AHP Perspective is a magazine published bi-monthly for members of the Association for Humanistic Psychology. It includes interviews, articles, essays, updates on member activities, conference announcements, and book reviews. Members receive the complete AHP Perspective as part of their membership.

AHP PERSPECTIVE April/May 2001 Table of Contents

To The Bone with
Yamuna Body Rolling

— Yamuna Zake

Yamuna Body Rolling
is a self-therapy bodywork system that I developed to empower people to release restrictions that their life experience has stored in their body. It is practiced with specially designed balls of specific sizes, densities, and resistances. Following the routines I designed, you let the weight of your body sink into the ball, as you breathe deeply and roll slowly through the length of different muscles. The purpose of Yamuna Body Rolling is to penetrate through the layers of skin, muscles, blood, and breath, to finally reach the bone and free the body of physical restrictions. This offers the ability to self-actualize without limitations imposed by the body.

In Yamuna Body Rolling you engage in a dialogue with your body. As you sink into a part of your body, it responds with sensations: releasing, letting go, sighing, telling you to stay longer, or to move a little this way or that. Sometimes you might feel a little discomfort, yet the body tells you to stay at this point, to breathe here and see what happens. This is often called the "good kind of pain." As the body processes information arising at the point where the ball is, and the ball penetrates more deeply through the physical layers, a letting go process occurs, and the initial discomfort disappears. When the ball is removed you feel a greater spatial sensation in the area, a surge of energy and an increase in blood flow. Often you feel a lightness of being and sense that something has been freed from the body.

Yamuna Body Rolling can be a powerful somatic tool. All you need is you and a Body Rolling ball to journey through the many layers of your physical body, explore what you have unconsciously stored in your tissue, and then free it. Everybody builds layers within the body made up of personal history. No one builds those layers quite the same way. It has been my experience as a somatic body-worker that life’s layers embedded in the body can be worked out and no longer restrict us. Many years ago, working with several women who had been sexually violated, I found that if I showed them how to work with the ball and stayed with them while they explored the areas of pain themselves, they were more successful in releasing their physical pain, which was a manifestation of the original experience. In such a case, the most important healing agent is self-empowerment.

The storage of life’s layers does not always create pain, but over enough years they harden in the form of contraction and constriction and restrict your physical movement—through limits in range of motion, for example. Because this doesn’t actually hurt in the initial stages, we assume we are fine. But the body may be holding us back from fully realizing our potential. Until we experience a greater degree of well- being in the body, we don’t realize how much better we really can feel.

Through releasing restrictions with Body Rolling, following the natural order of movement and muscle release from origin to insertion, it is possible to experience such well-being. The body becomes happy. Circulation, muscle tone, flexibility, and function improve. Areas of dormant energy and congestion awaken. The body becomes more alive, and you find yourself both physically and mentally present, listening to its responses. Yamuna Body Rolling enables you to perceive these sensations and positive changes immediately and gives you a clear sense of the physical and energetic changes that are occurring—something many people find difficult to achieve.

The body communicates with us in a specific language. It speaks in sensations, sounds, and pulses. Examples of letting go can be a swoosh, a shhhh, a pwha, a pppp, a kkk, a pulse which quickens, then becomes stronger and fuller, then slower, and finally more steady, accompanied by fuller, deeper breathing into the area. The noticeable visual changes which follow this letting-go experience are softer, more pliable tissue, greater length and openness in the body as a whole, and the ability to breathe and move more freely. The color and appearance of the skin also improve.

When tissue that holds fear or panic is touched by the ball, the tissue first contracts, wanting to keep the ball out. The pulses speed up and the breath either stops or becomes very fast and short. When cells panic they begin to scurry around the area of penetration, looking for an escape or a way to hold on to their previous pattern. They feel their safety is at risk because their holding pattern has been challenged. Often the mind comes to the rescue by saying, "This is too painful." It tries to stop the experience. If the mind can quiet this initial response triggered by the physical discomfort and fear and simply stay as an observer watching the body sensations, the cells are given time to experience the original cause of their being held in such a tight pattern. As the person’s whole being experiences the sensations and memories, the cells let go. They no longer need this holding pattern, since the experience that caused the holding in the first place has been felt and experienced and can be let go. The cells rearrange themselves to take up greater space, the breath flow increases into the area, and a sense that something has lifted is apparent.

