Bodywork

I barely woke up as she started pressing her finger into my C-section scar. “What are you doing?” I asked her.

“Releasing fascia,” she said. Fascia is a connective tissue throughout our bodies that acts like webbing, keeping our innards where they’re supposed to be.

As she pressed on my scar, Ann E. talked to me about my body in a way I wouldn’t really come to understand for many months, but which I could experience the effects of right then and there. She used one or two fingers, touching my torso gently until she felt something release, then she’d move her fingers an inch or two to a new spot and press gently there.

I didn’t know what I should expect from this subtle prodding, but it wasn’t for my lungs to inflate like balloons. As Ann E. worked, my breath deepened, my lungs filling as they never had. “My breath just completely changed,” I said.

“Yeah, I just created some real estate in your torso so your lungs are less constricted,” she said.

Now she had my attention.

Although I have spent about three decades — nearly my entire adult life — in talk therapy, I have always felt fundamentally unfixable.
Article