By Linda Peckham with Michael Harrison

Michael Harrison, Certified Massage Therapist (CMT), offers private sessions as well as professional training in Core Balance Therapy to massage therapists, physical therapists, occupational therapists, RN's and doctors in the Bay Area.

"Pain," says Michael Harrison, "is an inside job. People are overusing themselves." He says this with compassion, and he is speaking about something more than physical pain. "Our work-oriented culture encourages people not to notice exhaustion, to numb themselves so they can do even more." The bodies of his clients tell classic stories of stress: contraction and constricted mobility, where ligaments take on the nature of armor, nerves are over-stimulated, and muscles under-nurtured. He says systemic discomfort is a result of energetic and structural imbalance, and his mission is to "set up safe conditions for the body to heal itself, from the deepest intrinsic core out to the muscles and soft tissues."

Michael offers a somatic therapy he calls Core Structural Balancing. CBT is a skillful and simple professional bodywork method that invokes the body's intrinsic self-healing mechanisms. It is a gentle physical approach for cultivating tolerance, balance and sensory awareness, "which allows us to engage skillfully in the world, from a place of peace, balance and tolerance." Mindfulness-based Core Balancing is a unique synthesis of Michael's 32 years of holistic body therapy. This new approach draws from three decades of somatic education, professional training, teaching and practising of Deep Muscle Rebalancing, Applied Kinesiology, Shen, Amma, Jin Shin and Chi Kung. His work has taken a "transformative jump" since 1995, when he encountered the myofascial balancing bodywork of Thomas Ambrose Bowen of Australia.

It was a personal encounter. Ten years ago, he was confronted personally with acute back pain. Even with the help of some of the best body workers in the Bay Area, the pain persisted and threatened to interfere with his work. A friend invited Michael to a lecture demonstration of Tom Bowen's techniques in Santa Rosa. Michael volunteered to be the subject in a demonstration. "It was totally amazing," he says of the experience. The presentation leader gently manipulated tendons and muscles at specific locations, seeking the holding patterns trapped in connective tissue. After the brief demonstration, the pain was gone. It returned the next day, and seemed to actively shift, increasing and decreasing in sensation. Over the following week Michael noticed it gradually diminish and end. After months of intense discomfort, he was free of pain.

"I really had no interest in learning another technique," says Michael. "I felt I already had a pretty powerful approach to treating back, neck and shoulder pain, given the skills I was integrating from the traditions I had studied." But something about this amazing experience of structural release resonated deeply. There was a greater sense of ease, wholeness and reconnection. "This work supports long term wellness and vitality because it's about discovering, moment by moment in the session, and in our daily life, how we are using ourselves. There is a tremendous opportunity for deep reconnection and rest. First hand we are invited to notice on an experiential level of sensation what is happening right now in the body: how we are holding our muscles and how perhaps our habitual thoughts, emotions and postural habits often underlie and condition our muscular pain and dis-ease. In each session we have the opportunity to undo unconscious contractions, and heal ourselves."

Self-healing and self-awareness set the tone for a session. Michael encourages his clients to sit in the waiting room for a few minutes and enter an inner space before they enter the body therapy room. The protocols are simple. The client fills out a brief intake form to discuss symptoms and set an intention for the session; she or he can elect to remain clothed, because above all Michael wants to establish a safe space. He makes sure the client understands the work is gentle and there is no chance of injury, so that the body can relax and the muscles unclench. Working with the soft tissues-muscles, tendons and ligaments, he gently addresses the whole body, perhaps manipulating a limb in a certain plane of movement, or inserting wedges under the shoulder and hip to modify alignment.

The sessions have a meditative rhythm: he works on an area using simple precise rolling moves over a specific location of soft tissue structure. He then leaves the room for a period of 3-5 minutes, "a dynamic pause while the body 'cooks'." This important "cooking time" is the potent interval of non-doing that allows the intrinsic intelligence of the whole body-brain-mind to respond to the series of moves. A cascade of inner self-corrections happens at the body's own pace. Here Michael coaches the somatic mind as it often slips into a deeply spacious semi-trance of the parasympathetic nervous system, offering words of encouragement, like, "While resting into the breath, perhaps you might find yourself willing to notice and release the Poor Me story, without judgment. Invite yourself to just stay with the physical facts-what's happing right now, in this moment. Noticing the weight of the bones resting, the breath movingÖthe sounds of the exhale. Just resting with the facts of now, here on the table."

The pauses in each session, and the full 5-10 days of rest between sessions are important, he says, because "non-doing" is an antidote to all the "doing"-holding onto tension in the form of tightly held views, attitude, painful emotions which accumulate in the tissues. "The pause is the space where whole body mindfulness notices, undoes and possibly unlearns years of habitual patterns of self-defense." It's also a space that puts people in contact with the armoring around grief or anxiety, an opportunity to re-enter themselves and reclaim their vital power. "Although there may be discomfort meeting the pain in a conscious way, there's no drama, no pounding," he says. "Emotional hurt and pain just seem to slip out of the tissues."

Michael explains the mechanics of the injury or chronic pain, and gives the client movements to realign, re-pattern and strengthen a vulnerable area to prevent re-injury. "I want you to become conscious, day to day, moment by moment, of the contracting that causes physical suffering, and use that wisdom to open to more choices, more aliveness." Core Balancing Therapy is brief; usually 4 - 6 visits is enough for measurable change. The sessions on the table sow the seeds for the work outside the treatment, which is where flexibility and ease begin to be restored. The improvements attested to by his clients have "very little to do with me, the practitioner. It's more about the body's ability to effortlessly undo energetic habits at a core level deeper than the mask of personality."

"I'm not a doctor. I don't see myself as a healer. I may be an agent for change, a facilitator helping a client 're-member' him or herself." Michael sees education and the spirit of inquiry as key components of Core Structural Balancing. In the late sixties he started in education with a BS.ed, helping at-risk kids in Boston. He saw them acting out, hurting people and hurting themselves. But he found he couldn't give them anything because "they were not home in themselves to receive support." Leaving the city where his Irish immigrant parents raised him, and breaking away from a culture he felt was harmful, he hitched back and forth across the country several times, traveled to Mexico and India on a quest for "something authentic, a way of life that would be healing to myself, and would benefit my community." He turned to bodywork because "touch is a direct and instant reconnection, a return home."

Michael's practice is open-ended and evolving-"no dogma". He refers to Core Structural Balancing as a dynamic interpretation of Bowen's techniques, which were never systematized, and to which Michael brings an emphasis on presence and client empowerment. "I feel that the 'fix-it' or band-aid approach doesn't honor or empower the client. Reducing pain and stress over the long term doesn't happen just through the temporary effects of touch, but through constructive lifestyle change, and by cultivating somatic awareness, teaching clients to recognize muscular-attitudinal habits."