When I went to PT school, we learned to take a person apart into muscles, bones, and systems like the nerves, organs, etc. We dissected human forms, always looking from the perspective of the precise thing that we were studying at that moment in time.

We also removed the fascial connections and were taught that the fascia essentially provided a means for separating the parts into their individual components. Ironically, we NEVER tried to put the human form back together MUCH less even gave ANY thought to how the body changes when preserved for study, which is NOT at all what it is like when we are alive and fully formed and fluid filled. If we had tried to recreate the human form, we would have failed miserably because we removed and never gave any thought to the fascia which is really what holds us in connection based on its function and structure.

What does that have to do with biomechanics and not being a machine? Well, looking at you as parts that creates a whole discounts that you are really a whole made of parts held together by this amazing structure called fascia.

Biomechanics looks at movement based on Newtonian physics and often describes moving in terms of a lever system. Humans and animals don’t move in this way at all, if we did, we would move like those robotic forms that have shown up on the news or in your video feeds, moving yes, but not with the dynamic and fluid way that all animals and humans do, unless you are hurt or moving in a constricted or compressed way for other reasons like fear or trying to be quiet as you try to surprise someone as you sneak up on them.

If you have read any of my Facebook posts you may have seen me post or talk about BIOTENSEGRITY. You might be wondering what that means and why that might be an important word to know or understand for being able to move with ease. Biotensegrity can be broken up into two pieces, BIO and TENSEGRITY. Tensegrity is a word that combines the terms tension and integrity. Much of the work in tensegrity models came from the architectural world and the structures built by Buckminster Fuller and others. In the 1980’s an orthopaedic surgeon, Stephen M. Levin, was the first to recognize and then publish articles that stated that the laws of tensegrity - tension with integrity was a much more logical description of human and animal movement than the standard use of biomechanics. From there, other researchers have added more material from the study of the fascia and movement and have now coined the words BIOTENSEGRITY and FASCIALTENSEGRITY that better describe how the body moves.

To be clear - biotensegrity is not another new technique or method. What it does offer us is a way to look at movement from a very different perspective, one that is exciting and full of possibility and freedom. It helps us to not only understand movement but also how our bodies take up space. Instead of thinking in terms of levers as a means of moving the body, it is surmised that we function more from a tension/compression system. When experienced, you can really feel and understand physically and intellectually that this makes WAY more sense in so many ways. Add in normal embryologic development (the embryo develops as a series of invaginated tubes), you really can’t see or imagine the body moving in a biomechanical way anymore! We are designed for ease of movement, efficient movement that includes rotation and spiraling, something that a lever can’t do because it is a hinge.

This perspective has really influenced my practice, including in how I apply manual therapy techniques and then how I incorporate the change in space that is made with the manual techniques to help the person maintain and or gain more space after and between sessions.

I hope that you have found this helpful and if not helpful, that perhaps it it has created a spark of interest and or curiosity about how you move. Or perhaps how you developed and were meant to move. Or what else is possible for you if you start to challenge the concept of biomechanics and play with the new and every expanding concept of biotensegrity and how it informs our movement and life.

Questions? Feel free to reach out to chat about this or send me a message on my Facebook page Halen Hands.

Springing ahead.....just happened. This time of year can be met with a yahoo as the evenings have more light OR a groan because of the "lost time". Actually, I think that we all lose time, in some way or another especially when I look at how long it's been since I posted here.

My hiatus (see last post) was fruitful. I moved into a new house. I lost my beloved Ella, who inspired me to write a blog about eating crap. I got Covid - twice. One of my kids got engaged. I dove down some deep and interesting studies, completing a 10 month course about biotensegrity specifically for physical therapists. I expanded my JFB MFR skill set with repeats of two courses - Fascial Pelvis and MFR 2 and by attending  Cervical Thoracic and Womens' Health classes in the last year. I grew so much professionally and personally from those last two courses!! I got to meet other therapists with similar outlooks about care. I met mentors, some of whom I now call friends, from all around the world. People fascinated with learning about the fascial system and more importantly, what it means to move when we look at movement through the lens of the fascial system. I felt part of a community again.

However, there has been a  nudge that I needed to do something different. It began to get bigger and bigger and bigger last year too. Like the first buds on a tree in the Spring. But unlike the tree or really any flower or grass that grows - even after a late spring snow -  I was afraid to to follow that nudge into something different, to branch out in new ways that I knew deep in my core that I NEEDED to do, at least until now.

Which leads to the new adventure part of this post -  or at least an expansion of something that always was but I treated as more of a hobby versus a true calling. In February of this year, I left the comfort of a dependable paycheck because what I knew I needed to do was not going to be something that I would get to do in that setting.  I am happy, and to be truthful, sometimes scared, to say that I have decided to make Haelen Hands what it needs to be in order to grow, my full time gig, not just a part time, when I have the time, business. 

I am excited at what the future holds! I plan to share more about what I have been learning in the past few years of my hiatus. I hope you come along on this adventure with me!

The Cambridge Dictionary defines the word Hiatus in the following way:

a short pause in which nothing happens or is said, or a space where something is missing. Alternative words (synonyms for my English fans) include: pause, interlude, lull. In many ways, people have experienced this phenomenon in their lives over the past several months. If you are a follower of Haelen Hands either through Facebook or Instagram, you may have noticed a pause in my posting of late. 

