By Chris Hagey

We are all kinesthetic. Along with our auditory and visual abilities our sense of touch is one of the 3 main ways through which we understand ourselves and our world. We rely on our sense of kinesthetic to process and learn by feeling through touch, space and movement. We sometimes call this our tactile sense.

There is a wonderful format of bodywork emerging recently that makes the most of our natural kinesthetic ability. It's a healing therapy that deliberately pairs our empathy and intuitive with our kinesthetic capability. By listening through touch we can train ourselves to pick up patterns that are out of balance within and around our physical body. We can learn to work in a much more tangible way with challenges that are held at emotional, intellectual and mental levels that neither our visual or auditory modes can access as easily. Beyond finding negative patterns, this bodywork can simply be used as a powerful aid in helping us to process - we are constantly in motion and in process, mostly on levels and planes that we do not tune into consciously all that often, if ever.

This type of bodywork can allow our subconscious to express and to process in a very fluid, gracious way - often this can ease the inner tension and anxiety levels that may have resisted all our best efforts with other healing formats. Yet it is also best when used hand in hand with any or all other therapeutic modes, even standard medical treatments.

We could easily call this "hands-off" bodywork since quite often it will involve working well off of the body itself, anywhere from skimming inches above to as much as several feet away from the body.

Any stress or pain patterns we hold are emanating from us yet may not be doing so physically. We can use our kinesthetic ability to locate these areas of stress and then call on our intuitive to help us know exactly how to work with them in the most loving way. This simple formula can create healing magic for us. The best part is that we can practice this type of bodywork anywhere since it requires only our hands, our intuitive and our kinesthetic sense.

Getting Started is easy but as with all things, practice over time will give us the best results.

Step 1: Relax expectations: Remind yourself that this is your personal exploration; it's an activity of self-love and nurturement. As such, the very practice of this bodywork is a win-win for you no matter what you experience. We need to turn off our mental mind and logic which will always want to qualify and quantify. Set yourself towards feeling and moving instead of thinking and theorizing. It is crucial that you be gentle whenever you do this work. There is no pressure, there is only practice. Typically it will take anywhere from 3 to 5 weeks of practice with this bodywork before you will feel yourself truly relaxing your expectations. The more our expectations (aka mental belief code and chatter) relax, the more successfully we will be able to tune into what we are feeling.

Step 2: Relax the body as much as possible, with a special focus on shoulders and arms, since that is what we will be using to do our bodywork. Shoulder rolls, neck rolls and grasping our hands behind us to squeeze our shoulder blades will all help to release physical tension. If there is floor space available, you might also want to sit and stretch your spine or if you have favorite yoga moves those can be used.

Step 3: Consider How to Position Yourself We need to allow our intuitive to guide us to the proper vantage point for our bodywork. We can lay down, we can stand or we can sit, either on a chair or on the floor. The position we take to do our bodywork does matter; this is all about a very subtle spatial attunement so everything related to our body matters, even our body position. We may start by sitting in a chair and feel at some point in our session that we need to shift body positions. Our empathy and intuitive will be able to correctly navigate us in this.

Step 4: Tune Into Yourself and begin moving your hand above your arm, leg or other area in super slow motion to pick up any locks or cold spots or other such anomalies. There is no rule here…it is all going to be intuitive and fluid. There are endless ways that you may feel yourself moved - and each will be perfect timing in that moment.

In doing this type of subtle bodywork, we allow the flow patterns to present themselves to us. We allow the tension and pain to speak out through movement along the body. In practice this will mean that we might feel a subtle airflow moving our hand along the body, likely above it rather than on it. We will feel these as whispers of some sort that are so very subtle we are not sure what to call them. With our kinesthetic learning style we can feel far more depth at any one moment than we can see or hear! That is why using our kinesthetic sense can be the ultimate key to unlocking issues , pain or patterns that have held us back and for helping us to process what we need to , when we need to.

