Body Stress Release
(BSR)
Body Stress Release is a proudly South African technique founded by the Cape Town couple, Drs Ewald and Gail Meggersee, in the early 1980s, who realized that the body responded precisely with every release they did.
Today BSR has grown to be practised in over 22 countries, three international associations and two academies.
What is body stress?
Sometimes when I talk to people and use the word "stress", they smile at me and say they love their life and work and don't have any stress.
A comment like this only refers to an emotional state of being happy and does not mean that your body has no locked up or stored tension in the muscle structure.
Tension or stress gets locked up in your body because of three reasons:
1. Physical/mechanical reasons
Physical tension becoming locked up is a slow process for most of us. Long-term lousy posture might be the reason for getting stiff shoulders, lower back pain, headaches or even some sensations in your arms/hands or legs and feet.
For others, physical tension might happen more instantly due to some traumatic experience, like a motor vehicle accident or falling from something. Even a minor 'fender bender' accident will also cause your body to lock up muscle tension.
In athletes, tension can lock up in the body due to extensive training.
In short, we accumulate physical/mechanical stress in our bodies due to anything having an adverse or overload physical effect on our bodies.
2. Chemical reasons
Have you ever heard of someone who gets a headache when they smell cigarette smoke or walk into the nursery and smell the fertilizer? Their body will react immediately after their senses get in contact with a particular chemical. Some people might refer to it as the body having an allergic reaction, but during this process, the body goes into protective mode, accumulating tension in the muscle structure and using the muscles as a splint to protect the body.
This may cause nausea, migraines, headaches, and tension in the neck and shoulder area, just to name a few.
Chemical stress is something we accumulate due to products we are eating, drinking, smelling, or touching the skin.
3. Emotional
Emotional stress is something we all are very familiar with. When one receives terrible news, the body may go into a state of shock. Struggling or experiencing conflict with colleagues and employees,
relationships disintegrating, financial worries, writing exams or making decisions in our daily lives can be overwhelming, which will cause the body to tighten muscles in a protective or splinting action.
Emotional stress accumulating over time sometimes feels "good" for some people. They may like the rush of a deadline or the feeling of being pushed to work longer hours, and they thrive in these moments, but doing this over a long period might cause a "burnout" effect, leading to various types of adverse effects in your body.
When a traumatic negative emotional event happens, it can cause the body to go into shock, causing your brain to store the tension in the body to cope better with the traumatic event.
Body Stress Release story and Consultation
The technique is designed to be gentle and non-invasive, using the body's own biofeedback system to locate stored/locked-up tension.
Body Stress Release stands firmly under the umbrella of complementary and NOT alternative.
I am proud to work hand in hand and not in conflict with the medical field; as a practitioner, I do not make any diagnoses, nor treat any conditions or give advice towards any condition.
I aim to release locked-up/stored tension in the body's muscle structure. And restore effective two-way communication between the brain and the body, improving self-healing and coping capacity.
The first three sessions will be done within two weeks, allowing the body to readjust and adapt to new muscle memory patterns, helping the body to empty the "stress bucket."
After the 3rd session, the way forward will be discussed with the client, and sessions will be adapted to the client's needs.
Duration of each session may vary; usually, a BSR session at the Pain-to-Wellness Support Centre is approximately 40 min.
Why should you receive a Body Stress Release session?
Think of your body as a brilliant being (or a perfectly designed encapsulated two-way communication system).
This system is self-healing, but when the stress reaches an overload status, some outside help may be needed). When you are sick with the flu, your body knows to create antibodies to fight the virus.
The body can identify and handle threats as well as it possibly can.
Sometimes to fight the threat, the body needs some outside help; for example, If you have a fracture, you need to get to the right kind of doctor to help you.
And so then we have BSR. At times our body has been mistreated for so long; we keep suppressing pain, thinking it will go away if we do not think about it. Or we drink some medication, so we can't feel the pain and continue our lives beyond what our bodies can handle.
But in fact, the pain has been numbed in some way, causing you to think you are healed, but you are busy causing more and more damage to your body, creating a downward spiral in your health.
When stress gets to a point where it becomes an overload, the brain will store the tension in the body as a coping mechanism.
We have become a society that is constantly thriving in fight or flight mode, which is detrimental to our overall health and strains our adrenal glands and our system as a whole.
When this tension of overload happens in the physical body structure, the muscles take on the role of protection.
Muscles will start to brace the body, wanting to protect it. When we numb the pain however we choose and continue with our stressful daily routine, the body will start using successive layers of muscles to help brace the body or a specific area. This will continue until the more superficial muscles get tight and take on the role of protection, causing a lack of movement.
For some of us, this is happening over a period of time. We keep ignoring the pain, we keep on numbing the pain, or we might have the philosophy of "no pain, no gain", but in fact, we are damaging our bodies.
When feeling pain, it is a clear message from the body to the brain that something somewhere is wrong, and you need to address it. By postponing the issue in whatever way, it will come back and haunt you at a later stage.
With BSR, the tension stored in the body is identified through your body's response mechanism. When identified, the accumulated stress is released with a gentle but precise impulse, sending a message to your brain to respond to this specific stimulation of muscle and nerve pathways.
Body Stress Release has helped thousands of clients from all over the globe. For more information about BSR, you are welcome to contact the P2WS Centre or look at the BSR Association website: www.bodystressrelease.com