In truth we all are deeply sensitive, yet so often in life, our sensitivity has not been understood by others, respected and/or honoured.

How often do we hear the phrase “you are oversensitive” or “you are just too sensitive” as a negative connotation? Perhaps you were one of those children constantly being told this and therefore grew up believing that there was something wrong with you because of your sensitivity.

Too often we have not had role models that have shown us how to embrace our sensitivity, we have not been shown or taught how to express in and from the innate sensitivity that we all have. It is from there that we often react to what we feel, become disturbed, unsettled, feel un-equipped or anxious and then absorb disharmonious or poisonous energies around us that we are feeling, such as other people’s anger, frustration, stress or sadness.

Yet our sensitivity is our super power and a key aspect of our make up as human beings. Our sensitivity allows us to feel, stay tuned to what is going on around us all of the time. In a world where everything is energy, our sensitivity allows us to stay connected or reconcile with that truth. It allows us to stay connected to, or reconnect to our multi-dimentionality and the fact that there is more to us than just the physical body and what meet the eyes.

It is through our sensitivity that we can feel the depths of our essence and learn to express from the inner-most part of us.

So you can see, we should be celebrating our sensitivity, deeply honour it and nurture a way of living that allows its transparency with all others.

When we open ourselves up and live, move, walk, work and relate from our sensitivity we are honouring the depths of our inner-being and in this honouring, we remain our true selves and come to observe life and not absorb it.

What is key here is to learn to hold your connection with your body and your being whilst giving yourself permission to feel and learn not to react. You may like to read more about reactions in our past article 101 Guide to Dealing with Reactions.

When we reclaim our sensitivity as our natural way of being and our super power, our key strength and no longer see it as a fault, liability or weakness, we can start to see all of the ways, ideals and beliefs that we have used to protect it or shut it down, and that in truth, this never worked nor supported us.

The way to work with our sensitivity is to claim all that we feel and are aware of and not to shy away from this. To ‘read’ energies (feel, pick up on, recognise vibrations) that are at play, to hold steady through our connection with our body and observe what is taking place – all of the time. This is our natural way to be. Reactions are the antipode to observation, they take us away from being able to see what is playing out in front of and within us.

Learn to love and cherish your sensitivity. Living from and with our sensitivity is the key to developing deeper and more intimate relationships with ourselves and with everyone as we are not hiding from the world who we really are.

Have you noticed how powerful it is to express from your sensitivity or to interact with a person living from their sensitivity? It is a reminder to us of our essence, our natural state of being.

At Yoga & Healing we offer the services of Remedial Massage, Esoteric Healing, Esoteric Massage, Esoteric connective Tissue Therapy, Yoga, Exercise and Meditation. We offer live classes and online yoga and exercise classes. We are in the business of offering support for true health and wellbeing. Contact Us.

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Good technique forms a solid foundation for the massage itself, so it is important that the therapist has had adequate training and that they understand the workings of the body in order to know how to treat your injury or condition. This is super important and can’t be dismissed in any way. However, is good technique alone enough to offer the body the opportunity to truly heal?

What if there is another ingredient that offers the muscles and tissues not just a relief from the ill or condition, but true healing in that the muscles and tissues have the opportunity to return back to homeostasis.

This ingredient is the quality in which the massage therapist delivers the massage.

So what do I mean by quality? Quality is the WAY in which the massage is delivered.

As an example, have you ever had a massage where you can feel the therapist just going through the motions and that they are not fully present with you whilst they are massaging? They may talk to you the whole way through, be distracted, perhaps be rough in their movements and you can tell that their attention is elsewhere rather than being there with you in the room.

I know that I certainly have experienced this and at the end of the massage, I can’t fault what they have performed on a technical level, but I am left feeling like something was missing.  That missing ingredient is the lack of good quality that the massage was offered.

Having massaged for many years what I frequently experience in my clinic in Balgowlah is that clients respond to the quality of how a massage is delivered and this plays an equal role to the knowledge and technique.  I have a firm understanding that it is my presence and connection first of all to my own body and then to the body that I am working with can be felt and received by the client.  When I bring my quality of connection to the session, I can feel the client’s body respond with the muscles and tissues relaxing and letting go.

As an example, the way I do trigger points in remedial massage and deep tissue massage is to not push into the tight spot and try and release it with firm pressure, but I find that a gentle approach using anti-clockwise circles enables the muscles fibres to release.  Along with my presence of feeling exactly what is going on underneath my thumbs or fingers, this supports the person’s tight toxic spots (trigger points) to release. The use of effleurage after brings in fresh blood supply into the area so the muscles and tissues can return to their innate state of health.

