When a Bum Shoulder Isn’t Just a Bum Shoulder
How a Discovery About Years of Trauma Stored in Your
Body May Now Be Freed from Chronic Pain
courtesy Sharron Coeurvie, BSN, founder www.listendotdotdot.org
You ache badly and would do anything to be rid of it. Advil, stronger anti-inflammatories from your physician aren’t helping any more. Besides giving your firstborn– now a teenager and worth less than at birth–you’re willing to buy snake oil, have parts cut out, make a pilgrimage to Minnesota, Texas, or even California if it could just end– Now! “Oh, no”, you moan to yourself, “I remind myself of my father.”
Patience. (“What do you mean ‘patience’ after so many years of living with it ?!”) Yes, patience.
You are a human animal, not human mechanical machine.
Bodies do not always follow linear logic in healing. Even physicists know about non-linear dynamics. You are not ‘piece work’ on the assembly line, where a shoulder, a hip, a neck are the piece gone bad–’remove and fix’. The shoulder, the hip, the neck are in a relationship with each other.
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Woven together by fascial planes (Saran Wrap head to toe), neurology, and the metaphors that are unique to your life, this body is more a morphing bag of Jello, (you choose the color) and fluids that are listening to each other and changing each other just like a mobile tapped lightly moves for hours afterward.
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Ida Rolf, after studying organic chemistry at Columbia University, saw our bodies were capable of much more change than medicine gave them credit for. Taking a leave from her work she explored osteopathy, chiropractic medicine, yoga, homeopathy, eventually developing The Rolf Method of Structural Integration.
A bum shoulder, stiff, painful, might be from an ankle injury years before when the muscles shortened around it affecting the lower leg, maybe even lifting one hip higher. After it happened you probably didn’t notice your shoulders had braced.
Now, all you know is the shoulder pain that keeps you up at night, driving you nuts, and in the tired morning makes it impossible to lift a milk jug. Muscle layers are tight, stuck to each other, twisted or shortened to try to help reduce the irritation–“Voila!” you have postural distortion. Maybe you have migraines. These can be from a tailbone jammed from that fall on the ice in your tenth winter, an old whiplash, or a hip stiffened after a skiing tumble.
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With the Rolf Method, layers of muscles are freed from each other, improving range of motion and unnecessary compression or unnatural rotation of joints and bones which, as time goes on, can cause chronic problems and pain. Then the layers are realigned with each other and the gravitational field. As tissue releases, your blood and lymph bathes the tissue, helping it heal, or helping an organ function better.
One’s body is an elegant, intelligent creature, not a stupid mule that needs to be mastered. With freedom it can show us the grace we may have forgotten is still possible.
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Sharron Coeurvie has practiced integrative therapies for the past 23 yrs.. Nursing in hospitals, the community, and Hospice, she went on to study manual therapies, Alfred Tomatis’ Audio-PsychoPhonology, and psychologies of the body/mind with a Jungian and transpersonal/humanistic base.
She works with the family system as a whole and individually with infants, children and adults having chronic pain, ADD/ADHD, autism, and emotional trauma and its effect on the body. She studied The Rolf Method of Structural Integration at The Guild for Structural Integration. You can read more about her at www.listendotdotdot.org. Private consults by appointment Twinsburg, OH 440-526-0526 or mobile 217-355-3507 (Chicago/Champaign, IL)