Rosen Method Bodywork

Rosen Method Bodywork (or Rosen Method) is a type of complementary and alternative medicine. This bodywork, described as 'psychosomatic', claims to help integrate one's bodily and emotional/mental experience. In the tradition of sensory awareness methods, Rosen Method Bodywork focuses clients' attention onto internal sensations and emotions that arise as areas for the body are gently contacted with a 'listening' touch. This means that the practitioner's goal is not to manipulate or fix clients but rather to notice areas of tension and stillness. The practitioner uses words to help clients become aware of these held places in the body and encourages clients to describe what they are feeling. Clients felt experiences can arise directly from the held places or from life events, both present and past. This nonjudgmental noticing and listening by the practitioner helps clients to identify unconscious patterns of muscular holdings, feelings, and learned behavioral responses. Rosen Method Bodywork, therefore, is presumed to help clients have greater access to their interoception, their ability to feel the inner condition of the body. Research studies show that higher levels of interception are connected to greater resilience, improved immune function, and the reduction of stress, anxiety, and depression. The main theory underpinning this method is that a person protects themselves from past painful experiences through tightening muscles in the body that are involved in emotional expression and suppression, especially in the diaphragm, the prime muscle of breathing. Chronic, unconscious muscular tightening suppresses interoception and therefor separates one from one's true self, since many interoceptive sensations, feelings and emotional responses have not been able to be felt in the body, and thus cannot be known, acted upon or modulated in the present. This alleged protection against feeling and knowing how past difficult experiences are underlying one's perceptions, beliefs and experience of living is...