A Touch of Healing

A Touch of Healing

A guide to body therapies—from Rosen to Reiki—around the East Bay.

Touch is the first sense to awaken as we enter the world, and the only one whose sense organ covers our entire body. Premature babies who receive mini-massages in their early days of life gain more weight and suffer fewer complications than their non-massaged counterparts, studies say. As grown-ups, many of us turn to some form of massage to relax, and to alleviate muscle and joint pain. But that just scratches the surface, especially in Northern California, alternative capital of the West, home to dozens of touch-related therapies that claim to help clients balance their energy, get in touch with feelings, access repressed memories, and even change the structure of their bodies.

If your New Year’s resolution includes getting in touch with body or soul, there are scads of options within arm’s reach, including Rosen, Rolfing, Reiki, osteopathy, Bowen, ortho-bionomy, and cranial therapy—and many, many more.

Kneading touch

Many people think of massage not as a healing therapy, but as a form of pampering, similar to unwinding with a glass of wine or a hot bath. If it’s simple stress relief you’re after, you’ll find what you need at any number of studios offering the basic styles: relaxing Swedish with its classic flowing, rolling, kneading, and percussive strokes; more intense deep tissue for specific areas of tension; penetrating heat in a hot stone massage; acupressure to stimulate the flow of energy; plus, usually, specializations for athletes and pregnant women. At some spas these days, the extensive list of massage options reads like a restaurant menu. “You want that with a side of aromatherapy or a seaweed mud wrap?”

And in fact, at Body Mind and Spirit in the Rockridge district of Oakland, owner and master massage therapist John Vito views his job very much like that of a chef. He and his staff of 25 massage therapists blend combinations of the classic styles to suit their clients’ tastes. Back in 1985, however, Vito spent his days on the stock options trading floor. During his weekly massage, an inner voice told him to lessen the stress and take care of himself. Not only did he follow that advice—a life-changing decision—but now he helps others take care of themselves, too. “The power of touch is good for both the giver and receiver,” he says.

While most people enjoy being the recipient of a relaxing rubdown, there are those who find lying passively on a table a little boring. If you crave a more active experience, you might prefer being pulled, twisted, pressed, and stepped on—all part of the package in traditional Thai massage. Unlike many other forms of massage, this specialty is performed while the client is fully clothed (a more psychologically comfortable state for some). Working on a floor mat, the Thai massage therapist stretches the client’s limbs to increase flexibility and presses on energizing “sen” lines (the Thai version of energy channels, originating at the navel) using hands, knees, and feet. It is like having someone do yoga to you.

Along with the usual massage choices, the venerable Claremont Hotel Club & Spa in Berkeley offers a few unique options. Lomi Lomi, for example, is a Hawaiian-style massage whose long, rhythmic, flowing motions mimic the ocean waves. Tibetan Sound Massage practitioners place sacred metal bowls on the body’s chakra points and ring them with special mallets to produce deep tonal sound and vibrations, which induce a meditative state, explains Stacey Parks, director of spa operations.

Although local practitioners’ rates vary, a standard massage may cost $75 an hour while more intensive bodywork ranges from $120 to $200 an hour.

Focus on fascia

Susan Solari, who learned Thai massage while living in Hawaii, performs this specialty as well as several other forms of massage at her home studio in Oakland. But to achieve more than that just-massaged afterglow and create permanent change, Solari believes it’s necessary to work with the fascia, the body’s connective tissue. Something akin, Solari says, to “a gelatinous wetsuit,” fascia (the word comes from the Latin word for band) is a layer of fibrous tissue that envelops and separates the muscles and organs. Simply sitting all day at a desk, Solari notes, can cause the hip flexors to shorten. To loosen stiff, tightened fascia, many bodywork practitioners apply intense pressure, often using their elbows.

The practice of Structural Integration, informally known as Rolfing—after founder Ida Rolf—is all about fascia. As a biochemist in the 1920s, Rolf was dissatisfied with what she perceived as the inadequate medical approaches of the time to deal with her family’s health problems. After studying osteopathy—a medical specialty centered around musculoskeletal health—as well as related disciplines, she developed a series of 10 standardized treatment sessions to reconfigure the fascia and realign the body. Solari says that in her own Stuctural Integration practice, she’s treated clients with everything from scoliosis to a misaligned pelvis post-childbirth, as well as Ironman athletes hoping to improve performance.

Structural Integration has a reputation for being painful: the practitioner uses elbows, forearms, and knuckles to open up stiffened fascia. But the ouch factor is not a given. “It’s more a matter of persuading the body, rather than forcing it,” says Don Hazen, a chiropractor and “Rolfer” for over 30 years who relies on his fingertips to address peripheral nerve pain. In his Solano Avenue office in Berkeley, Hazen prods—gently—clients who come in complaining of chronic neural pain, from dancers to horseback riders to average Joes.

