t present a barrier to the passage of energy—motion is lotion.
When you work with a body look for areas that don’t move, the bigger the better, work with these first. As you hydrate, move, these large restrictions you’ll work you way to the smaller and smaller areas. These smaller areas will require more refinement of your touch to hydrate/release, and your eye to see.
An interesting article on Hydration
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