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.

​This CPD Session with dance practitioner, Richard Parker, will be held on Saturday, 22nd October 2022 from 2pm to 4 pm at the Gestalt Centre, London NW1 0PT.

"An opportunity to explore the relational qualities of touch within a creative and dance-based practice called Contact Improvisation.

Contact Improvisation is an embodied, meditative and profoundly connecting dance practice. It works with the principle of how we listen and communicate our intentions of co-creative movement through touch by awakening our whole body into tactile listening and presence.

Within this workshop, we'll create a safe and playful container, using easy-to-follow exercises and movements to creatively explore some of the fundamental principles of how two or more bodies can move together as one within a spontaneously unfolding improvised contact dance.

Richard Parker is passionate about the relational and profoundly human experience that can be revealed through Contact Improvisation (CI).   He has been developing his skills and knowledge as a Contact Improvisation (CI) dancer since 2006.  Over the years he has extensively trained with many internationally renowned teachers within CI including Karen Nelson, Lisa Nelson, KJ Holmes, Nita Little, Andrew Harwood, Ray Chung & Martin Keogh.  Since 2011 he has shared his teaching of CI within Professional, Educational, Festival & Community Organisations as well as organised his own festivals, Retreats and Camps."

This event is open to members and non-members of ABMT. Please contact [email protected] if you would like to attend.

The ABMT is holding its annual Spring meeting on Saturday 14th May 2022 at Wesley Methodist Church, Cambridge CB1 1LG. We very much hope you can join us, either in person, or on-line.

Our morning Meeting will begin at 11.00 am. You are welcome to join this session where we discuss ABMT business and any other ideas that arise.

In the Afternoon (2pm – 4.30 pm) we are planning to run a practical ad hoc workshop revisiting biodynamic practice. Sue Frazer has kindly agreed to lead this and we will have massage tables up for demonstrations and practice. How this session will run may depend on what issues, ideas and impulses arise in those of you attending! Sue is happy to work spontaneously with you in this and I think this will enable an exciting and creative spirit to inform the workshop.

The Session is open to non-members (but only registered biodynamic massage therapists) as well as Members, but tickets are limited so please RSVP me before the event if you are intending to be there in person, either for the morning or the afternoon.

You are also welcome to attend on-line if you cannot be there in person. If you are planning to only attend on-line, please register at the link below;
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/abmt-spring-meeting-tickets-330421508627
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If you have any other queries about the event, please do get in touch: [email protected].

Otherwise we very much look forward to seeing as many of you there as can make it.

Written by: Lindsey Nicholas, Chair, ABMT

A mental health resource pack which you can download below, entitled The Lone Therapist, has been created by Sue Frazer and Lindsey Nicholas from ABMT and Gina Lilley from Amatsu Therapy. This is part of an initiative by newly-formed Mental Health Working Group within GCMT (the Council for Soft Tissue Therapies). The Lone Therapist is designed to support massage therapists in terms of the mental health implications of their work. In biodynamic therapy, we already understand the intrinsic connection between emotional and physical health and this understanding informs much of the interactive material in the resource pack. In particular,  we hope it will support and encourage other massage modalities to recognise the emotional implications of the client/therapist relationship.
 
It is an interactive, visually orientated document and is still a work in progress, and we are interested in how it works for you in terms of its flow of ideas and the linked sections. It is available for anyone to download and feedback would be helpful, particularly in terms of how it might be of use to you.
 
This resource document offers:

• support for you in terms of your own mental well-being as you go about your practice as massage therapists.

 

• the opportunity for you to deepen your awareness of what might be going on between you and the client in relationship,  beyond the physicality of the therapy you are providing.

 

• help to use this knowledge to create good boundaries and confidence to encourage and refer clients to mental health therapy.

 

• more detailed insight into the intrinsic relationship between emotional and physical health.

 

• case studies and a section on massage on trauma

 

• advice and recommendations on self-care.

​Written by: Lindsey Nicholas

​A Therapist’s Protection Group within GCMT (the Council for Soft Tissue Therapies) recently commissioned a survey into sexual harassment within massage practice. It received about 600 replies from its membership (there are an estimated 10,000 practising massage therapists in the UK), and most of those prompted to complete the survey did so because they had experienced abuse and/or wanted something done about it.

It feels a bit despairing and certainly shocking to read some of their testimony; that sexual harassment is still rife and massage therapy still being conflated with sex work (not helped during the Covid crisis by the Government referring to our industry as ‘massage parlours’).

 
Sandra Heider is a practising body psychotherapist, trained at CBPC, and also a yoga teacher. We were lucky enough to have her at our Afternoon Session at this year’s AGM and to discover how biodynamic practice informs her yoga teaching.

Some of us there had done lots of yoga, some still did yoga, and some not very much at all. But we were all biodynamic massage therapists and were intrigued to find out whether there could be a meeting between yoga (which one attendee described as a more ‘top-down, structured approach’ to physical practice) and biodynamic massage. How would it make it different?

Sandra’s approach was one of allowing ‘gentle curiosity’ with ourselves, as our bodies followed her instructions. How does it feel to constrict the breath in ujjayi breathing? How does it feel to wrap our arms and hands around each other and bring our elbows together? What is happening internally when we take on the detailed positioning of each part of the body? Bringing a level of attention to the internal aspects of taking a pose not only meant we worked more interoceptively but also with an added sense of taking care of ourselves. Often Sandra would remind us to relax our  necks and heads – often forgotten when we are concentrating on aligning ourselves. Using our hands to hold our own heads as we came out of a pose also gave an added feeling of safety and care.  In a way that is more typical in body psychotherapy, we  also encouraged to make sounds and movement in the usually silent and still savasana (corpse) pose at the end of the session.

​B​randing and Authenticity can work together.
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This was the message of the afternoon session of our Spring Meeting 2016, given by marketing consultant, Kirby Amour.

As she opened her talk, with her honed use of marketing terminology, familiar to those in the industry but not, perhaps, to those of us at home in the more advertising-shy  world of psychotherapy, I, for one, wondered whether I could keep up. Was this all going to go over my head, overwhelm me or paralyse me into avoidance?

We were asked to address some questions: What can I offer that no-one else can? Why did I get involved? Who is my ideal client? What needs do they have? What is their energy like? What three traits does your ideal client possess? Slowly it dawned on us. In our marketing we need to look at much more than conveying information. As Kirby said, look at your offering, not just at your service. By this she meant, look at what you are actually selling. A shining example was given to us in the form of  Colgate, which, in terms of its advertising sells white teeth, not toothpaste.