Positive Body Image Through Touch

Every Shape, Every Size Compliments Of: Whether a client weighs 30 pounds or 300 pounds, massage and bodywork therapists are trained to appreciate all bodies, without judgment, and to deliver the best care Positive Body possible. During your session, your therapist’s goal will be to create an environment that feels safe and nurturing for you, all while Image Through delivering much needed therapeutic touch. Touch Through the Scars A negative body image is not necessarily about those few extra pounds on the hips. It might instead be tied to the scars of past injuries and surgeries. Massage can help here, too. For burn victims, research has shown massage can help in the healing process, while for postsurgery breast cancer patients, massage and bodywork can reintegrate a battered body and spirit. In addition to softening scar tissue and speeding postsurgery recovery, massage and bodywork for these clients is about respect, reverence, and learning to look at, and beyond, the scars. member © 2010 Associated Bodywork & Massage Professionals Combating Negative Images Reconnect with Massage The Value of Touch How do you see yourself? Are you Being unhappy with our bodies Touch is a content with the person looking back at has serious, and sometimes lifelong, powerful ally you from the mirror or do you frown in ramifications. Feelings of unworthiness in the quest frustration? Researchers say more than 80 and self-loathing can set up a lifetime of for physical percent of U.S. women are unhappy with self-deprecating behaviors. What regularly and mental their appearance. Whether it’s lamenting scheduled massage allows us to do is “get health. It not about having a pear-shaped figure instead back” into our bodies and reconnect with only can help of an hourglass or exhibiting more serious, ourselves. Massage can help us release you be more self-hating body dysmorphic disorders, body physical and mental patterns of tension, in tune with image is under siege in our celebrity-fixated enhancing our ability to experience our your body, society. While Madison Avenue continues bodies (regardless of their shape and size) in but it can to airbrush photos of svelte, 120-pound a more positive way. Just as it facilitates our help create supermodels for magazine covers, others ability to relax, massage also encourages a sense of are trying to teach young girls to love their an awareness of wellness and bodies, beautiful imperfections and all. One the body, often “wholeness” way to combat the Hollywood hype and to allowing us to more that is often create an appreciation for the bodies we clearly see and lost in our segmented, overscheduled lives. have—and teach our children the same—is identify destructive When we regain that connection, it’s much through hands-on massage and bodywork. behaviors, easier to remember that our bodies are including something to be cherished, nurtured, and overeating or loved, not belittled, betrayed, and forgotten. purging. Valuable for every age and every Massage also body type, massage and bodywork have creates a sense of innumerable benefits. Here are a few: nurturing that is • Alleviates low-back pain and especially powerful improves range of motion. when it comes to • Decreases medication dependence. poor body image. • Eases anxiety and depression. Accepting the • Enhances immunity by nonjudgmental stimulating lymph flow. touch of a trained • Exercises and stretches weak, therapist goes a tight, or atrophied muscles. long way toward • Increases joint flexibility. rebuilding • Improves circulation by pumping oxygen an appreciation and respect for your and nutrients into tissues and vital organs. own body. If we find acceptance for • Releases endorphins—the who we are and how we look, we are body’s natural painkiller. giving ourselves permission to live comfortably in the skin we have..

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