 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 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
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 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. A review of the 2024 Amy Winehouse film “Back to Black” from a Biodynamic psychotherapeutic perspective  Amy Winehouse, "Back to Black" “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 sense the first signs of Spring emerging in our Wintery environment and I hope you can too!
Our annual Spring Meeting will be held on Saturday 18th May 2024 at the Clayton Hotel, 27-29 Station Road, Cambridge CB1 2FB. The committee meeting, open to all ABMT members, will run, as usual, from 11.00 am to 1pm, and the Afternoon Session from 2 to 4pm. The whole of the day's events will be available on-line so if you would like to participate in this way, please let me know. The Afternoon Session will be open to non-members. Members are free, £20 for non-members. Our Speaker for the Afternoon Session this year will be Professor Helen Payne. Here is some preliminary information that Helen as sent us about the workshop: This workshop will provide a brief background to The BodyMind Approach for supporting people experiencing medically unexplained symptoms (with labels such as IBS, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia etc.) for which all tests and scans come back normal. There will be open discussion and opportunities to engage in some experiential learning practices.  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.  “With the onset of cognitive impairment, the experience of touch will increasingly determine someone's sense of relationships, their expectations of caregiving interactions and the intentions of their carers.” (p45) Luke Tanner’s book comes from his recognition of “the power of touch but also the negative impact of a clinical, task-oriented culture of care” (p17) and inside this culture, he seeks to explore the question of touch in dementia care. Through case studies and discussion, the book explores different types of touch and how these types of touch can affect the person being cared for. Tanner discusses issues such as consent with cognitive impairment, misuse of and abusive touch, intimacy, relationships, sexuality, sensory issues, attachment disorders, types of touch, and types and effects of different care giving environments. In his experience working in dementia care homes, Tanner has found a lack of discussion and lack of precision in policy regarding touch, but has found a general culture of prohibition of intimate touch - such as hugging - though no explicit prohibition has been made. In this vague cultural norm, Tanner finds some types of touch are more readily acceptable than others. Massage, for instance, is “acceptable” whilst hugging or hand holding is not - even when the latter might feel more appropriate, helpful and supportive to the recipient of the touch.  Gut, The Inside Story of the Body's Most Underrated Organ -- a Book Review by Ruth Baigent
In 2002, gene sequencing technology enabled science to identify microbes according to their genetic blueprint. This lifted the restriction on identifying microbes by culturing them on a Petri dish. Bacteria can now be identified dead from their DNA – for instance in the human stool. Most gut bacteria do not bloom away from their native anaerobic environment and cannot be examined and identified by the old methods, so we are still ignorant of more than 60% of gut bacteria. (p236) Identification by genetic blueprint has enabled medical science to move into bacteria-related digestive health research in a big way. An explosion of new research (much of it seemingly using mice) has led the world of medicine to some dramatic re-thinkings on the role of bacteria in our lives: “we are gradually decoding processes which we used to believe were part of our inescapable destiny”, says Enders.(p204) Over the last couple of years, there has been a proliferation of books like Gut which tend to be research led and written by fascinated and enthusiastic biologists and medical research doctors thriving on the possibilities for understanding that new research is enabling. Ten years ago, scientists tended to think that all humans had the same bacteria in their systems. New tests show us that this is far from true: our digestive systems are populated by billions of bacteria, 1000+ species, “plus minority populations of viruses and yeasts, as well as fungi and various other single celled organisms”(p140) which are uniquely our own.[i]  This book, aimed at the professional body therapist, offers a fairly balanced split between physical exercises, anatomy, and theory. There are definite parallels between the theory that Noah Karrasch expounds and Biodynamic theory, which makes the read of particular interest to us as Biodynamic therapists. While he includes massages and other types of physical manipulations to be used on (or with) clients, the main emphasis is on the personal development of the therapist - whatever our specialism.[i] With this in mind, there are regular sets of exercises at the end of each chapter as well as further exercises scattered throughout the text. The text is itself is full of challenges and questions which require us to pause for consideration. Explicitly and implicitly throughout this book, Karrasch makes it clear that he wants us to stretch our minds and bodies alike. He aims for us to shine light upon, and relax, our preconceptions and our habitual behaviours, as well as relax the habitual holdings of our physical body.
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