Marion Rosen taught me as a student not to have an agenda, not to have an answer, but to sit in stillness, patience and acceptance of another’s suffering.

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Every Rosen Method bodywork session is a spacious conversation. The “magic” of this work is deep attuned presence: I attempt to just be present with myself, with the client, and to sense the authentic self beneath the holding. Many (most) of us have experienced ruptures in our relationships around people’s ability to be present with us; We’ve felt people tune out, zone out, recoil, harden and disappear. To experience in the bodywork sessions, through direct gentle touch, that the practitioner is able to stay present and connected to you without an agenda is deeply healing and transformative. 

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A session typically begins with the client on their stomach. I will say hello to their body and see where they allow themselves to move and where they hold tension. 

 

When I find an area where there is something holding on with more grip. I will ask the client if they are able to feel that tension there, and they respond with a yes or no. 

 

I will educate the client a little about what the function of that muscle is- for example the reaching out muscles in the arms and shoulders, or the support area of the pelvis: there are patterns to where people tighten based on the functions of the muscles. 

 

Eventually people turn over to lie on their backs and I can see if they present similarly to what I would expect based on what I found thus far, because we exist in 3 dimensions. 

 

There is a whole picture that gets painted from the tension in the body; I ask questions about their life based on the tension I find and sometimes people will have a memory arise or an awareness of something. 

 

Sometimes the conversation is about holding themselves together, or tightening through the shoulders. The tension in the body shortens the muscle fibers, so it literally makes us smaller than we are. By being with the tension clients can discover that there is more inside here, there is more freedom and expansion available without this tension. 

 

That said, I have no plan for how my client should be, or how they should heal. I have no vision for how my clients should show up in life and place no expectation upon them. I draw no conclusions about how my clients ought to be, because here is the deal – many of our deepest hurts center around the conclusions other people have drawn about us and have not allowed us to grow past.

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Instead of an agenda, Rosen Method Practitioners trust in the wisdom of the body and work with what I like to call reverent curiosity (reverence for what my clients have been through and what they have had to do to survive, and curiosity to show interest and invite my clients to show more).

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There is a foundational gentleness to Rosen Method Bodywork. Big catharsis isn’t necessarily where change comes from. Small steady change is actually often more sustainable. 

 

The way that we repair trust is to experience small changes, and then go out into the world and live into that; Clients can then notice where they shut down again because that’s also information about what happened. The original wounding shows up in present-day in the ways we are closing down. An opening comes with the work and then (life being life) something happens and we put the tension back on. 

 

We can let this be ok as clients gently discover and embody new ways of moving through the world and through their lives.