Jan Trewartha, founder and director of The Fascia Hub, the British Fascia Symposium, and Body in Harmony Training (focusing on light touch work, especially working with scars and adhesions) came to deliver a workshop for the ABMT 9th November 2024. Her knowledge is extensive and a powerful complement to the working knowledge of Biodynamic Massage. We have a lot to learn from her work and experience.


Jan has been in healthcare since 1979, originally training as a State Registered Nurse in the Queen Alexandra Royal Army Nursing Corps (QARANC), working at grass roots level with patients on the wards and spending time in the operating theatre; a superb if non-deliberate foundation for her future career.  
 
In 1988 Jan took time out to go travelling for three years, where her life was to dramatically change direction. Trained by a blind massage therapist to really ‘feel’ the body led to a lifetime passion for body work.  Her work now is the culmination of many years of training and experience in different disciplines. She has been in practice since 1992 where her clients have been willing guinea pigs in her ongoing development of light touch therapy work.  
 
Jan has been teaching since 1993, and in 2014 became the first accredited UK teacher in Sharon Wheeler’s ScarWork. Having had surgery in Great Ormond St. Hospital as a young child, resulting in major scarring, Jan experienced great relief and lightness after being treated by Sharon Wheeler; this has given her an awareness of the effect of adhesions and empathy with her clients. 
 
Apart from a missionary zeal for spreading the word about the effects of scarring on the body, Jan’s passions are for travelling and for anything that gets her outdoors and moving.

​Jan's book is available here: uk.singingdragon.com/collections/author-jan-trewartha-pid-300246
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Find out more about training with Jan for "Sharon Wheeler's ScarWork", "Fascial Unwinding and Energy Awareness", and "Specialist training working with abdominal and pelvic scars" here: www.bodyinharmony.org.uk

And Jan's Fascia Hub can be found here: https://thefasciahub.com/

​By Ruthie Baigent, 22nd November 2024

Patrick Casement, psychoanalyst and author of several books and numerous papers on clinical technique, most famously: On Learning from the Patient.

In The Emperor's New Clothes, Patrick Casement discusses power dynamics in psychoanalytic training that can patronise, pathologise and, ultimately, even dismiss students. Psychoanalytical theory is capable not only of drawing into the light, but also of eclipsing the reality of the person in its projection. What Casement describes in terms of group dynamics and narcissistic projection are issues that are common to all institutional trainings -- including schools (for children) -- and, potentially, in all relationships, so we can all learn something from his article, whether we are working with clients, students, children, or simply being with each other in daily life. 

​​Casement says, “…projection comes into play in the services of narcissism…”. If we are unguarded and unaware we risk walking in illusion and not seeing or giving space to the reality outside of ourselves and our “group”, be that a psychoanalytic society, training committee, or, I would add, staff-room friendship group, or beyond. It is the power dynamics of exclusion, of fascism (as I have written about elsewhere), to which we are all prey since it is an easy place for us to go to in our (unwitting, secondary personality) narcissism and insecurity. Casement shows how this is possible, and even normal, when we are inattentive.

The ABMT's Annual General Meeting will be held at the Centre for Counselling and Psychotherapy Education, Beauchamp Lodge, 2 Warwick Crescent, London W2 6NE.  The nearest tubes to the venue are Warwick Avenue (Bakerloo Line) or Paddington.

As usual, the Meeting will run from 11.00 am until 1.00 pm. The Afternoon Session will be from 2.00 pm until 4.00/4.30 pm.

Our Speaker this year will be Jan Trewartha, who came a few years ago to talk about and demonstrate her Scarwork techniques. 
 
Jan is the founder and director of The Fascia Hub and the British Fascia Symposium.  She also runs Body in Harmony Training, focusing on light touch work, especially working with scars and adhesions.

Jan will be presenting a session which revisits this work and its alignment and relationship with Biodynamic Massage. 

The Session will be in person and also on-line. Please let me know ([email protected])  if you would like to attend, and whether you will need a Zoom link. The event is free to members, and £20 to non-members.

There is some further information about Jan, below. I'm sure it will be a very interesting.

