Virtually everyone at sometime in their life is subjected to an acute or chronic stress, injured, or traumatized.

The very pace of modern life floods the body/mind with stress to which we must constantly be adapting. Many of us are unable to keep up, and as a result we begin to slowly lose our structural integrity, our fluidity, our adaptability. We begin to be literally crushed under the force of gravity.

In the case of traumatic injury, if healing has not been encouraged with proper attention to maintaining fluidity and mobility, then scar tissue and protective contraction patterns will "harden" the injury site. This local hardening of the injury site can have adverse effects in the somatic system far from the actual site of original injury. These secondary effects can over time, be even worse than the original injury itself.

As a basic rule, the body/mind responds to stress, trauma or injury with protective reflexes. Occurring largely below the level of waking consciousness, these reflexes (or defense mechanisms) cover a wide spectrum from muscular guarding patterns, emotional armour, scar tissue, behavior changes, etc., depending on the type of insult.

The real purpose of these defensive reflexes is to protect us. They do so by isolating any actual wound, as well as by modifying our behavior such that the possibility of further insult (both real and imagined) is avoided. However, every defensive reflex comes at a cost. These defensive responses nearly always contract or constrict the connective tissue matrix. It takes energy to maintain these defensive contractive patterns and this energy is taken away from it's job of maintaining our health and vitality. It also means that our ability to adapt to further stresses has been reduced. What should not pose a threat normally, may now do so. In a perfect world these reflexes serve a useful purpose, for a limited time, and are then released. But for many many different reasons, they are frequently held far beyond their useful function.

Time is the real problem. Over time, if we are unable to rebound from, and release a condition of reflexive contraction, then that pattern of contraction becomes fixed in the tissues to the point where intervention is necessary to release the pattern.

The longer a pattern has been fixed in the body, the harder it may be to undo, and the more likely that additional problems have been created. Or, as in the case of gross morphological changes to bones (Dowager's hump, bunions, joint failures, etc.) it may become impossible to reverse the problem. Although, Structural Integration may slow further negative development.

Over time a contraction pattern will begin to affect the liquid ground substance of the body. This inter-cellular liquid begins to harden and lose fluidity in the area of contraction. When the liquid ground substance turns to gel and stiffens, the connective tissue which is infused by the ground substance, loses it's adaptability and literally becomes glued into place. The very flow of life in the tissues is interrupted. Necessary signals to and from cell membranes are inhibited, reducing the coherent behavior of the cells and in turn creating dysfunction and eventually dis-ease in the body.

It is common to see people who have been unable to recover to a healthy neutral from a stress, trauma or injury. Sometimes it's the severity of the trauma in the tissues and sometimes it's an emotional avoidance of feeling/knowing that prevents an easy return to neutral. Irregardless, the contraction patterns, hardening ground substance and inhibited breathing becomes a perpetual state at best, and more often a process that progresses for the worse. The downward spiral continues, accelerating as time passes. Health disintegrates and symptoms of disease appear.

Aging as well can be seen as a form of this downward spiraling process. Tissues are literally starved to death where nutrients needed to cleanse and refresh our systems are delayed or prevented from arriving and waste products build up into toxic deposits because the ground substance is gelled thick and the connective tissue matrix has become immobilized.

By undertaking the process of Structural Integration, we address all the levels of the somatic system that are suffering. We return the ground substance to a liquid state, we restore the flexibility/adaptability of the connective tissue matrix , and we integrate the structural parts so their functionality becomes whole person based rather than local compensation based.

When the ground substance returns to it's healthy fluid state, the accurate transfer of healthy motion between metabolic fields and the cell membrane is restored which enhances metabolic function. Fascial planes and continuities are then balanced to the most optimal state for the client. Movement patterns are reset. As the body achieves integration, function will also return to an optimal state. A person's ability to handle the stresses and insults of life increases and the general tone of being reaches an optimal state.

The process of Structural Integration happens in phases over time. The sessions themselves are really only the beginning of the process. Connective tissues will begin to reshape themselves to support the new body integration in a process that will go on for many months after the actual hands on work is complete.