Often clients are surprised at the results that can be achieved by not pushing into the body, but rather through the gentleness and care that is offered in the session.  This is the quality that they are feeling and the body does respond.

So next time you are getting a massage, tune into what you feel and the quality in which the massage is being delivered, knowing that the quality of a massage plays an equal role to technique in your overall healing.

Donna Nolan teaches Remedial Massage for Australia’s leading massage school. She runs her own massage clinic in Balgowlah and enjoys supporting people for many common conditions such as back pain, neck pain, sciatica, shoulder impingement, postural imbalances, stress, anxiety etc. Contact her.

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The focus of this meditation is to connect to a quality of gentleness and then when you get up from this meditation and head back into your daily activities, there is the invitation to take this quality with you into your next movements.

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Deep tissue as the name applies, refers to the deeper soft tissues within the body including muscles and fascia. A common way that many therapists work with accessing the deeper tissue is to press firmer or harder in order to try and access the deeper tissue or muscles in the body. This can sometimes be painful for the client (and draining for the practitioner) and in some circumstances can cause bruising. Of course there are many clients who enjoy this type of massage and subscribe to the “no pain, no gain myth” and will request this and enjoy this style of massage.

However, if you are like me and avoided receiving massage for a long time as I didn’t like how much it hurts, then you may be pleased to hear that there is another way of releasing the deeper fascia and muscles in the body that is not painful, and rather is relaxing, enjoyable and has amazing results.

In clinic, I often have people asking for a deep tissue massage, without really understanding what it is that they are asking for. I like to share and educate clients as to what deep tissue means and the way that we can access working with the deeper muscles and fascia without having to hurt them.

The industry is changing and the way we are now teaching massage has taken a turn to support the client to relax, so that their muscles can release and relax. Ultimately it is important to remember that relaxation is at the basis of any form of remedial massage. If the person is tensing up due to pain, then we are promoting a protective mechanism in the body, muscle constriction, rather than the muscles letting go.

So how do we release the deeper lying muscles in the body without digging deep?

Warmth is the key – use plenty of effleurage strokes to warm up the outer, surface layers of muscles and tissue. Once these are warm and feel softer, then we are able to gently use techniques such as trigger point therapy to access the deeper muscles that lay beneath.

There are many deep tissue techniques that can be used with one of the most common being trigger points. The way I work with trigger points is through feeling and sensing what is happening in the muscle and the client’s body. Having warmed up the area that I am working on, I use gentle circles over the area where I can feel the built-up point in the muscle and gently release it using thumbs through the small movements. Feeling when the muscle releases beneath my thumbs I then use effleurage again to allow for the fresh blood flow into that area to promote restoration of the tissue and reintegrate the local area with the rest of the body.

Whilst receiving this technique, the client may feel a different sensation in their body with the release of the trigger points, but it should not cause a flinching or a high level of pain in any way. I often find clients relax deeply and sometimes even fall asleep.  They commonly report on how lovely it is to receive this type of massage and the results are long lasting and not a quick fix.

Donna Nolan works as a Remedial Massage Therapist in Balgowlah on Sydney’s Northern Beaches and teaches the Diploma of Remedial Massage at one of Australia’s largest and most reputable massage schools.

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The word ‘remedial’ means ‘to apply remedy’. Therefore Remedial Massage is about supporting the body to heal from an injury, tension or pain. Our aim as Massage Therapists when working with the musculoskeletal system is to relax and release tightly held muscles that may have a build-up of toxins from an injury, from overuse of muscles, stress or from incorrect posture etc. When muscles are held in tension our aim is to release and relax these muscles, not cause further tightness or tension.

Therefore, what is important when performing a massage is for the client to be able to fully relax in order to support the muscles to release. If the client is tense and bracing (which often comes when they are feeling pain) then it is difficult for the muscles that you are working on to fully let go.

Pain is the body’s feedback mechanism to say stop what you are doing. When pain is felt the body responds by causing the muscles to harden up around the injured site for protection to avoid further injury. Which of course is the opposite to what we are looking to achieve in the first place.

What can also be useful here is to haveanunderstanding that the role the connective tissue plays within the body. Connective tissue is a system of tissues that runs throughout all the muscles, tendons, ligaments, bones, nerves, blood vessels and organ overlapping and enveloping soft tissue structures like cling film.

