The 12 Core Principles That Guide Our Approach to Bodywork
Moving Mountain Institute’s Foundation for Learning and Practicing
By Michael McMahon
Throughout my 25 years of learning and practicing bodywork, I’ve developed 12 foundational principles that guide my work. This means my work in the clinic here at Moving Mountain Institute, my curriculum development for all of our courses, how we teach, my study of the body and the body in the world. All of it is interwoven and complex beyond measure.
I was presented with the idea of working from principles in my first bodywork training ever, a Craniosacral Therapy seminar through the Upledger Institute, where I learned about the Osteopathic Principles. In the decades that followed, I’ve developed a set of my own principles that help orient me within the ever-evolving complexity of our work with bodies in the world.
These principles have become guides for my ongoing relationship with bodies and not rules, nor vehicles for maintaining a historical orthodoxy about the work we do. Good principles should support us evolving with our understanding.
These principles have become guides for my ongoing relationship with bodies and not rules, nor vehicles for maintaining a historical orthodoxy about the work we do. Good principles should support us evolving with our understanding.
Nature is intricate and presents us with complexities that are humbling. Human bodies are but one expression of this intricacy and yet bodies follow along with the ways that nature does its work, its magic. If there are any rules, they are nature's rules, not humans’.
When we are engaging in a principled approach to clinical work and ongoing study, we are not rigidly reproducing doctrines from the past but living with ideas in the present; testing them against real world experience. We are guided through inquiry. When grounded in principles we are encouraged to be creative when challenged by the inevitable complexities that show up on our tables. Our best work will often be outside of “technique” and come from unique combinations of applied principles.
These principles are meant to be seen as interrelating, living ideas. In different instances different principles will rise to the top as a guide for you in your work.
At their core, these principles guide us as we participate in the “kinesthetic theory making” 1 that is this work in practice. When taken as a whole, the principles have the potential to establish a field of trust for you within your work with bodies. As with any grouping of principles, they are only relevant if they are relevant to the challenges of lived experience. I have tested and continue to test these ideas in all facets of my work. Up to this point, they have proven reliable.
The MMI Principles: Building a Field of Kinesthetic Trust
If we place the body in the center it’s fun to see the principles as “planets” orbiting this central idea. The principles are non-hierarchical and meant to be understood and used in relationship with each other (because that is coherent to the principles).
It is my idea that as we work with these (or other principles you like) it helps us to build trust in our work. I have found over my career that working with these ideas as supported me immensely in trusting the body and the ways I have learned (and am still learning) to work.
At Moving Mountain Institute, the body itself is always at the center of our work. It is “the book” that we listen and respond to. It has a story to tell. So in our model, amidst a solar system of interrelated planets, the body is the Sun that they’re perpetually orbiting around.
Below this poster is a carousel that contains each of the principles and three bullet points offering a deeper context for ways to think of them in your work.
Bodies
The body is intrinsically intelligent and has an inherent self-corrective healing capacity.
Our work can participate with and stimulate the body’s self-intelligent, healing capacities.
The body exists on its own terms beyond scientific, medical, and cultural models. These models exist to help us understand the body but we can’t confuse the model for the body itself.
Bodies are unique and should be assumed to be different.
Natural Systems
The body is a natural system embedded within natural systems.
- Studying natural systems helps us participate with the body as it is, not as it has been categorized by the Western mind.
- Bodies are expressions of nature, informed by nature, and connected to nature.
- The natural world is a constellation of interrelated processes that unfold in ways we are aware of and ways we do not know. The body is the same.
Process Before Protocol
Process-oriented work, rooted in sound principles, allows us to meet the complexity of bodies with curiosity + skill.
- People aren’t protocols. A process oriented approach means we meet people and their bodies as they are, not as a protocol assumes they are or should be.
- Bodies are prisms through which possibilities refract in endlessly unique patterns. Process oriented work allows us to meet and respond to this prismatic patterning.
- Sound principles and flexible processes allow us to respond creatively, in real time, to what the body is communicating.
Context Matters
Bodies and ideas of health are influenced by socio-cultural, mental-emotional and environmental contexts that shape and texture our felt and lived experience.
- Dan Siegel teaches that our brains are structured when we are infants by our social environment, particularly our primary care-givers. This is the original social context that brings the initial shape to our lives.
- Each person has to navigate the socially constructed identity categories. These have specific and measurable impacts on folks’ well-being. We can’t pretend otherwise.
- When we are curious about, and invite contexts into treatment, treatment is grounded in that person’s reality. This establishes trust.
Follow the Tissues
Felt patterns in the tissues represent a way the body communicates or tells its story.
- Relational anatomy, fascial mapping and fascial/tissue properties matter. When we understand the map and connect with the properties, they become our guide.
- Your listening hands touch vocabulary is how you participate with the story.
- Because the tissue wraps around the tension, you can rely on patterns as you perceive them and let them lead you where you need to go.
Calibrate to the Tissues
We calibrate our touch to what’s needed for connection and meaningful change.
- Tissues are dynamic and dimensional. The quality of our touch should be fluid so that as tissues change we maintain connection with them. This is how the body “feels” our presence. This is “listening hands” in action.
- Tissues respond to presence, not force.