My hiatus from posting does not mean that I am not an active participator in life at the moment or that I have abandoned by business, Haelen Hands, quite the contrary, actually. I have been able to continue hand readings through remote sessions using Zoom, which have been fun, lively and lovely all at the same time. I miss the in person contact and hope that there is a way sometime in the near future that I can resume my monthly visits to the North Branch Cafe, doing the mini readings. My myofascial practice, like many in the hands on community, has been impacted the greatest by Covid. So some of this time, in the "space of nothing happening" has had me working on creative ways of trying to make this happen again in a way that feels safe to everyone involved and I took an Equine Myofascial course! YES, the manual skills I use with humans can greatly help our animal friends as well. 

I think another reason for my pause, my interlude has a great deal to do with how I am working through the state of the world at this time. While Covid, and its ramifications for those in face to face careers, has impacted my very small business (and for a great many weeks, my job at an outpatient clinic), it has given me a personal pause, one that I think that many of us do not take on a regular basis. One that has allowed me to slow down, to stop and pause before acting. It has helped me glean what is important right in the moment that I am living in. It is giving me time to reflect and help to really process the many feelings about the ongoing conflicts in the world. Sometimes we all just need a hiatus....

My dog sometimes eats her own poop. There, I've said it. Now the dirty little secret we have been living with for the last 11 years is out. I do know that she isn't the only dog in the world that eats their own poop AND I am happy to say that she doesn't do it every time that she poops. But still, it's a pretty disgusting habit and one that I am not proud to divulge other than it caused me to think about crap in general and what we as humans do with our own crap.

It dawned on me on an early morning walk with Ella that her habit of eating poop is not unlike something that we two legged beings do a lot of the time too. I run into it pretty often when doing hand readings. Even friends do it. And I also have to admit to doing it myself a time or two. The human equivalent of eating our own crap. 

What?! You know, that bad habit that you can't give up. Every time you say "never again" but do it again anyway. And as disgusted as we may get with ourselves, sometimes we just can't help ourselves. I think in a way because it's familiar to us, after all, it is our own crap, the stuff we have been carrying around with us all this time. And putting up with it and metaphorically eating it over and over again, enables us to hide it from others. And sometimes even ourselves - or at least that's what we think.

Is it bad for us? Will we die from it? Likely not, as Ella is proof that after 11 years eating her own she hasn't. But would I rather that she not do that? Certainly! Would I prefer to not eat the metaphorical crap of my life over and over again? Well of course. What will it take? Just recognizing it for what it is, telling ourselves "no". Maybe asking a trusted friend to help us with that "no" or if they are willing to help us clean up our crap by reminding us it's CRAP. 

It's what I do for Ella - a good stern no when she's going for the goods or just making sure that it's not there to tempt her. The bottom line, is that I love her despite her bad habits and I will always be there with a properly interjected "no" or clean up job. Now to do that for myself....

I LOVE puzzles and how seemingly random bits of information can lead to creating wholeness of a thing or person. As a kid, one of my favorite things in the world was getting a new connect-the-dots book. I started every puzzle with anticipation, wondering how those dots would align and connect to form an object. I was very precise with the lines I drew, lining them up so that whatever they combined to make would look exactly like the object they were forming.

Jig saw puzzles are another example of how individual pieces come together to create a whole. Sometimes the puzzles are difficult, the colors are so close in tone that you really have to be observant to bring like pieces together. Other times the edges look like they are going to connect perfectly but then they don't. Despite that, I really enjoy doing jigsaw puzzles - a much harder version of "connecting the dots to get to the whole" than dot -to- dot books! 

So, I guess that it would not be surprising that I have taken this LOVE of taking seemingly random bits of data and applying that in my career as a physical therapist and hand analsist.

It's really a gift, to be able to sit with someone, to look at how their body lines up, how they use their body and understand how that information all combines together so that I can come up with a plan for helping them return to their prior level of activity. The same thing happens when I analyze someone's hand. How do their fingerprints, hand shape and lines pull together into the story of who they are as a person and what gets in the way of living on purpose. For some people, it's the physical restraints, for others it's the repetition of life patterns that don't work that lead them to contacting me.

I have to say, I've always been curious about what makes people tick, including myself. Why is it that two people can experience the same thing and have such a very different understanding of what occurred? Why does someone end up with an injury when another person doesn't? This curious nature has been a leading factor in my decisions to study hands, dive deep into the mystery of the fascia and a multitude of other areas of study over the years. Along the way, I have learned a heck of a lot about myself and I believe that makes me better at understanding of others as well, to get down to ground level and be able to take the various pieces in front of me to bring wholeness to whatever is facing me.

I started Haelen Hands so that I could help people with their "random" pieces, to gain clarity and to heal in order to get back out into the world and live life on purpose . Haelen is an Old English verb that means, “to heal”, and it literally translates to mean “to bring to wholeness”.

To bring to wholenss, it's really like doing dot to dot books or jigsaw puzzles, and most importantly, sitting down with a client.  Haelen Hands also allows me to "connect the dots” with the people I meet, to facilitate their growth and healing no matter the format. Here's to living life on purpose and loving our "random pieces" that make up the entirety of the greatness of who we are!

Hi all and happy spring!

Back in November of 2017, I did an interview with Jackie Weyrauch at Orca Media, and I'm finally getting around to posting it here. Give it a watch if you'd like to hear me talk about using hand analysis to find direction and improve communication in your relationships, among myriad other things. Self discovery and personal decision-making feature heavily in our conversation. Click here to see it on the Orca Media website where you can find links to other episodes of the You and Your Health Series as well!