You will want to begin by moving very slowly about 3 inches above your body area of choice until you encounter an area that feels off in some way - this can be either something you physically feel or can simply be a knowing that you have no logical reason for. When you encounter this you would stop and keep your hand there hovering just overhead. As you do this you are focusing on that spot more effectively. Don't try to put it into logical terms.    Think via feelings.    Do you feel that your hand is too close to the area, as if there is some invisible force pushing you away - not unlike how two south pole magnet ends repel one another?   If so, continue pulling outwards away from the body until you feel you can hover there comfortably.

By allowing this spike of tension you have picked up to push your hand outward away from it, you may find yourself even 2 feet away from your body.  That is fine. In fact, that is excellent because you can now *really begin to work on the extent of the pain.  It emanates all the way out in the airspace to the boundary line where your hand is now hovering. It is this space between your hand and your body that is alive with charged  (aka distressed) energy. If you ignored this area and simply placed your hand on the skin there you would be applying far, far too much force and healing would not take place easily or at all. But by backing off and beginning at the edge of the distress - as far out as you need to go - you will be truly allowing this ultra sensitive, charged area to finally be seen, be validated, be processed and thus, to be released. Don't be surprised if along with that come sudden memories or smells or colors or emotions.   You might even feel the airpace as buzzing or heated or crackling.   However, don't be alarmed if nothing comes with that except a feeling that you are relaxing "something". There are no rules on what you can expect here - and it's all good.

As this release happens you will feel your hand slowly begin to naturally move in… like you now have exchanged one of those southpole magnets for a north pole and the two are now drawn together. What you are really doing is kinesthetically feeling the contours of the distressed energy as it releases and becomes less charged. As this dissipates through your steady loving focus, the space between will grow shorter and shorter until finally your hand gently touches your body.   The trick to remember is that you are not moving your hand…you are merely following the flow of the energy distress as it grows smaller and smaller, naturally drawing you back to the body. We can and will feel this if we allow ourselves to do so.

That point is when physical touch can commence there! Likely, if you have had deep tissue or any other type of massage, the masseuse has covered this area thoroughly - yet without taking the subtle energy charge back down to the body level none of those massages have helped that tension release. But from here on out physical touch will be far more likely to aid this process for you.

What I have learned in my practice is that there is nothing more critical to our long term healing process than to work on the space between in these ways. And when we can touch our body we have acheived incredible victory! Many people, when they first begin this therapy say "well , I can touch this area right now"….however, often this is merely our brain / logic simply doing what is normal to us from the time we learned body coordination and movement as a baby. Just because we can create the motor coordination and muscular movement necessary to touch our body in an area doesn't mean we can truly handle being touched there at all levels. There are the more invisible levels within us that may be in distress there. Those are the ones you would be working to soothe via kinesthetic bodywork.   We are each equipped to focus on these invisible layers of ourselves through our empathy, intuition and kinesthetic sense. We were born with these capabilities to reach precisely these areas where our logic and usual senses cannot go.

Kinesthetic Bodywork is Moving Meditation. If we were to think about all the minute details we perform during one session of bodywork, we would think it to be a hopelessly complicated technique to master. However our intuitive is aptly suited for this task! The more we can turn off our logic and allow our intuition and empathy to guide our movements, the more we will find ourselves moving effortlessly from one position to the next. We might work ourselves from head to toes and back again over and over.

There will be areas we "feel" we can touch more deeply, those that want to be lightly touched and areas that will not be able to receive touch yet. Often we will have each hand working as a team. We may be scanning our right arm from about 2 inches above slowly when all of a sudden we feel that we need to go down to our ankles, grab them both gently and just stay there focused on them like this …until we feel it is time to move on again. The timing of how long to stay in any one place is entirely keyed to reading the feelings of our body. This could be 10 seconds or it may be 2 minutes or longer. We may work with ourselves for a total of 30 seconds or we may feel we want to work for 30 minutes.

