If you attended the conference, here's a book of words and images collected on and from the day to bring back memories. If you were unable to attend, some words and images to give you a flavour of an amazing event at King's College Cambridge in July where neuroscience, psychotherapy and biodynamic massage therapies came together to dialogue on touch. 

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​Speaking and touching are two streams of communication which seamlessly interweave in daily relationships.  Touch is a "language" in its own right and it can sometimes communicate more than words can say. The foundations for this are laid down prior to birth and afterwards.

Communicating through touch is a way of relating in body psychotherapy.  Body psychotherapists are trained to touch, have a touch lexicon, are skilled in its timely therapeutic use, and know how to observe and discuss the impact of touching with clients.  Ways of touching are diverse and complex.  Varying speed, rhythm, pressure and depth, focussing on different tissues of the body, touching skin to skin, through clothes and blankets, touching with finger tips, the palms of the hands, elbow to elbow are some of the possibilities.  Through experience the skills and methods of touching become embedded in the psychotherapist and are pulled out of the practitioner, often intuitively, in a "dance" between client and therapist at appropriate moments.

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’).

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A few updates regarding Covid:
The latest Government guidance, updated in January 2022 with regard to close contact work can be found here: Government Guidance >

Please read the guidelines carefully to ensure you comply. As usual if you do not feel safe to return to face-to-face massage work, it is your perfect right not to do so.

Please note also this guidance from the GCMT (the Council for Soft Tissue Therapies):

• Given that the devolved assemblies are all taking different routes and timings in their respective announcements. It is incumbent of the GCMT to reiterate to Professional Associations that the recommendations for close contact services have not changed. As providers within the medical and paramedical sector, it is recommended that therapists continue to exercise caution and vigilance and maintain continued best practice of regular sanitisation, ventilation and a minimum standard of a type 11R face mask. It is expected that therapists should continue to risk assess individual clients/patients where the use of enhanced PPE would be appropriate. (GCMT, January 2022)

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We were one of the many thousands of people who decided to move house during lockdown. In this article, I am picking up the strands from Louise Chunn’s posting on 1st September 2021 about her house move, Guy Gladstone’s Top 10 tips to help with the emotions of moving house and weaving into those strands the role hands-on therapy played in helping me find my footing when the ground shifted beneath me.
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We had lived in our previous home for 18 years. Although we knew we had outgrown our place quite a few years ago, it took the pandemic, the lockdown and the stamp duty holiday to facilitate our move. At first, we were delighted to be moving out and we looked forward to moving from commuter town to the countryside in East Sussex. We grew up abroad and our work also took us to different countries so we treated the move as largely a logistical challenge. We couldn’t have been more wrong. The reality was, beneath the logistical challenges were layers of history melded together by and the highs, the lows and the routines of life. Each round of clearing things out involved repeatedly asking ourselves the questions ‘do I still need this?’, ‘will I ever use this again?’ and the sub-text ‘does this still have meaning for me?’ Layered on top of these reflective and sometimes emotional moments, we were still navigating our way through the day to day business of living within the context of a national lockdown and majority of interactions being conducted virtually. 

The AGM last weekend was an opportunity for those who attended to meet Jan Trewartha and hear her speak with a gentle conviction about Sharon Wheeler's ScarWork. Her demonstration of a couple of techniques and opportunity to practise on each other added an experiential element to a really relevant and fascinating session.
 
For myself, I had the added experience of being able to  volunteer a scar and thought I would share a little bit about it. Jan worked on my caesarean section scar, using feather touch and down the rabbit hole techniques. Using the lightest of touch and subtlest of movements I could feel shifts down my left leg, gluts and abdomen, leading to a feeling of more freedom of movement as I walked to the station. That night I was exhausted! 
 
At home both my partner and daughter noticed a change in the shape of my belly, less of a fold tightly pulled in and more of a flop! For myself, my gluts remain more relaxed, and I feel less constricted across my lower abdomen. My scar is shallower than it was and less tightly attached to my abdominal muscles. 
 
It is difficult to feel that I am doing justice in describing Jan's skill and the changes she has instigated in my scar. It feels that these benefits are continuing over time and I sincerely thank her. 


Written by: Laura Hawksley, December 2019
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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.