Last February, I went for an advanced Raynor massage course in Australia. I have been practicing Raynor massage for the last 6 years with some really good results with some of my clients. It's only within the last few months that I realized how important was the breathwork for this technique.
For 6 days, I was able to receive some high-quality massages, which is really hard to get with 'conventional massages'. Don't get me wrong, conventional massages are good, but they don't fix deep rooted issues. They are only focused on the physical and mechanical side of the body.
You can check here one of my sessions with my teacher Brandon Raynor. Disclaimer: Be ready as I am true to myself. I am ready to release all the pain and memories from my past. I have -had a lot of sadness, guilt, fear within. Every session, I am freer and lighter. Daily meditation is also extremely important for me. This is for me what is a profound, life changing Raynor massage:
Since I started my journey of self-healing in 2017, I now know that to heal we need to go beyond the physical problem. The body and the mind should be treated as One and also understood as frequencies or energy waves.
Emotions cannot be touched, yet they are part of our daily life which can create positive or negative impact in our life.
The mind keeps the 'memories' as a giant library, while the body keeps each memory throughout sensations and emotions. Over the years, emotions are piled up and stored in different parts of the body.
When bodywork techniques such as Raynor massage are used, if the mind is bypassed (with deep breath), the body can finally start releasing emotional tensions felt as physical tensions.
I do believe that any physical tension is emotional. The reason is simple. We are multidimensional beings. When we think, we create emotions. Then we move, stretch, do physical exercise or movement. So, what we were thinking creates an emotion while at the same time, we are doing a movement.
Where do you think the 'emotion' will get stored? In the muscle that was fired on! The problem is that we don't realize it consciously. It is done automatically in our unconscious behavior. I give you an example.
This morning Hector woke up grumpy. He had an agitated night because last evening, he had a big argument with his wife. He got angry, frustrated, he tried to express what he had in mind, but it was coming out wrongly. On the morning, he goes for a run, still feeling grumpy and tired. While he is running, he thinks about the day to come (he is anticipating a bad day as he knows that he always gets a terrible day after a fight with his wife) and of course he thinks of all the scenarios that could have happened last night...
While he is running, he doesn't realize but his breathing is a bit shallow, his fists are tight, and his throat is tightening up at the thoughts of all the things he wanted to say. But Hector is too much in his mind, he has no clue of what is happening in his body. His thoughts are overpowering everything. Suddenly, Hector's foot gets caught in a rock and he twists his right ankle. He goes to the doctor and it's a sprain. He has a few weeks without exercising and is off work for a few days. Two months later, Hector's foot should be better, but he still feels a sharp pain.
He goes to see physio and therapists that help him to reeducate his foot with some exercises. It gets better, but he still has the pain now and then, randomly. He doesn't realize, but it happens when he gets angry and frustrated in general.
One day, he comes to see me, and he agrees to do a Raynor massage. He tells me that he had a sport injury. When I ask him if something stressful happened around the same time, he tells me no, he can't think of anything (remember, it's all processed unconsciously because we have been trained to not tune with our own feelings). During the treatment, we work in detail on his big toe, and he does a lot of deep breathing. Suddenly, Hector starts to make some angry and frustrated sounds. He sees colors and even images and sensation during the treatment. A few days later, Hector comes back and tells me that the pain is completely gone, and he feels calmer in general.
During the treatment, he finally processed the 'emotional overload' he was holding for so long. He allowed his body to express through the breath and sound, some of the frustration that were stored in the body. His ankle was holding partly the frustration which was also held with the shallow breathing and the frustration in his throat for not being able to express his feelings.
This example is unfortunately a common example that we all experience because our society doesn't understand the role of our feelings. Our parents taught us to be strong, men don't cry, we need to toughen up or we will never be able to achieve anything in life if we express our feelings (and Anglo-Saxons are really good at hiding their true feelings - and Australia and NZ have one of the highest levels of domestic violence in the world...).
This is a major problem; it is an epidemic health issue, and we only started to talk about it seriously within the last decade. Unfortunately, it is still taboo to talk about our feelings.
What we don't express or let go, we keep it inside for years and years until we can't hold. It creates unbalances within our nervous system, which affects our hormones, our organs, or nerves... And years later, it can be translated in uncontrollable anger (domestic violence), depression, suicide, PTSD, personal identity disorders, diseases (autoimmune, cancer...) and so on.
If we want to find a balance in our life, if we want to gain back a healthy body, if we want to see the change outside of us, we need to start doing the self-healing work. We ALL have emotional baggage. Even the person that had 'a normal childhood' holds unresolved emotions.
To know if you have some overloaded emotions, you need to look at your health, digestive system, your reaction with people, your level of happiness, your level of motivation in life. Are you tired? Are you frustrated? Do you enjoy what you are doing in life? Do you have health issues?
Be true to yourself, stop lying and creating some stories. It is time to take care of yourself. If we want a better world, we need to work on ourselves first.
If you are ready to make a positive change in your life, and you feel that you have trapped emotions, you can contact me to have a Raynor bodywork. I also do hypnotherapy to help people to get their life back from low self-esteem, fear, anger, depression...
May we all be free.