What is a Session Like?

Your SI practitioner will first conduct a pre-interview to discuss you health history, discuss your expectations, and answer your questions. He will assess your traumas, surgeries, and screen for possible contraindications such as fever, cancer, acute inflammation, severe rheumatoid arthritis, osteoporosis, etc.

He will then have you strip down to your underwear or bathing suit and observe you standing and walking to assess for balance, structural alignment, and freedom of movement. Then he will have you lie on a bodywork table and will begin to palpate your tissues to get a sense of your fascial contractions and your level of sensitivity. He will then begin pressing on the tissues with fingertips, or sometimes knuckles or elbows in a deep and very slow manner, moving to begin freeing up the fascial tissues. He may ask you to move the part being worked on in a certain way to assist the process or may just ask you to relax and let go. The work feels deep and may have a warm and pleasant feeling, but occasionally is a little uncomfortable when encountering very bunched up areas of fascia.

You may recognize the feeling as being somewhat similar to when someone digs their thumbs into your shoulders at the end of a stressful day. You may go “awwwwhhh” …or “ooooh, I didn’t know I was holding that there…but please don’t stop….can you go a little deeper there”…”that’s a little intense, can you back off just a little…” You are in charge of the depth, so it will never exceed your pain tolerance level. The vast majority of most sessions are quite pleasurable and clients can’t wait to come back the next week. Yet, it feels different than massage in that the strokes are far quicker in massage, different than chiropractic in that there are no sudden movements, different than physical therapy in that there aren’t repetitive range-of-motion movements. It is quite unique.

Parts of some sessions may be conducted with the client sitting on a bench or standing. Several times through the session the practitioner may ask you to stand up and try walking while he observers you for changes and for parts that may still need to be worked on in order to have the changes feel integrated.

Sessions usually take from 75 to 90 minutes, and are paced by what we are trying to accomplish in that session more than by the clock. Most clients will opt to attend a 10-session series at about a weekly interval where each part of the body has its own focus, such that as the weeks go by every part of the body has been covered at the surface level, the deep level, and at the level where the surface and the deep meet and interact. Sometimes due to schedule or financing a client is not able to commit to a full series. In this case other arrangements can be made including a customized miniseries. Let your practitioner know ahead of time what your time and money constraints are and together you will be able to work out a plan.

Most people come in feeling a bit tense from the fast pace of modern life, but leave feeling very relaxed and very alert, similar to after a good meditation session. But the body feels freer, like it is supposed to be. Sometimes, later that day or the next, there may be some residual soreness but this varies from person to person. Any soreness will lift in a day or two and the freedom of movement and breathing, and a new lightness of being is experienced. Occasionally, clients will have some emotion come up that they were not expecting, and may even have a memory of a traumatic event that had left their tissue contracted, as the practitioner frees up that contracted tissue. This is usually quite welcomed by clients as they experience old traumas actually leave their bodies that they have been stuck carrying for many years. This results in a feeling of freedom from carrying such burdens, and is really quite relieving.

Occasionally, a client will feel a little bit vulnerable walking down the street after a session because the rigid body armor that they have been carrying in their soft tissues has freed up. As they learn to live with less protection over next few days this feeling passes. Many psychotherapists send in clients who are having slow progress in therapy because they are so body armored from living in a dangerous and hostile environment at some point in their life. As the tissues free up it frees up the client’s ability to be there with another person with an emotional availability that they have not experienced in a long time.

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