What techniques are used during a Massage?
Although there is no set structure for sessions the techniques used are breathwork, Massage & Somatic Practices. Some days we will use one technique more heavily than the others, you lead the way.
For example, let’s say you just had an incredibly busy and stressful week at work. We would focus on breathing techniques that downregulate and calm the nervous system, focusing on slow exhales that give signals to the body that it’s okay to relax now. Then it’s likely we would explore where in your body you’re feeling the most tension, and where in your body you have the most limited sensations and we would use massage to release tension and activate the parts of the body that have gone stagnant / ‘switched off’ during your busy week.
In this case it’s often, but not always, that your neck & shoulder will be tense but your legs will feel ‘fine.’ My professional experience tells me that ‘fine’ usually means ‘numb’. We check our legs and we don’t feel anything, so we say “yeah they’re fine.” This is such a common pattern because Interoception is your body's ability to sense its own internal state like your heart rate and muscle tension. This information comes from the vagus nerve, and the vagus nerve carries this information to the brain, and the insula is processing it.
Somatic practices help to improve our interoception, which is why it’s the first thing we do in each session.
If we go back to when we were cave men, we would have had a short lived and big stressor for example seeing a tiger, then once we were safe shortly after, the vagus nerve scans our surroundings and lets our brain know we’re safe and our bodies go into rest and digest. This is why sometimes you see animals shaking after they escape a predator, the animal is releasing the stress their body held during survival mode.
In our modern culture, the stress we experience is completely different to that of our cave men ancestors, but our bodies are responding in exactly the same way.
We’re perceiving threats from our unread emails, the amount of laundry we need to do, the project at work we can’t get our heads around.
What I’ve seen is that a lot of us are chronically stressed. In an attempt to regulate ourselves, the nervous system dips down into freeze mode. This nervous system state is reptilian in its evolution. It’s the ‘if I stop running and pretend I’m already dead the predator might not eat me’ state. Here we see the heart rate slow, the digestive system shut down and the pain receptors in the body reduce, so that if we are in fact eaten, we will feel it less.
A common adaptation to chronic or traumatic stress in modern day is dissociating from the sensation the vagus nerve is sending to the brain, the activity in the insula drops, and the result is a felt sense of numbness. Which is often what we’re describing when we say our legs are “fine.” It’s not that nothing is happening here, and more that the brain has stopped registering it.
For example, if you’ve ever thought a certain part of your body felt fine but then a massage therapist starts working that area and it’s very painful, this is why. The brain is not registering the tension held there, we’ve disconnected from this part of ourselves.
Normative stress helps us to build resilience and is a natural part of life, but ‘Chronic stress that is constant and persistent - wears us down and harms every system in our body’ - Dr Nicole LePera, How to do the work.
Repeat and unprocessed stress prevent the vagus nerve from accurately assessing threat and the nervous system baseline goes from calm and steady to vigilant and tense. This is why somatic practices are so important.
Somatic Practices
Somatic means relating to how the body feels, rather than solely its physical structure. For example when you feel stressed, where do you feel it? Is the sensation deep or surface-level? Tight or heavy?
By tuning into these sensations, we quiet the mind and begin to understand what’s happening in our bodies. These practices build our ability to introspect (investigate and feel what’s happening within us) and strengthen our vagal tone, which is the ability to pull your body back into calm after stress.
Somatic exercises include: breathing techniques, movement, stretches, mindfulness practices & meditation.
Through our interoceptive capacity we stop being driven by stress. We can feel what is happening in the body, and make conscious choices about how we meet those feelings. We can decide how we hold it, what stories we do or don’t attach to it. Whether we feed it, repress it or let it be as it is.
Biodynamic Rebalancing Massage
Biodynamic Rebalancing Massage is trauma-informed holistic bodywork combining deep connective-tissue massage & joint mobilization to create space in the body and release pain and tension that’s built up over time.
Together, these threads of somatic awareness, breath, and bodywork support what sits at the heart of all of this work: nervous system regulation. Whether you're recovering from burnout, carrying chronic tension, or working through the physical imprint of stress and trauma, a session meets you exactly where you are that day.