Traditional bodywork therapies have been fundamental to my own, my family's, and my patients' health and healing
I developed the Possums programs by learning from many talented bodywork practitioners
My work with breastfeeding women has been deeply informed by my personal and professional experiences with a wide range of bodywork practices.
In the same way that my own profession has failed, in my life-time, to prioritise the clinical support of breastfeeding (though this is changing), doctors have failed to understand that musculoskeletal dysfunction, with associated neural patterns of movement, causes pain and suffering, and is amenable to skilled bodywork rather than pharmaceuticals. I watched this begin to change in the 2000s, when osteopaths began to quietly upskill doctors in the new speciality of musculoskeletal medicine - but we still have a long way to go.
Mind-body-spirit integration has been fundamental to my personal life, and to my life as a doctor and healer since I first worked as a young GP. Because of this, bodywork practices have been at the heart of my physical, professional, and emotional life - and are at the very heart of Possums Breastfeeding and Lactation.
I have always been deeply interested in how our emotional experiences write into the body. This means I've been very interested in how neural patterning affects movement patterns, through mechanical pressures and bodily function and structure, how our emotions and nervous system settings interact with fascia, muscle, tendon, ligament and even bone.
For this reason, I have worked for years developing what I now call evolutionary bodywork approaches, including for helping a baby breastfeed from his mother's body. Out of this painstaking clinical work, year by year, carefully listening to women's experiences and feedback, I developed the gestalt method of fit and hold, building on what was already being used but developing it. I noticed how this method began to dramatically improve outcomes for certain breastfeeding problems.
A bodywork therapist helped me get through my first couple of years as a doctor
I've also been interested, both personally and professionally, in various forms of somatic therapy for trauma, from when I was a young doctor working within the harsh realities of the public health system and exposed to high levels of vicarious trauma.
I visited a bodywork therapist for a couple of years in the mid-1980s as a freshly qualified doctor enduring internship in a busy metropolitan hospital. The hours were long, the pressures immense. The amount of human suffering was profound. I had staggered out of adolescence into young adulthood as a doctor with certain life-skill gaps, beset by self-doubt. Maybe this is the nature of young adulthood for many of us, and particularly for women of my generation who were often the first women in our family to have the opportunity for university, let alone take on professional roles. I was grateful to find myself in the hands of a kind, large-bodied, white-haired bodywork therapist. I also occasionally saw a registered psychologist who integrated bodywork - sound and movement - into her practice.
At that time, the concept of bodywork therapy was fringe. My bodywork therapist offered her own quirky blend of therapeutic massage, breath work, energy medicine, and psychotherapeutic techniques. To be honest, I think the ingredient that brought me most healing was simply that she cared about me, and that she lovingly returned my attention to my body. But my bodywork therapist also had the most intelligent, sensitive, respectful touch I've ever experienced in a bodyworker since (and I've had hundreds of therapeutic massages - another kind of bodywork).
I've used a range of bodywork therapy modalities for my own healing and health
I've sort help for my own fascial and musculoskeletal vulnerabilities from osteopaths, in particular, but also earlier on, from practitioners of Alexander Technique and Feldenkreis. Over the past 15 years, I've regularly consulted with an extraordinarily skilful physiotherapist who is also trained in osteopathy and the Vojte method. These practitioners have helped me work out what made sense for my own body. The physiotherapist also worked with my adolescent children at different times.
By the 2010s, physiotherapists were adopting techniques more aligned with bodywork, but prior to that I preferred bodyworkers for treatment of my loved ones when they were facing musculoskeletal challenges. I cherished Ruthy Alon's book about Feldenkreis for many years. I even took my mother to a Feldenkreis therapist once, though with little benefit. I referred an elderly cousin to a Bowen therapist, who said it changed her life. I saw an Alexander Therapist a few times myself, though I found that lady's understanding of the body's complexities rather dated.
"That is definitely not normal," the Alexander Therapist declared, pointing at my chest. (I looked down at my poor accused rib-cage in astonishment. My thoracic and lumbar spine display the signs of mild scoliosis and postural dysfunctions, with a modest accompanying torticollis and mild plagiocephaly. Was she right? I felt that I must be weird and unattractive when she said that - though I would argue now that to label my body's musculoskeletal vulnerabilities and imperfections as "abnormal" is risky, and lacks perspective.