​“We only said goodbye with words, I died a hundred times…”  

​As a human being, I have been in the situation of feeling “He’s killed me…”. Amy Winehouse, played beautifully by Marisa Abela, speaks these words from her heart, feeling utterly abandoned by Blake, in the 2024 biographical film of her life, "Back to Black".

Perhaps I’ve been in the other place too, of abandoning someone and leaving them feeling like I have killed them. Strong words… and yet, these things happen... people react, close their hearts and leave, and the people they leave also react, and feel destroyed.

Amy speaks straight into these places of raw feeling and deep, unconscious reaction, with her heart fully engaged in her music. Through her music and life, we feel all the tragedy and waste, “me and my head high and my tears dry… get on without my guy… you went back to what you knew... I’ll go back to black…”, especially as her life spirals into addiction and early death. We watch as Amy tumbles headlong into the turmoil of her dreams for love, marriage, family and relationship with “her Blakey”, ultimately un-achievable and insurmountable.

Bless Amy’s love for Blake, it’s a sacred love, and the pain she feels is universal. ​

And all the time, there is something earlier that is underlying, seemingly buried by both the film and by Amy herself: the nagging reality, less romantic, of difficult relationships with close caregivers. Amy’s loss of her Nan, the intimate relationship with her Nan, cuts into her reality and Amy doesn’t seem to survive this. She disintegrates into her coping strategies, previously successful: sublimation into her music and displacement into her love for her Blakey. Amy’s Nan gently telling her, “oh, I’m sorry. You liked him, didn’t you?” And Amy, simply being heard, “Yes Nan, I quite liked him a very lot.”

I've literally just come away from our ABMT autumn meeting with Sue Frazer which explored trauma and how to work with trauma.

The session started with a sharing of what we thought trauma was and I thought it was helpful for Sue to use the definitions in Babette Rothchild’s book, The Body Remembers, to distinguish between different types of trauma:

• Stress:  non specific responses in the body to any demand both positive and negative.
• Post Traumatic Stress: likely to be from an incident where the PTS persists and where the body is held in fight/ flight.
• Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: where stress responses accumulate to such a degree that the person is showing symptoms within the DSM V classification and there is a clear dysfunction.

It was helpful to be reminded of the differences between body psychotherapists and biodynamic massage therapists and what we are equipped to work with. In essence, body psychotherapists can work with all three and biodynamic massage therapists can work with the first two.

The ABMT will be holding a workshop on Saturday 15th April at the Gestalt Centre, 15-23 St Pancras Way, London NW1 0PT.  The session runs from 2pm – 4pm and will be facilitated by Gemma Ireland, who will encourage us to explore how we can deepen our understanding of working in the aura in biodynamic massage. Gemma is a biodynamic psychotherapist and trainer with many years’ experience, having trained initially with Gerda Boyesen. This workshop will be rich and informative in terms of learning; we aim to explore working with the aura being both in contact and outside the body; how it is possible to be in both places together working with the energy field.

For logistical reasons, we probably won’t be working on massage tables, so attendees are being asked to bring yoga mats, blankets etc; Gemma also says this work can also be explored sitting in chairs.
 
This event is free to members of ABMT, and we are asking for a contribution of £20 for non-members. Please could you RSVP to Lindsey Nicholas: [email protected], if you would like to attend.

Led by Richard Parker for the ABMT 22nd October 2022


Richard hosted and led us in a two hour workshop which was attended in person in Cambridge, and online. This workshop took place in the afternoon of our ABMT Autumn meeting, 22nd October 2022. It was free to attend and open to non-members.


Most striking for us as biodynamic bodywork and massage therapists, were the commonalities between contact improvisation and the methods we use for connecting in therapeutic work. Richard guided us in techniques which used “reaching” to make contact, and we were guided to a place of being present with ourselves and the other, while we were working with a partner. We were told to be observant of the breath, and the whole being, of ourselves and our partner. Richard told us to “see what was there” and that we were “seeing” though the touch. This is very much how we feel as biodynamic massage therapists, seeing or listening with our hands, as well as the rest of our senses.