When choosing a bodyworker and then coming for your first treatment, rather than thinking of the therapist as a “healer”, try thinking of your therapist as a facilitator of healing. Your body possesses within you the perfect knowledge for healing, and the skilled hands of your therapist brings the necessary attention to all of the health and maintenance mechanisms that are essential to rebuild and/or maintain your good health. So, whether you have a specific health condition, or no symptoms at all, regular bodywork continues to bring attention to all those factors affecting your health, allowing and insisting that the healing mechanisms in your body continue to operate at their full potential.

Deane Juhan, in his book Job’s Body, explains this process beautifully:

“The bodyworker is not an interventionist; he is a facilitator, a diplomatic intermediary between physiological processes that have lost track of one another’s proper functions and goals, between a mind that has forgotten what it needs to know in order to exert harmonious control and a body politic which increasingly utilizes disruptive demonstrations, terrorist tactics, and even the thereat of all-out civil war to regain its governor’s attention. Touching hands are not like pharmaceuticals or scalpels. They are like flashlights in a darkened room. The medicine they administer is self-awareness. And for many of our painful conditions, this is the aid that is most urgently needed.”