the slow work.
I am still learning to not push.
There is a part of me as a practitioner that is curious, nosy, hungry to understand.
A part that wants to dig into what's happening in the body, in the muscles or the fascia.
To read it like a map, solve the puzzle, figure out what's going on in there.
My hands translating, narrating, cataloguing.
These qualities and ways of practice are part of what has made me a successful manual therapist. It is also my biggest challenge, this brain that wants to figure out the problem and fix fix fix, because somewhere along the way I started to notice: the more I chased the answer, the more the body would sometimes quietly close the door.
My Chi Nei Tsang practice has taught me something I am still working with; When you finally stop trying — when you let your hands soften and your agenda dissolve — something shifts. Not pushing. Not fixing. Just arriving. That's when the body starts to move on its own terms.
I don't get there every time. Some sessions I catch myself clawing and solving instead of listening. But I know the difference now between those two states — and that knowing keeps pulling me back toward the quiet.
I share this because I think many of the people who find their way to my table are doing the same thing to themselves.
When you've been in pain for a long time — or when your body has felt confusing and unreliable, it's natural to become goal-oriented. To research. To push. To treat your body like a problem that needs solving rather than a living system that needs listening to. I see this all the time. Clients who arrive with years of trying to figure out what's causing their pain, a long list of things they've tried, a quiet frustration that nothing has worked.
What I am learning in my Chi Nei Tsang and Manual Osteopathy practices is: most of the body's deepest patterns don't respond to force. They respond to safety. To the felt sense that someone — including you — is finally paying attention without an agenda.
This is what I mean when I talk about slow work. It's not a pace. It's a presence.
In my osteopathic and Chi Nei Tsang sessions, I work with that principle directly. The unwinding that happens — in the fascia, the joints, the organs, the nervous system — often moves in ways that surprise me. Clients come in with pain that has been stubborn for years and something releases in a session in a way that still baffles the part of my brain trained in clinical physiology. The mechanism isn't always explainable. But I've become a devoted student of the doing, of what the body does when it finally feels met.
If you've been trying to fix yourself for a long time and it hasn't worked — maybe it's time to try something different.
Please let me know if you have any questions.
Samantha M