- Instead of thinking about how much pressure, ask yourself what manner of sinking, compressing, shortening or lengthening creates/maintains the most connection with the tissues?
Pace Makes Space
The body perceives and responds at its own pace. We create the space for that to happen by how we work.
- Our work is time-based rather than pressure-based. This is true at both the macro and micro levels. We take time with each technique and the arc of care is a time based process.
- When our touch is in sync with the body’s pacing, space opens for change. This is true at both the tissue level and for the nervous system. Proper pacing invites the ns into treatment.
- You have to work at the pace at which your system can track the system you are working with.
Inter-Relationship
All life is built on inter-relationships. We look for meaningful places of inter-relationship in our work.
- Reciprocal relationships are oriented around co-creation, not hierarchy. This is true within bodies and between providers and clients/patients.
- When we honor each person’s inherent wisdom and invite it into conversation with our own, we create possibilities that neither could access alone.
- Centering relationships orients our thinking. We can ask ourselves what tissues are related to an area we are working with or a symptom picture. We can also consider the nested social relationships of the person we are treating.
Curiosity
Curiosity creates possibilities and lead you to ideas or insights in treatment.
- When you maintain an attitude of curiosity you are always available for possibility. This is true in the treatment room and as a guide for your thinking about your work.
- Curiosity is how we listen to and follow the body’s inherent wisdom, staying open to what emerges rather than rushing to conclude.
- Curiosity is more valuable than certainty. The willingness to not know creates possibilities that protocols cannot. Curiosity keeps us available for ongoing learning.
Creativity
Instead of only relying on fixed categories of knowing, we cultivate and embrace creativity as a meaningful skill within our work.
- Be creative in your own relationship with the work so it can come through you authentically and uniquely, carrying your specific flavor.
- Background knowledge gives us a foundation, experiential learning helps us transform concepts into embodied understanding, and creativity/imagination allows us to explore beyond the limits of what’s known.
- Our work is informed by known medical models and the understanding that there are limitations on what those models can know. Grounded creativity is part of how we can help bridge that gap.
Embrace Complexity
Complexity is normal. When we meet complexity with grounded principles we can orient ourselves within it.
- Complexity is part of being a healthcare provider. In addition to the complexity of the body, we are working in a time where models of medicine, science and the body itself are intensely politicized. Principles help us navigate complexity.
- One of our care roles is working with folks who have complex conditions that conventional medicine struggles to address. Care for these folks is at its best when we face into the complexity with them.
- Our work exists at an intersection of what is known by the medical model and things the medical cannot explain. This is true both of the conditions/symptoms folks bring to the clinic and the modalities we use to help them. The unknown is part of the complexity we are working with.
Learning is a Verb
We embrace learning is an active and ongoing process.
- We are building kinesthetic theories through an active process of applying our techniques and reflecting on what happens. Theories guide our thinking and practice, they are models not facts.
- Learning is iterative. Foundational concepts and information when studied and practiced over time become advanced practice.
- We don’t chase fads; we orient ourselves towards depth of practice and thought. It’s what our clients and patients expect without saying so.
Apprentice to the Body
We are apprentices to the body, not individual teachers, singular cultural perspectives, orthodox approaches to bodywork, science, or medical models.
- Apprenticing to the body means that in every treatment we are in the presence of our teacher, the body before us. This keeps us present to our learning mindset.
- The body is our primary teacher. What the body says is more important than any teacher’s teaching. This keeps us fresh and alert in our work.
- Explore models of the body by applying them in your work. Applied knowledge is apprenticeship knowledge. If it doesn’t pass the “does it work in clinic test” it probably isn’t worth pursuing.
Letting the Principles Guide Us in the Clinic and the Classroom
The great thing about working with principles is that, if they are good ones, then they are not abstractions but actual guides for working in the clinic, assessing health related information and, for me, how I design curriculum and facilitate our courses. Good principles can weave themselves coherently into our work helping us navigate all of the complexities involved in being a healthcare provider at this moment.
The principles help me to see all of the various modalities I have learned as a coherent whole. I do not have to pre-decide which modalities to use because when we start from listening to the body, the body will direct us. Utilizing the principles keeps me attuned to the tissues rather than preconceived ideas about a symptom set or chief complaint. In this way the session becomes an opportunity for both me and my patient to learn about their system. This is often more effective than working from a protocol and more fun too.
When we are presenting modalities in courses, we may have a bit of an unconventional approach compared to other teachers/schools. The principles have helped loosen me from the rigidity that can be common within any modality and center the body itself and not “rules” about how to do a modality.
The unavoidable truth is that bodies and the intricate personalities that inhabit them are unique. Tissues are unique. How tissues respond to touch, subtle or deep, are unique. So, rather than quantitative measures of force or time in a hold, we emphasize listening to the tissues themselves and helping students identify how tissue change feels in their body. From here, we can explore ways of performing modalities and specific techniques within modalities to serve the actual body we are treating.
When I think of the teachings I have received from my mentors/teachers, what I return to the most are not the specific rules but the creativity that was the foundation of what they were sharing with us. I know that bodies are both complex and unique and that the best way to meet the needs of the moment is with an approach that is grounded in principles and those principles are a foundation for inquiry and creativity.
Footnote
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg Intelligence and Rebellious Transformation,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 3, no. 3 (2014): 1–25.
