Unlock the wisdom of your spine – Portal I Am
Metropol deputy editor Tamara Pitelen tries out spinal energetics, a healing modality that works with the spine to release stored tension and emotional patterns.
Christchurch-based somatic therapist and founder of Portal I Am, Fernanda Cecchi works with energy. Your body’s energy. Once you get on her massage table, through gentle, low-force and often non-contact techniques, she feels around your energy body for the places within you where your energy has got, say, ‘stuck’, and she helps release it. Unravelling your knots and dissolving the blocks, allowing the energy to flow around your system again, not unlike releasing a kink in a garden hose.
She does this with a healing modality called spinal energetics. It is a nervous-system-based modality that works with the spine. Created by Australian chiropractor Dr Sarah Jane, spinal energetics blends chiropractic concepts, somatic therapy, and energy medicine.
“When loss is too overwhelming, especially in childhood, the nervous system often protects us by storing what couldn’t be fully felt. The event may belong to the past, but part of us can remain emotionally frozen there, waiting for the opportunity to finish what was never completed,” Fernanda says.
Combining elements of Eastern philosophy with Western clinical understanding, the aim with spinal energetics is to release stored tension and emotional patterns. In simple terms, it’s about shifting the stuff that’s keeping you stuck and causing imbalance in your life, be that emotional, physical, or mental. This is a lack of ease, which leads to dis-ease.
“Trauma is not only a memory in the mind, it’s also a pattern stored in the body. When energy gets frozen in moments of overwhelm, the body holds on to it for safety. Through spinal energetics, we gently invite those stories to move, release, and integrate. Healing begins when the body feels safe enough to let go.”
How does our energy get ‘stuck’? According to Fernanda, stress, shock, emotional experiences, and periods of prolonged pressure influence the way we breathe, move, protect ourselves and respond to the world.
“Sometimes, even when we understand what happened intellectually – or believe we have moved on – the body may continue to respond as though it still needs to protect us. This can show up as persistent tension, difficulty relaxing, feeling constantly ‘on’, emotional overwhelm, disconnection from the body, or patterns that seem difficult to shift,” Fernanda says.
I’ve had a handful of spinal energetics sessions with Fernanda, and each one has been different. Initially, I would just lie there, even doze off, while Fernanda worked away, doing what she does. Afterwards, she might say something like, ‘We released some stress that had built up around your heart…’
In later sessions though, my body has become more responsive, and I feel the urge to move, stretch, and arch my back or let out a sigh. At times, I’ve found myself crying and at least once I’ve had a good wail and primal howl. When that happens, it feels like a deep grief or hurt is being released from my very soul.
Personally, I am a big fan of energy healing. For me, it’s both a way to address long-held childhood wounds and traumas (big and little, we’ve all got them) as well as a way to release the day-to-day stresses that come at us every day. It’s the energy equivalent of having a shower to get rid of everyday grime. Modalities like spinal energetics are also a great way to reconnect with the body in a world where so many of us are so firmly stuck in our heads and disconnected from the pain we’re storing in our bodies. There are many other ways, of course, everything from yoga and breathwork to dance and meditation – anything that gets you to get back in touch with your inner self. Find the way that works for you.
For more information on spinal energetics and other energy-based healing modalities, go to portaliam.co.nz.
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This article is based on independent and personal experience. Tamara Pitelen paid for all services herself; the content is not sponsored or influenced by any third party.
