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Kalyani has been in private practice in Carmel California since 1983. Kalyani’s dedicated focus is on total integration and optimal alignment of the whole system: the long term best approach for healing chronic structural/functional pain patterns. She shares her life with her husband and beloved daughter. |
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Massage certification Monterey Institute of Touch, Monterey CA. 1983
Touch For Health Levels 1, 2 and 3 1984
Structural Rebalancing Training, Rajneeshpuram, OR 1984
Certifed Rolfer , Rolf Institute, Boulder CO, 1986
Rolf Movement Teacher , Rolf Institute, Boulder CO, 1990
Pilates MAT training, Carmel, CA 1991
Movement Integration training, Osho Ashram, Poona India
Masters in Traditional Chinese Medicine, Five Branches Institute, Santa Cruz, CA 1997
California State Acupuncture Licensure
Feldenkrais Practitioner Certification, Berkeley CA 2003
Bones For Life Practitioner training by Ruth Alon, BFL Founder 2007-continuing
Chronic knee pain got me to a Rolfer in my early 20’s. I know now how fortunate I was, at that early age, to have heeded the call to pay attention to my body.
Pain communicates a need for improvement. Finding out which path leads there is the journey. “There are many roads up the mountain,” sages say. This website describes four pathways, my skill set: Rolfing, Feldenkrais, Bones For Life, and Acupuncture. This section will detail how I’ve come to blend these tools to maintain well-being.
A Rolfer’s hand’s guided my soft tissue through a basic Rolfing 10 series. that improved my alignment such that my knee pain disappeared. I was so impressed and thankful that such progress could be had naturally that I decided to learn how to Rolf.
In my first year of practice poor body mechanics brought new challenges: It wasn’t long before I’d need a session nearly every time I’d give one! This opened up the next chapter of learning: Movement Education.The Rolf Movement Teacher’s training helped me transpose my newly found structural alignment into correct biomechanics; clearly every daily action I made was an opportunity to embody my new stability.
The circle of structure-creating-function-creating-structure was exciting. Recognizing this relationship made it easier to remember that discomfort is the reminder to change how I used my body. The Rolfing/Movement education had given me the tools to achieve this. I fondly remember the first time I corrected my body use and immediately erased the pain signal in my knees. I felt empowered to steer my healing and my interest in this work blossomed.
Years later while on sabbatical at the Osho ashram in Poona, India I discovered a “movement integration” class. As we lay down on floor mats the Feldenkrais practitioners verbally directed us through simple, precise movement sequences with quite a bit of rest in between each directive. I wondered how so simple a process could be profound. I enjoyed the sense of relaxation, but I really like to see change!After the ATM (Awareness Through Movement) Lesson we stood to sense any differences. It was a pivotal moment where my perception of Body morphed from a black and white photo to a 4-color movie - such effortless balance and ease in standing…received with so “little” effort! I had experienced results like this but only after some pretty focused hands-on work from another practitioner. This occurred on my own. Astounding!
Moshe’ Feldenkrais is oft quoted: You can’t go where you want, if you don’t know where you are.” Most of us are fairly ignorant when it comes recognizing and responding to the signals that our bodies give. Refining one’s sensitivity is a persuasive pathway to well-being: Like calibrating your antennae for a more accurate read.
Where is the weight in your two sits bones as you read this? Do they feel balanced or tilted? If tilted, maybe that could have something to do with your back/neck pain? Have you ever thought about your sits bones? Or: As you breathe do you sense movement in all the dimensions of your ribcage? If not, which parts participate? Which do not? When did you last experience of a fully functioning rib cage, an easy breath, full and vibrant?
Sensing your body, your unique personal teacher, will correctly guide you to wellness.
Pain arises after other, more subtle, signals have gone unnoticed. Discomfort is a practical tool; it’s what gets people to my office. When a client is ready for the focused work that instills healthy organization in their system, their ability to discern comfort vs. habit (ie: discomfort) confirms the path toward improvement. Clients who work with me develop this skill.
Optimal biomechanics has very little to do with force or will and everything to do with awareness, access to the foundational support coming from the ground up and one’s ability to be supple enough to utilize that natural force. Clenched back muscles and tension are the tell tale signs that this relationship is lacking. Physical alignment is a dynamic reality. The fact that we all get stuck and stagnant in our bodies exemplifies the fact that we’ve lost continuity, our ability to flow.
We start from what is hurting: knee pain, neck strain, some history of injury. My individual sessions blend the structural hand’s-on elements using the Rolfing matrix with the functional re-patterning work of the Feldenkrais Method®. Chronic tension unwinds and daily function is confidently retrained to sustain and enable the positive changes of a session
A scant few clients in all these years were blessed with mentors or caregivers who modeled for them the idea that being in the flow of life is our nature. The metaphor of the physical proves this time and again. As our structure aligns with gravity and achieves a responsive balance the physical experience of that is…. Nothing: easy, floating, powerful, no thing. Think about it. What is balance? If you feel any one muscle group that means that group is doing more work than the others. When all the muscles around a joint work in harmony, in balance, the experience is a sense of ease and freedom, flexibility and lightness. When all the joints interact in a harmonized way the power from the earth can transmit freely though the system.
The transmission of that power through your structure dynamically organizes alignment. It’s what tells the muscles to act and the bones to strengthen. The central tent pole is trustworthy because the surrounding guide wires are in balance.The yin martial artists know this. The chi gung masters know this. Lock up any joint and the qi stops flowing. The healing power is lost.
As the work progresses the emphasis shifts away from releasing stuck tissue to refining correct function. It’s what we do everyday that has creates our patterns. We must learn to do what we do…well. I focus on the lifestyles of each person: like learning to transition from sitting to standing easily, making sure their body mechanics at their desk are right, walking, running, golfing or whatever functions are regular in their life and in need of improvement.
Western culture has been indoctrinated to believe that life is hard, that the aging process is a downward spiral of physical misery and a variety of things we are told about how to hold the body, how to posture ourselves. What we have learned in the somatic arts in the past few decades is disproving these ideas as myth.
After a decade of this work, I noticed that many clients needed support in other areas of their health. Things such a digestion, emotions, breathing and lack of energy, for example, were influencing the results that were possible in the body/movement arena.
I wanted other tools in my kit. Not being enamored with Western medicine I chose to add Traditional Chinese Medicine to my tool kit. It was the acupuncture that has allowed me to effect the energetic meridians in yet another way to help regulate and balance the body/being.
My job is as much a coach as it is to offer educated hand’s on guidance to my client’s tissue. I know many of the pit falls, and after 25 years of listening to my own system and working with many others’ I’ve seen patterns of wellness consistently emerge. These results can be discovered by anyone who is interested in their own improvement.
I enjoy seeing progress. When I see a client’s relief when they understand how they have been creating the problem and now understand how to steer themselves toward balance and out of pain I know we’ve turned a major corner aimed toward wholeness.
In truth I’m not so interested in the immediate pain cycle that presents itself when I see a client. I’m interested in an overhaul to their system that will bring them to a higher level of function that will continue to improve over time. I’m interested in establishing a base of neurological intelligence that will allow them to be peacefully moving into the later years of their lives and give them tools for trouble shooting their own pain patterns no matter what the circumstance.
Website and information copyright 1985-2012 Kalyani GIlliam-Salman / movementor.com. All rights reserved.