The fluidity and moistness of the connective tissue allows for friction free movements and supports all our body’s systems from the inside out. Energy flows through our connective tissue and in its ideal state, the connective tissue supports our natural elongated posture and our organ systems to work together harmoniously. We can picture our connective tissue like a river that flows throughout our entire body.

 When pain is induced, the connective tissue (fascia) also hardens up to go into its protective state.

So we can see that force or pain inflicted causes not only the muscles to tighten up but also has an impact on the connective tissue and therefore an overall effect of creating more tension in the body. Again, this is the opposite to what we are looking to achieve which is to relax and release the body.

To make this practical to massage, I would like to use an example and discuss how this can be applied to Trigger Point therapy, a common technique used in Remedial Massage. A trigger point is an area in the muscle (usually in the belly of the muscle or at the origin or insertion of the muscles) that has a build-up of toxins. The client often feels a bit of pain when pressing on what is referred to as an active trigger point.

Rather than forcefully working into a trigger point where the body might tense up, it is possible to release the trigger points gently and access the deeper tissue and muscles in the body. We can do this through the use of lots of repetitive effleuragestrokes to first of all warm up the outer layer of muscle, this then allows you to naturally and easily access the next and deeper level of muscles (hence the name deep tissue). If you try to access the deeper muscles via force and without truly understanding the role of the connective tissue in the body, the outer muscles harden and go into protection going against what we are trying to achieve, which is to relax them.

Once the outer muscles have been warmed up, then we can access the deeper tissue in a gentle manner, with no force and without inflicting pain. The trigger point is able to release gently and the rest of the body hasn’t gone into protection. We have therefore released the point of tension as well as keeping the surrounding muscles and tissues relaxed. Goal achieved – with no pain inflicted.

Donna Nolan works as a Remedial Massage Therapist and teaches the Diploma of Remedial Massage at one of Australia’s largest and most reputable massage schools. She offer Remedial Massage at Balgowlah. 

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One of the reasons why we don’t address the root cause is because we do not want to feel the choices that we have been making or the pressure or strain we have been putting ourselves under. We become caught in our emotions, we react and feel hurt by what others say and do and often we don’t take responsibility for the part we play.

We then choose to bury what we are feeling and ‘get on with life’.

There are a myriad of ways in which we can bury our feelings and I could write a whole article on this alone. Food is a big one – alcohol, sport, staying caught in emotions, pushing our bodies and hardening them. In fact any activity or movement that we do in a way where we disconnect from our body and do not honour the true delicateness and tenderness that we are has the potential to bury what we are feeling.

When we bury our feelings we push those feelings that may be just on the surface, deeper into the physical body so that we don’t have to face the pain or hurt of what is actually there. As human beings, we get very good at doing this and find all sorts of ways to distract ourselves from feeling our bodies and we therefore stay caught in the mental activity of our minds.

So having understood what our hurts are and why it is not good to bury them, how then do we work with this?

Here is a simple guideline that can support you to reconnect to what is going on in your body and become more familiar with addressing your hurts.

1. Nominate the hurt when you feel it without blame. Let yourself acknowledge that the incident/person/event that has happened has actually deeply affected you and that you feel hurt by it. At this stage it is important to do this without blame. You are simply nominating what is there.
2. Feel where this hurt resides in your body. You may feel a tightness in your chest, in your lower back, in your jaw. In fact, it could be held anywhere in the body. Make this exercise physical so that you feel how the hurt affects your body rather than staying in the thought process in your mind of “he said, she said” etc.
3. Stay with what you feel, without judging or trying to fix it. Simply let yourself be with what it is that you are feeling. Practice self-acceptance and that this is a process that you are going through. Let yourself truly be with what is there without fighting the urge to not go there. Stay out of the mental dialogue that may be running in your mind and stay with the sensations that you are feeling in your body.
4. Notice if there are any patterns or behaviours that you go into to stop yourself from feeling the hurt. Try to avoid using those things as medications (chocolate, alcohol, coffee) and instead let yourself be with what you feel (as explored in point 3).
5. You may like to seek support from a friend or a practitioner so that you can see the situation more clearly. Be careful to seek assistance from a person who will not allow you to ‘wallow’ or go into blame, but who will reflect a steadiness and openness so that you can go deeper within and learn that this is a healing process for you and for you to see and own your part in it.

The way to heal our hurts is to not bury them but let them come to the surface so that they can come up and out of the body. If we over ride what we feel, pretend that they are not there and push them back down – we bury emotions deeper into the physical body and at some point this will show up via an injury or illness.

