There is nothing more important to a therapist than self-care. How can you care for others, if you are in pain or limited by unnecessary tension? How can you feel better and better the longer you do massage?
In this course you will learn how Massage and Yoga Therapy enable you to assess imbalances within your own body. You will learn more about the cycle of pain and tension that lives within the layers of our whole self, not just the physical body. At its core, self-assessment is the process of knowing and directing the soft tissue and nervous system network through mindfulness. Using Mukunda Stiles’s, “Joint Freeing Series”, from Structural Yoga Therapy, and his apprentice Maria Mendola’s Functional Yoga Therapy model, massage therapist and yoga therapist, Rhianna Sanford, will help you build a baseline for proper joint function and range of motion, as well as a daily practice for rehabilitating limitations.
You will learn how to assess dysfunction within your range of motion and movement patterns, and build a protocol for treating your own limitations through self-massage and release work using the Yoga Therapy model and bodywork modalities. This will give you new techniques and a deeper awareness of kinesthetic principles making your daily practice adaptable to your needs. These techniques are foundational, for not only building your own daily practice, but for creating home care routines for your clients to complement your massage therapy treatment plans. Yoga Therapy is the broader study of Yoga and its many lineages to specifically apply the practice to the individual, versus the other way around. It is a non-dogmatic, multidimensional approach to personalizing your daily practice of connection and mindful living.
This class will focus on bringing us out of the habits of our movement patterns, to a place of observation and curiosity, where we can address our limiting beliefs around tension, pain, and discomfort, thereby creating the necessary individual changes within the bodymind. Before reshaping ourselves, we must first observe, understand what is in conflict, and know the proper tools to respond to those stressors, versus reacting. Your practice is a lifelong growth process that moves from the smallest most insignificant areas to the biggest most important and farreaching decisions of life. Why not feel good in the process?
Learning Objectives:
Students will learn body mapping/documenting/charting skills through self-evaluation and assessment techniques and how to identify areas of weakness versus strength.
Students will be able to target their chief complaints through self-evaluation using a systematic joint freeing series, guided movements, stretching, yoga postures, self-myofascial release, active release, and PNF stretching techniques.
Students will have a good working understanding of how to plan daily self-care routines of practice for lasting results and freedom in the body that will not only benefit them personally, but translate over to their clients as well, building the tools of their trade.
Brief introduction to Yoga Therapy, the history and theory of assessment techniques (Mukunda Stiles/Joint Freeing Series and Maria Mendola/Functional Yoga Therapy), the broader study of Yoga and how these techniques are applied in the bodywork community as a rehabilitation method that compliments Massage Therapy.