Many different types of touch therapists, in fact, use elbow grease to reform the body’s bad habits. Angi Spector, a petite brunette who looks nowhere near her age of 62, discovered her calling as a bodyworker when she experienced her own physical crisis. Employed as a professional wedding photographer in the 1980s, Spector was exhausted from lugging around heavy cameras and lights. “It would take me a week to recover from a photo shoot,” she says. Then she found Yamuna Body Logic, developed in 1980 by Yamuna Zake, a New York yoga teacher. “It gave me a whole new body,” Spector reports. Body Logic is a series of movements done with the practitioner’s elbow that follow muscles from beginning to end, for example, tracing the hamstring from the pelvis to the end of the hamstring. The practice is designed to lengthen and realign the muscles, create space in the joints, and relieve tightness and pain.

Spector, who launched Mind-Body Connection studio in Emeryville in 1995, has worked with clients ranging from an 89-year-old tango dancer who couldn’t walk without pain to a professional football player.

Another client, Berkeley educator Felicity Bensch, suffered a fall last year and wound up with serious sciatic nerve pain. Bensch, 54, says that after several Body Logic sessions, “I felt straighter and taller when I left and was able to go on a three-day kayaking trip without pain.”

Body, heal thyself

Muscles and fascia are not the only parts of our bodies that may need realignment. Cranial therapy gently manipulates the bones of the skull. An imbalance in the cerebrospinal fluid, which flows between the occipital bone at the base of the skull and the sacrum at the base of the spine, can produce symptoms such as headaches or digestive problems, according to practitioners. Gently moving the cranial bones as well as manipulating the diaphragm and lumbo-sacral region can bring the body back into balance, they say. “The body is an amazing playground and we are designed for self-healing,” says Mia Curcuruto, an effervescent Emeryville chiropractor who specializes in cranial therapy.

When she works, Curcuruto’s hands do the talking, cradling the skull, gently working the bones with subtle rocking motions that often lull her patients to sleep. By using the body’s innate intelligence, Curcuruto says, cranial therapy can ease symptoms of a wide range of ailments including tinnitus, migraines, depression, jaw disorders, and stroke.

Like cranial therapy, the Bowen Technique is based on the premise that the body knows how to heal itself. Developed in the 1950s by Australian Tom Bowen, an intuitive, self-taught healer, the practice was introduced to the United States in 1989. Michael Harrison, a Berkeley bodyworker specializing in deep tissue work for more than 40 years, discovered Bowen Technique in 1995, when a fall in Yosemite left him with a painful slipped disc. Today, Harrison uses Bowen’s basic moves and methods, short movement sequences of finger rolls over certain muscles and tendons, which feels like your muscles are guitar strings being twanged. These moves are interspersed with rest periods of several minutes to “let it cook” as Harrison puts it. The sensation is like being a gong which continues to vibrate after being struck.

“I am not a fix-it man,” says Harrison, who resembles Obi-Wan Kenobi with a slight Boston accent. “I am setting up your nervous system to come back into balance and heal itself.” Bowen clients are not required to remove their clothing. “I can do it even if you are wearing an overcoat,” says Harrison, who has worked with clients ranging from opera singers to athletes.

Learned hands

What kind of doctor completes four years of medical school, plus residency, is fully qualified to perform surgery and prescribe medication, but has an extra 500 hours training in the musculoskeletal system, and can diagnose illness and injury and treat most medical problems with just their hands? Give yourself an “A” if you know the answer—a Doctor of Osteopathy, usually referred to as a D.O. or osteopath. According to Patti Rochette, a vibrant Berkeley osteopath who is also the mother of 10-year-old twins, a D.O. learns how to palpate (or feel) the patient’s body to determine what might be throwing off the whole system. Using a skilled sense of touch, they search for disturbances in the organs and tissues, from the soles of the feet to the subtle rhythmic expansion and contraction of the cranial bones. Osteopaths then apply gentle pressure—“nothing high-velocity,” Rochette clarifies—to release compression in the joints and allow the body’s internal fluids to flow more freely. “A D.O. has to be a good listener,” says Rochette. “I am open to what the body tells me.”