 We are all deeply sensitive human beings. Let yourself be and live in with your sensitivity. This is not weak, but in fact our true strength and power.

For further reading, here is a great article We are Not our Hurts by Jean Gamble, Psychotherapist.

Donna Nolan offers Esoteric Healing, Connective Tissue Therapy, Massage , Yoga/Meditation at the Balgowlah (Northern Beaches) and Cammeray clinics. She has a love of working with people to understand the root cause of their ill or injury and works with these modalities to support her clients to return to true health and wellbeing. For bookings contact Donna donna@yogaandhealing.com.au

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As human beings we are multidimensional. What constitutes our make up is the physical body; the energetic body; our mental state of being; and our essence. So we need to really understand both the “human” and the “being” aspects of who we are and how we are.

So if we recognise that we are so much more than just our physical body, does it not make sense that when we offer ourselves the support of bodywork therapies such as massage, that as the physical body is being treated we are also having an impact on our state of being physically, emotionally and mentally.

As an example, have you ever been feeling out of sorts with your mind racing, you have a massage and you come away feeling more relaxed both in your body but there is also a sense of stillness in your mind that you hadn’t previously felt.

Or perhaps you have been feeling off and then practiced some simple exercises such as stretching and breathing, or you have simply gone for a walk and all of a sudden the world seems like a different place.

So if we recognise that indeed the mind and body are inter related, what then is going on when we have an injury that doesn’t heal?

With a deeper understanding of the relationship between the body, the mind and emotions can we limit injuries to just the physical body? Could there be so much more going on?

Have you ever experienced an injury or pain and no matter how much treatment you have such as physio, massage or other bodywork therapies the pain continues to linger and doesn’t resolve?

Could it be that although you may have addressed the physical injury or ailment, what hasn’t been addressed is the underlying cause of the ill in the first place.

Is it possible there may be a held emotion stored in the body that hasn’t been addressed and it is this retention that is not allowing the body to fully recover and heal?

What is needed is a bodywork therapist who recognises and addresses not only the physical ailment, but who also has an understanding of how we hold mentally and emotionally and the affects that this has on body. This type of therapist can offer you the space to truly heal by addressing both the underlying cause of the ill in the first place and the resultant physical affect in the body. This is the primary focus of how we choose to work at Yoga & Healing.

The missing link that is so often overlooked when dealing with injuries is that we are not just a physical being we are multidimensional human beings.

Donna Nolan is a Massage Therapist (Remedial Massage and Esoteric Massage), Connective Tissue Therapist and Yoga Therapist who loves to explore with her clients the root cause of the ailment they present with.  Donna practises in Cammeray and Balgowlah.  For bookings Phone 0408 783187 or email donna@yoagandhealing.com.au

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What I have been reflecting on within myself of late is just how many of these there are and how can I go about in my day-to-day life shifting some of these.

I guess first of all, why would I want to change certain patterns of my mind? To put it simply, because it causes me suffering! And I have decided that this is a good enough reason.

So how do I go about this? Well, first of all I need to be diligent enough to start to notice what type of thought pattern is causing me not to feel so great. Perhaps it causes some disturbance that leaves me worrying, or thinking in a way that is not so pleasant.

The next step is to be honest about it.  To “fess up” about it… not to deny that those thought patterns are there, but to own it. With the honesty can then come change.

Once I start to notice the thought pattern, I have a choice. I could keep the “story” that is playing out in my mind going, or, I could choose to recognise that this is a “story” that is not serving me and not feed it. This doesn’t mean I just ignore it. It means I recognise it for what it is,  but I choose not give it more power by delving into it.

What I also find very useful at that point, is to bring it back to my body. To connect and feel my body. What is going on for my body at the time? Is there somewhere in my body where I feel tension? And if there is (which there usually is), I let myself sit with what I feel, without judgement and just feel it. And, sometimes it shifts and sometimes it doesn’t. Not being attached to an outcome but to just be with it. And then the next time the same pattern comes up, I try it again.

I have found the more I can work with this process, the more I have been able to look at my samskaras and they start to slowly shift. I have become quicker at picking them up and it has become like a game. I can now look at them with a sense of playfullness, knowing that they aren’t really me, that they are just something that I have chosen to hang on to for a while. Perhaps it’s time now to let it go.

Donna Nolan is a Sydney based Yoga Teacher and Esoteric Healing practitioner. She teaches private, group & corporate classes. She offers Esoteric Therapy sessions at her clinic in Cammeray and in Balgowlah (Northern Beaches).

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