Again, What is Hellerwork?

Dan Bienenfeld, one of my teachers and also a long-time Hellerwork practitioner in California was recently interviewed in the Palisades Post. It is one of the best descriptions of Hellerwork I have seen in print.

The Healing Power of Laughter

Why do we laugh? What purpose does it serve? Ode magazine features this topic in the August 2009 issue.

I highly recommend watching one of the funniest videos I've seen in a while (yes, it is worth watching the whole 6 minutes!).

Ode also has many more top picks on their laughter page.

To your belly!

Go ahead, relax!

Do you know how to relax? Some common relaxation techniques folks tell me they use: exercise, eating good food, alcohol, meditation, playing and being in nature. For many folks the benefits of relaxation are often short term.

Hellerwork is one of the most profound relaxation methods I know of. What I do is help you discover areas of your body that you may or may not be aware of being unable to relax. And then I help you learn how to really relax and let go of that area. The result is usually felt immediately and it’s common for all sorts of aches and pains seem to magically disappear. Sometimes I hear it described as feeling a glow from the inside out and is very relaxing. The effects tend to stay around, or under stress, help you better manage your response to stress. Another benefit is that all those relaxation techniques seem to work even better with a stronger baseline of relaxation felt in your body.

Wild Geese - Mary Oliver

An excerpt from the poem, "Wild Geese" by one of my favorite poets:

" You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves."

You're a fruit salad

Seriously, "fruit salad" is my analogy of the human body and how fascia (fash-uh) relates within it.

Visualize a jello fruit salad mold, maybe some red jello in a clear glass bowl. Instead of there being pieces of fruit in the jello, imagine chunks of sponge cake. The jello is your fascia, aka connective tissue, and the cake chunks are your muscles. Those muscles are literally pervasively saturated in fascia. If you try to separate the fascia from the muscle, you end up with a mess. Back to the jello salad - if you gently press your fingertip on the top of the salad (not hard enough to punch a hole in the jello), you'll see the entire contents of the salad shifting. All those sponge cake chunks move under the pressure of one area of the salad. Your body is much like that. Fascia connects everything to everything else in a remarkable way. Of course, bones, ligaments, organs, skin and other connective tissues are also involved, but since I work primarily with the fascia of the muscles, I'll keep it simple.

Fact: The primary ingredient in Jell-O is gelatin, which is made from the structural protein collagen. Collagen makes up nearly a third of all the protein in the human body. The collagen in Jell-O is usually from the bones of pigs or cows.