Another gentle, non-invasive body therapy, ortho-bionomy, works with and even exaggerates the way the body holds tension rather than forcing the muscles into unaccustomed movements. For example, if a client’s shoulder muscle is contracted, practitioner Kathy Kain of Albany will begin by using her hands to encourage the muscle to contract further. In response, she says, the body tends to bring itself back to equilibrium. Kain repeatedly checks in with her client as her strong hands initiate an ebb and flow of stretches to which the body can respond by releasing tension. “One of my clients suffers from a spinal disorder that keeps him in constant pain,” says Kain. “He told me his pain is so distracting that he often needs to disassociate from his body in order to function, but our sessions allow him a respite to tune back in and befriend his body again.”

Kain’s work with patients who have experienced violent trauma, however, has led her to believe that the body’s instinct to heal can be blocked by unexpressed emotions. And in fact, many body therapies have the goal of attending to buried emotions which may be at the source of physical discomfort. One of these is the Rosen Method.

Emotional healing

At age 97, Marion Rosen still practices and trains people in the method she developed in Berkeley after emigrating from Germany in 1940. Concluding, during her career as a physical therapist, that muscle tension is often associated with repressed memory, Rosen has characterized her practice as using “hands that listen, rather than manipulate.”

Donna Meehan, an Albany-based Rosen practitioner, has long blond hair, a quiet voice, and a nurturing presence. Clients consult her for relief from a broad range of physical and emotional complaints: a persistent headache, an old trauma, or just a feeling of being stuck in life. Regardless of the symptom, she starts each session in her Berkeley office by having the client disrobe and lie, covered by a light blanket, on her massage table. As she works, she calmly invites them to “let out what had to be put away.” Her aim is to create a safe space for clients to “reveal what is; not necessarily to change it, just to accept it.” Making firm but gentle contact with her clients’ bodies, Meehan’s hands do not massage or adjust; they simply search for and identify areas of muscle tension.

As she works, she often asks clients to articulate what these constricted areas might be holding onto. “When the body tells the truth, it opens and relaxes; it wants to be heard; holding all that tension uses up our energy,” says Meehan, who explains that as clients remember a long-ago trauma or a moment of sadness they could not express before, the breath deepens and the muscles let go of tension.

“Rosen changed my life,” says longtime Rosen Method practitioner Karen Anderson McCaulley, who is also an emergency room nurse. McCaulley, who practices her healing art in an office at the Berkeley Acupuncture Project, has been on both sides of the treatment table—she started receiving Rosen sessions more than two decades ago, in her late 20s. “I went because I was looking for myself,” she says. “Some part of me was missing, but I had no idea what it was.” Over time, her Rosen practitioner’s supportive acceptance of “what is true right now” helped her find the missing piece. “It was like magic,” she says.

Addressing stress

Chiropractors try to achieve balance in the body on three levels: physical, chemical, and emotional. They may employ moist heat, ice packs, massage, and spinal adjustments, as well as advise clients on nutrition and exercise. Chiropractor Peter Schneider, who shares his Emeryville office with sister Mia Curcuruto, adds another ingredient to the mix: the work of Wilhelm Reich. Reich, a pupil of Sigmund Freud, is widely considered the father of therapeutic breathwork because of his belief that breathing and therapeutic, physical exercises can release locked-up feelings. “For example, someone with a continual frown or hunched shoulders has emotions trapped in their muscles,” says Schneider, a thoughtful, articulate man in his mid 40s. “The body does not let go of these emotions easily, but when they are released, there is often an experience of catharsis which leads to relaxation and awareness.”

In his practice, Schneider sees many clients suffering from stress-related symptoms such as chronic tension headaches, sleep disturbances, and sexual problems. To activate the brain’s relaxation centers, he may ask a client to perform a slightly unusual action, such as breathing only through the mouth in conjunction with making certain sounds. “The changes are a softening of chronically stiff muscles,” he says, “allowing a reconnection with one’s deeper feelings.”

Luring the life force

Small dramas unfold every day on the bodyworker’s table—that’s part of the occupation’s draw for the professional, and the benefit for the client. For a truly breathtaking story, though, you can’t beat the origins of Reiki therapy. Standing under a rushing waterfall at a Japanese retreat center in 1922, Dr. Mikao Usui had an epiphany: that he could heal other people without exhausting his own energy.

Like Schneider’s Reichian practice, Reiki bodywork focuses on the body, mind, and emotions. Reiki practitioners, however, use a laying-on of hands in a series of positions all over the body to induce deep relaxation and pain reduction.

When Atsumi Sueishi of Berkeley, a Reiki Master at the highest level, performs a healing, her hands transfer glowing radiant warmth to the areas she touches. This is done through clothing, with the client lying on a massage table. “I am a pipe,” Sueishi says, describing how she channels the life-force energy, which “collects wherever it is needed.” In the future, she plans to share her skill with those who “desperately need a rest from pain, such as people in hospice care and cancer patients.”