I have found working through my own physical layers to be a fascinating and never-ending experience. The body has its own logic and order; it seems to work through layers in a gradual and systematic way, from superficial to deep. I have learned that even when I thought I had worked out something powerful in a certain point in my body, when I penetrated to deeper layers at that same point, I still might find something else embedded there. It seems that the deeper layers hold in trauma the longest and can actually cause repeated traumas to occur in more superficial tissue. The saying that we repeat patterns over and over again definitely holds true in the body: it is very common to continuously injure the same part of the body or always hurt one side. The initial trauma is fixed in the body at the deepest layers. Once the holding pattern is established, it is as though we are programmed to continue to injure ourselves in the same exact place in the same exact way. You can have a strong release of an emotional holding pattern in a superficial layer, and it might not have any effect on releasing the deeper roots of the pattern that are embedded into the bone. Only when you penetrate to the deepest layers can you free the deepest physical holding patterns and their causes. It is at the bone that these patterns can be freed.
Bone is harder, denser, more porous, and more contained than other tissue in the body. It can absorb and hold more shock and trauma, too. It has the ability to store life experience, hold it in, and pull the tendons and muscles in toward it. What allows us to create and express ourselves out in the world is the tendons and muscles moving outward from the bone. The more trauma is held in the bones, the more the rest of the body is pulled into the bone. In addition, the more trauma bone holds, the faster are the aging and degenerative processes; I have seen in practicing Yamuna Body Rolling that severe cases of osteoporosis can be reversed through bone stimulation.

When bone is stimulated by touch, palpation, being leaned into or rolled on, it begins to awaken and change form. From being brittle, contracted, very dull when touched, like a cement wall, it can become fuller, more porous, and more alive. Bone begins to pulse and vibrate and actually expand under the influence of touch. When bone is palpated or the ball is sinking into it, there might be no response at first. After one to five minutes, a pulsing sensation begins and the bone actually starts to melt and change form. As the bone awakens, it expands outward, setting off an outward-moving release. The tendons, instead of gripping tightly to the bone, begin to unwind outward, freeing the muscle. Trauma that has been stored in the bone is freed from its deep holding pattern to the bone.

In cases of severe trauma held in the bone, the pull of the tendons and muscles to the bone is so extreme that the bone actually sustains a type of suffocation, since its vital nourishment is cut off. Stimulating the bone through applying direct pressure into it awakens the bone, and the tendons and the muscles begin to free themselves, making movement out into the world easier. When bone is free and alive, there is a sense of fullness and freedom from the inside out. Often-repeated injuries occur when there is a strong inward pull to the bone while the person keeps trying to move outward. Injury can result when the backlash of the inward pull keeps restricting the person’s actions. When trauma has been embedded deeply for many years, it often takes time for the bone to respond. It will initially feel nothing when penetrated, and you might think there is nothing there. But if you just persist in working with the bone, it will begin to awaken. You may feel sharp pain in the bone as this awakening begins. As the stored memory surfaces, you may temporarily lose the coloring in your skin, and your breathing might stop or become quite rapid. The older the memory, the longer it may take to process it from the bone to consciousness. Sharp pains in the bone are not a signal that the bone is being hurt. On the contrary, life energy is re-entering it.

The sensations of freeing something from the bone are quite distinguishable from other physical releases of trauma. There is a lightness of being accompanied by a grounding in the feet and legs, and a feeling of centering and calmness from the inside out. The bones free the tendons and muscles toward outward expansion and function. There is no longer a struggle between body parts. When we are free from the bone, there is an inner strength and solidness of structure. Structure can begin to determine function.

When I began to work with bone penetration and see how it affected both myself and others, I wanted to understand why it was so powerful. I went back to the embryology section of my anatomy books and learned that bones develop before muscles in the formation of the fetus. Once bones are formed, the muscles grow from them at specific points via tendons. I believe, in fact, that bone stores greater levels of body intelligence and when penetrated it awakens any muscle attached to it to perform its specific function optimally. I believe muscles become more flexible and have greater ease of movement when bone is stimulated first.

You cannot free yourself of anything until you are aware of it. Sometimes just by touching or rolling into a physical expression of an experience that has been unconsciously holding you back, you can free yourself of it forever.

The culture we live in focuses primarily on muscle and skin. Yet by working to the bone, we can make these outer layers much fuller and healthier. I find now that there is no conflict between my inner and outer layers. They do not pull me in opposite directions.

YAMUNA ZAKE is the creator of Yamuna Body Logic and Yamuna Body Rolling. She has co-written the book BODY ROLLING: An Experiential Approach to Complete Muscle Release. She has a private practice in New York City and trains throughout the country. Her U.S. teaching center for her two-year Body Rolling Certification is the Alive & Well Massage School in San Anselmo, CA. For more information about Yamuna Body Rolling call 1-888-226-9616 or visit the website at www.bodylogic.com.

AHP PERSPECTIVE Apr/May 2001 Table of Contents

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