9 months of stomach pain. Mostly after meals. This young lady received all the advice she could get, changed her diet, ate slowly, ate less, ate more. She got all the examination you can get nowadays. Nothing could improve her problem. And nothing was found physically. So her parents took her to me.

An insight into how I experience the world and treat my patients

When a patient comes to see me, I do not try to look in their body. I am not interested in palpating their tensions. I am interested in experiencing. And most importantly: I am the one being touched. Have you ever considered that? When you interact with someone, you touch as much as you are touched. When your right index finger is touching your left palm, you are both touching and being touched. And the same thing occurs when you interact with people.

And touching/being touched is just like tasting wine or smelling perfume. Osteopathy is a world were almost everybody talks about the technique to bring the glass to your mouth. I teach you how to deepen your tasting. If you want to be able to feel more, to taste more, you need to dive into the sensation.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to dive into your body. I mean to dive into your body of perception. This is a whole different thing. For that, you need to train. You need to learn how to get back, you need to slow down. By doing so, the information becomes more and more available, more and more precise. Why? Because you don’t really focus on it. Your attention is on the space in which the information arises.

What about stomach pain

As I placed my hands under her head, I could imediately feel the weight surrounding the stomach. This part of her space seemed to be screaming for support. Her whole left side seemed to be bending in order to reduce the tension around her diaphragm. If you looked at her standing, if you don’t feel, you would see a perfectly fine young lady. Just like if you look at a bottle of perfume. But looking at a bottle of perfume is not smelling the perfume. One has to smell the perfume.

If my patient gets to relax enough, that’s usually when the dance starts. Of course, the tissues of the skull/neck reacted under my fingers, but I always monitor the whole world of my patient (at least as much as I can). The stomach held tight, but the left hip started to relax. The breathing slowly started to change. A tension vanished in the neck and I could feel that she let her skull drop a bit more on my hands. It is always subtle, but it is here. No big cracking techniques. Nothing too impressive. Just a shy movement, like a whisper. Many patients tell me that they fall asleep but are still very conscious of what is happening.

Once the neck got really relaxed, I placed my hands under the next area that needed help, which was the area of the ribs on the left side, around the stomach. The tension seemed to increase slightly at first, and that’s when you need experience. Your hands have to give a sensation of security for the person to surrender a bit. And that’s what happened. The dance started again. The hip, the left shoulder, the diaphragm, the neck, and finally…the stomach. Gone. It just feels like coming back home after a long day at work and removing your shoes. It feels so light.

I applied the same principle (not technique) on her hip until I felt a deep sensation of Stillness in her whole body/space.

Call it magic

Or don’t. If you know how to listen, if you know how to see, if you know how to feel, or if you experience the world the way I do it, this has nothing to do with magic. That young lady hasn’t had any episode of stomach pain since our session. She needed space, that’s all.

The whole treatment is based on empathy (which sounds a lot like osteopathy). And this can be learnt. If you are a manual therapist such as a craniosacral therapist, a physiotherapist, an osteopath or a chiropractor, if you are tired to treat bones and muscles and want to treat people, please develop that tool. It takes time, but it is so rewarding.