Sueishi came to California from Japan in 1995. “Berkeley is where I am meant to be,” she says. Well, of course. Here in the East Bay, we like to think that we’re more open-minded than those in many other parts of the world—more laid-back, too. But the messages our bodies give us often suggest otherwise. This year, why not make a resolution to get some hands-on help?

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Anna Mindess is a freelance writer specializing in food and culture and a frequent contributor to The Monthly. She is also a sign language interpreter. See her work at annamindess.com.


Auto-Bodywork

While all body therapies aim to reduce pain and increase comfort, some focus on teaching people new ways to move their bodies instead of healing them through direct touch.

Alexander Technique, originally designed for actors working on vocalization, helps students identify and change ingrained patterns, and learn to move without tension. Focus is on everyday actions such as sitting, standing, and walking. “This technique redistributes the work of the body throughout the entire body,” says Berkeley Alexander teacher Joanne Somerville, “so that the head, neck, jaw, and shoulders are not doing what they were not meant to do.”

Feldenkrais revolves around the relationship of movement and thought. Group classes teach students to break down movements into their smallest components and learn new ways of moving. In one-on-one sessions, the teacher’s gentle touch guides the student’s own exploration. “This is discovery learning,” says Frank Wildman, a certified Feldenkrais trainer, director of Berkeley’s Feldenkrais Movement Institute, and a practitioner for over 30 years, “to bring awareness back into the body.”

Pilates, first created to treat injured athletes, especially dancers, is a series of specific exercises on specialized equipment designed to tone muscles and correct posture in order to develop balance, strength, coordination, and flexibility. “Mind and body, breath and movement work together to teach your body something new,” says Oakland Pilates teacher Sophia Thorsen.

 

 

Handy Healers

Following is a partial list of the extensive bodywork resources in the East Bay.

ALEXANDER TECHNIQUE
Joanne Somerville, 3019 Adeline St., Berkeley, (510) 548-6229.

Body Logic
Angi Spector, Mind-Body Connection, 5855 Doyle St., Suite 108, Emeryville, (510) 420-0444; mindbodyconnection.net.

BREEMA BODYWORK
Breema Center, 6076 College Ave., Oakland, (510) 428-0937; breema.com.

BOWEN
Michael Harrison, 1422 Cornell Ave., Berkeley (510) 525-1250; bowenpainrelease.com.

CRANIAL THERAPY
Mia Curcuruto, 1240 Powell St., Emeryville, (510) 579-7074.

FELDENKRAIS
Frank Wildman, 721 The Alameda, Berkeley, (510) 527-2634; feldenkraisinstitute.org.

MASSAGE
Claremont Hotel Club & Spa, 41 Tunnel Road, Berkeley, (510) 843-3000; claremontresort.com.
Melisa Knapp, Body by Melisa, (510) 655-2639; bodybymelisa.com.
Paul Slidders, Paradigm Acupuncture, 3800 Piedmont Ave., Oakland, (510) 333-0773; paradigm-acupuncture.com.
Susan Solari, Center for Integrative Therapy & Structural Integration, Oakland, (510) 534-7643 or (510) 225-5305; east-bay-massage-therapy.com.
John Vito, Body Mind and Spirit, 6206 Claremont Ave., Oakland, (510) 547-6716; bodymindandspirit.us.

OSTEOPATHY
Patricia Rochette, 3099 Telegraph Ave., Berkeley, (510) 549-3636.

ORTHO-BIONOMY
Kathy Kain, (510) 845-3742.

PILATES
Minoo Hamzavi, (510) 848-4133.
Angi Spector, MindBody Connection, 5855 Doyle St., Suite 108, Emeryville, (510) 420-0444; mindbodyconnection.net.
Sophia Thorsen, 5427 Telegraph Ave., Ste. B, Oakland, (510) 547-8722; sophiathorsenpilates.com.

ROSEN
Donna Meehan, 901 Peralta Ave., Albany, (510) 524-3778; donnameehan.com.
Karen Anderson McCaulley, (510) 367-1606.
Rosen Method, The Berkeley Center, 825 Bancroft Way, Berkeley, (510) 845-6606; rosenmethod.com.

REICHIAN THERAPY
Peter Schneider, 1240 Powell St., Emeryville, (510) 220-8509.

REIKI
Atsumi Sueishi, (510) 387-1259; centralreiki.com.

STRUCTURAL INTEGRATION (ROLFING)
Don Hazen, 1760 Solano Ave., Ste. 306, Berkeley, (510) 528-1514.
Susan Solari, Center for Integrative Therapy & Structural Integration, Oakland, (510) 534-7643 or (510) 225-5305; east-bay-massage-therapy.com.

Faces of the East Bay