Massage & Mind-Body Skills for the Entire Family
The Family that Plays Together Stays Together - True Now More than Ever.
In the cycles of connection and stress that we all go through, a simple secret is this: an embodied family celebration.
Why? Creating an embodied celebration cultivates momentum for family love, connection, resilience, and health for the entire year. It helps to preserve the original spark, chemistry and magnetism that brought you together as a family and becomes a foundation for your family all year round. Imagine - Valentine's Day - all year round.
Creating the physical and emotional cycles and routines to support physical embodiment helps to prevent the life stressors that erode the chemistry and connections between partners and within the family. And, if stress or trauma occurs to a family member, or the enitre family, the foundatoin of this 'Family Embrace' can help to repair the deep, sublte, and invisible stress responses that can erode the famliy connection.
The Secret Ingredient for Year-Round Family Health: an Embodied Family Celebration!
The Secret: mind-body-somatic skills and massage that are integrated over the rhythms of family activities and cycle of weeks, months and the year. These are simple activities done as a family, such as yoga, dancing, singing, laughing, hiking, sports, fitness, hugs and embrace, and meditating together. And these can be enhanced with family therapeutic massage and more advanced mind-body skills drawn from integrated health practices.
This embodiment plan celebrates the spark and magnetic chemistry that brought you and your partner together before your wonderful children arrived.
Life stress can tear the fabric of your family and contribute to stress related illness in both children and adults.
More intentional then a 'once a year' valentine’s celebration, these activities cultivate the felt-sense of love, affection, and connection, caring, nurturing, and communication. A family romance. A broader and deeper heart, passion and family romance.
Its more about the family connection, and less about the activity.
Resilience in the Face of Stress – Avoiding High Risk Conflict
Stress for any one individual within the family can cascade to other family members. If the load of stress elevates fo rthe individual family member, or all family members, a state of high stress, defensive response can be triggered at a deep physical level.
This contributes to conflict.
Unfortunately, this condition is seen in high conflict divorces. Good people who fell in love, had a child, lacked adequate resilience skills, then passed their threshold to navigate the life stressors.
The result was a recoil response into high defensive physiology. In those cases, the defensive responses can prevail over the physical love, affection and connection response. The partnership and the family can descend into bitter, shocking conflict. Sadly, health impacts upon the child and the partners can occur.
What Makes a family – What Breaks a Family?
What makes a family: a sparkle, a warmth. A subtle and bold ‘Yes’. An oxytocin love bubble of ‘we’. Hearts beating as one. Resilience and rebound.
What breaks a family are often the tangible and invisible stresses and traumas of our lives, and generations. Life stressors can tear the fabric of your family and contribute to stress related illness. Family health is becoming more important as the stress level for almost everyone is rising.
A embodied family celebration is a family preventative, integrative health tactic in disguise.
Mind-Body-Somatic Skills & Massage
Combining mind-body-somatic skills plus advanced massage and bodywork concentrates and trains the family to generate happiness and connection - endorphins, natural internal opioids, oxytocin, and social-brain engagement.
‘Somatic’ and ‘Mind-Body’ can mean shared movement, breath and voice expression, laughing together, shared meditation and stillness, hugs, hiking, play, family therapeutic massage, and more.
A central goal is to practice family ‘co-regulation’. Partners and families share experiences – both the easy ones and the difficult ones. Training the ‘happiness and connection’ reflex build resilience when hard times hit the relationship and the family.
The goal is to cultivate skills, rhythms and routines that incorporate these activities to concentrate the ability to de-stress and connect quickly. This is a wise and efficient plan to build momentum for the weeks and months ahead.
As well, these are helpful skills to implement before relationship stress or the stress of life takes its toll.
For some individuals, couples and families, learning therapeutic massage skills, receiving professional massage, and practicing family therapeutic massage can be a core tactic to dissipate stress that is deeply held in the body. Add bonus - this can improvce your ability as a heart-centered huggger.
Conflict between couples can sometimes be traced to stress held deep in the non-cognitive, non-verbal realms of the body and psyche. The skin is an important doorway into that realm. Massage is an easy tactic to ground, center and connect partners and the family.
Touch brings awareness. The skin, the largest organ of the body, is central to a close family connection. Or when in destress – the skin plays a role in a cold, distant relationship.
What does Family Therapeutic Massage look like?
Individual massage – just relax and receive a great massage. Clear your own stress so that you don’t pass it on to your partner or children.
Self massage – learn skills to massage your own body, such as feet, back points, head and neck points. This can help relieve headaches, improve sleep, and more.
Four handed partner massage training: each partner learns to give a therapeutic massage to the other partner by mirroring a professional massage therapist, myself, while we (you an I) both give your partner a massage(these can be a fully clothed massage, no need for disrobing). Great for Valentine's Day, beneficial all year round.
Family massage and mind-body-somatic day: This can happen at your home or at my office. The entire family joins together and learns to give the other family members a simple, brief, clothing on massage - about 10-20 minutes per person. The parents learn basics of pediatric massage focusing on common point of the child’s body that get stressed. Such as, neck, shoulders, mid and low back, ribs and breathing. Plus, the internal brain and organ systems related to surface muscle tension. These physical stress patterns are common even in young kids. This improves sleep, relaxation, child developmental progression, general health, and family connection.
Family Resilience circle: join together as a family to practice resilience skills to over come general life stress, or overcome the stress and trauma of a significant event, such as an illness or accident. The goal is to disspiate the past and generate resilience in the present.
The family that plays together – wisely – stays together - happily.
For More Information
Contact Daniel now for a complimentary, no obligation, 20 min Family Wellness consultation.
415-846-8181
About Daniel
In private practice for over 20 years, Daniel has conducted over 10,000 hours of client sessions, supporting clients from all walks of life, and supporting families and children from pre-natal pregnancy massage to 93 years, old and hospital hospice support.
He is a licensed Massage Practitioner, with certificates in Pediatric Massage, and Somatic Therapies, and training in birth psychology and developmental trauma. He is on the faculty of the Globe Institute for Sound and Consciousness, and has been a keynote presenter and lecturer at the Integrative Medicine Network at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center.