The Challenges of Listening

This weekend I was in the woods in Arnold, CA and I found myself outside at night listening to that deafening silence that I can never seem to find here in San Francisco. As I sat there the silence became less deafening and I began to hear all the little noises that had been happening all along. The faint rustle of the trees as the occasional breeze blew by. The breath of the dog sleeping next to me. Even my own breath and heartbeat as I watched the stars in the cold night air.

I began to think about the blog post I recently wrote on the Art of Listening to the Tissue and how this is a similar process that I go through when listening to the tissue of my clients. During a session, I need to focus my attention on the subtle communications of my client's body in the way that I had tuned my ears to the quiet noises of the nighttime forest.

When I focus on my client and attend to them in this way, my work changes completely. It becomes more of a conversation. There is a flow to it and if there was a leader, I would say it was the client’s body. As the body makes suggestions and gives me information, I listen and respond. The body gives me feedback from my input, and I continue to respond to that.

As I mentioned in my previous post on the topic, this ability to focus on the client in front of me and deeply listen to their body is what I believe truly keeps my clients coming back. And the way that I learned how to do this deep listening regarding bodywork all comes down to the Concepts of Palpation from the Morales Method®. These techniques gave me the tools to learn how to communicate with the tissue in the ways that I do every time I work on someone’s tissue. They are the foundation of my work, and I can’t suggest enough taking the Free Concepts of Palpation in the Morales Method® Online Course to see what these techniques have to offer your work.