I expect that these structural changes were set in place in the earliest months of my life (if I didn't already have a genetic predisposition), and it's true that they impact subtly upon the appearance of my ribs, but I am able-bodied, pain-free, and my rib-cage is definitely normal, if not perfectly symmetrical!
In the mid-2000s my daughter started to suffer chronic headaches from computer use in high school, and a local physiotherapist wasn't able to make a difference. Then I met a remarkable physiotherapist in a community choir, who told me she'd spent years dissecting and teaching in the anatomy department at The University of Queensland, and even more years visiting Prague regularly to learn Vojta Technique. This physiotherapist offered an interesting blend of Vojta Therapy, osteopathy, and conventional physiotherapy. She had a formidable knowledge of functional anatomy and the importance of activating the primitive or neonatal reflexes to heal movement patterns in an adult body. My daughter's headaches faded with this physiotherapist's sensitive manual therapy and a re-setting of her neural pathways of posture and function.
My son, until recently a professional volleyballer but back then a passionate teenage athlete, began to see a male physio who worked in the same practice. He was a sports physiotherapist who worked using the same combination of techniques with various Olympic teams. My son deeply internalized this work with his body's primitive neurological reflexes, and still does the exercises he started as an adolescent every day, the 'ball bounce', the 'buddha belly', the 'dog pee', the 'cockroach', the 'sphinx' …. He lists them for me affectionately in a text from Europe.
When my own underlying postural dysfunctions flared into chronic headaches with computer overuse both in the clinic and for my research in the late 2000's, I began to see this same female physiotherapist too, visiting regularly over a period of years. I often hear her voice or feel her hands working sensitively, confidently, with my body and breath as I move - powerful healing somatic memories.
I've participated in classes in Tai Chi and Qigong at various times in my life. I love it when a massage therapist incorporates some reflexology. I've also done a little yoga over the years, although I've not found yoga sensitive enough to the tissue limitations of my own brave but imperfect, even wounded, musculoskeletal system.
I have referred patients to osteopaths all my professional life
I finished working as a resident in the hospital and after two years working as a GP in a community-controlled indigenous health service, I opened a small general practice in West End, Brisbane. At this time, I referred patients with musculoskeletal problems to a very skilful local osteopath. (I have always fretted that the repetitive manipulations of chiropractic created joint micro-trauma without empowering the patient to address their own dysfunctional movement patterns, and for this reason I still don't refer patients to chiropractors.)
Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, I continued to refer to osteopaths rather than to physiotherapists, if my patient was happy with this, since I found (in my clinical experience) that the osteopaths achieved better outcomes. Throughout the whole of my professional life as a GP, I despaired that many patients with back and neck pain (even as they saw physiotherapists) were developing narcotic dependence when I believed they would respond well to osteopathic treatments for postural malalignment and dysfunctional movement patterns.
I despaired that many patients endured chronic headaches and migraines as a result of postural malalignment and functional compromise but were often prescribed analgesics long-term, since both the patient and their doctor were convinced by the biomedical paradigm that the patient had no control over his symptoms. I think this is shifting now, but this failure of my own profession to understand how movement patterns in the body could feed into chronic pain caused me professional distress for decades.
I have been deeply influenced by mindful movement practices and feminist philosophies of embodiment
The bodywork practice which has brought me the most joy, friendship and body awareness since 2009 is known as NIA. NIA is a contemporary dance and movement practice which celebrates 'the body's way', and 'dancing for joy', a social engaged and inspiring mind-body practice. NIA is where I practice mindful movement and postural alignment, hour by hour, week by week, simply by dancing with friends. "Be a sensation scientist", the teachers say to us, "listen to your body", "feel inside your postural alignment", "feel your skeleton", "feel your tissues", "feel your joy". "Your body's way." "Mindful movement. Joyful movement." Long ago, I borrowed the concept of micromovements from my NIA teachers, for my breastfeeding work. I consider mindful movement an elemental kind of connection to the present. I try to move consciously.
I've also been deeply influenced by feminist theories of embodiment - female philosophers preoccupied with the way women have learnt to disembody from our bodies, our sensations and our experience. I have adored the work of the French feminist philosophers Helena Cixous, Lucy Irigary, and Julia Kristeva.
Recommended resources
Who gives traditional bodywork therapy to breastfed babies and why?
Breastfeeding, orofacial development and traditional bodywork therapy
Nine reasons why traditional bodywork therapy makes life with your baby harder than it needs to be