Not only will our intuition and kinesthetic sense be able to guide us from area to area in quick succession, but this will also tell us exactly how we must place our hands.

For example, perhaps we feel that our knees are wanting to be touched. When we move our hands there and place them on the kneecaps we might right away feel that this is the wrong position. So we listen to our knees through our empathy and feel we could begin by placing only the fingertips of our hands on the very central position of our kneecap. . And we hold that there until we feel some tiny invisible click of release. That may be tangible or less tangible. But when we feel it, we will also simultaneously feel the urge to move our hands into another position. This is a key point: When we have succeeded in opening up an area we will naturally feel nudged to move one or both of our hands.

Whether or not we feel any releasing going on, we can rely on our sense of feeling like it's time to move one or both hands - and when we feel this, that means we have aided our processing. If that processing had been stuck there for days, weeks or decades, it's now been unstuck and we are allowed to move into new processing territory. For any issue or setback in our life there is an entire process of energy movement towards completion/ resolution - likely from head to toe and back again, most of it taking place in our subconscious. We can facilitate this processing for ourselves through kinesthetic bodywork.

We each have a powerful team in our empathic, intuitive and kinesthetic senses . While moving to the tune of our body's needs, it is a fulfillment unlike any other and it will free many locks for us. This form of self nurturment is incredibly soothing and relaxing. It can also be facilitated for others and there is a wider range of possibilties when another aids us, such as working on backside areas.

Opening up to the full capacity of our kinesthetic sense is going to offer us a modality that can heal issues and hurts which may have felt as though they could not be found or released before with any other method of attunement work.

The best part about this bodywork is that we each come standard with the empathy, intuitive and kinesthetic sense we need to do this for ourselves. We need only practice to flex and build the "muscle" of pairing these together and working with them formally.

This is not only bodywork for everyone, it is extremely powerful bodywork that we each can do anywhere, anytime. When we can't think of what to do next, we can turn to our empathy and kinesthetic sense to help us feel out the way to go. This makes kinesthetic bodywork a great addition to place into our tool box of techniques.

The best way to begin is to very slowly scan your arm while focusing on feelings you may pick up in the airspace between your hand and arm

This is the lightest of touch!

my hands are about one inch off of the head at both sides.

...and here I am cued to use only my fingertips - notice my left hand needs to be upside down (to me) so that I can place the right fingertip at the right spot

here I am tuning in - my hands are almost not touching

when I feel I can touch the foot I begin with a very gentle hold like this one

Making a circuit here between foot and top of lower leg - we are working our way to the knee area

...and here I am cued to use only my fingertips to create a circuit between 3 places.

How many ways can we touch our knee? I begin here by feeling a need to work on the sides of the knee rather than the top

When I place all my focus on the kneecap now I feel a need to do this very gingerly - one fingertip centered on the kneecap

Then , with a feeling that I still cannot fully and directly approach the knee, I gently hold the knee cap all around. This is incredibly nurturing

Only now am I finally cued that I can place my whole hand on top of the kneecap

Here I am able to really surround and nurture the knee very fully using both hands. It might take many minutes before you can arrive at this point.

And the next step leads us to bridge between knee and hands. I will hold this position of the two areas lightly until I feel I can move on.

On the hands for this man I am feeling that I need to use full physicality so am pulling outward, much like a massage therapist will work

..and after a bit of this I feel I need to go gentle again, surrounding the palm with both of mine

Back to a more of a massage activity again working on the fingers and knuckles

...and here I am massaging the hand using both of my hands very actively. It is my intuitive that tells me when to use both hands, how much physical pressure to apply and when to stop or move onto another area

Here I am beginning to feel the cues to work the entire arm and I begin by holding these 2 areas gently, not moving until I feel the receival in the arm.

Here I am now supporting the arm and gently allowing it to express and *unwind* tension through subtle, slow movement.

Now in another position, I am working front and back sides at heart level without touching

As processing commences here I find myself needing to stand and place both hands at the backside