BODY WORK SERVICES
Our bodywork services connect you with your body center to restore balance and rejuvenate your body’s vital energy through physical touch. We offer a range of services and can recommend the right options for your individualized health and wellness goals.
Thai Bodywork
Thai Bodywork is a creative, effective, and nurturing massage that uses conscious touch to relieve pain and restore balance. During our therapy, we will rock, stretch, and support your body through yoga-like positions. The pressure we use may range from gentle to strong and deep depending on your needs and physical constitution. We help you develop mindful body awareness in a supported, nonjudgmental space. Thai Bodywork will transform pain, tension, and stress; replenish your energy; and realign your posture.
Visceral Manipulation and Abdominal Massage
Visceral Manipulation (VM) is a gentle hands-on therapy from the osteopathic tradition that manipulates the viscera, or internal organs of the body, to restore ease. Our hands-on care helps your body release restrictions and unhealthy compensations that cause pain and dysfunction. We assess for altered or decreased motion of your viscera and other important structures such as joints, blood vessels, connective tissue and nerves. We then apply VM techniques to help your body adapt and restore itself to health. Sessions may address scarring, fascial and muscular tension, organ health, gentle joint mobilization, the craniosacral system and emotional and energetic balance.
Swedish Massage
Swedish Massage promotes relaxation and relieves pain by engaging your nervous system and releasing muscle tension. We use soft, long, kneading strokes, and light, rhythmic, tapping strokes on the topmost muscle layers, and combine these gentle touches with passive joint movement. Our work improves circulation and flexibility, leaving you feeling relaxed and energized.
Happy Feet Foot Massage
Feet are our foundation, and foot problems transmit their pattern throughout the body. Happy feet equals grounded movement. Our sessions begin with an herbal foot soak and include a 45-minute foot massage and hot towels. Our foot massages benefit sufferers of foot pain, plantar fasciitis, calf and ankle pain, shin splints, or knee and hip dysfunction.
Tui na
Tui na is the practice of using massage instead of needles to stimulate the flow of blood and qi (energy) in your body’s energy channels and points. Though tui na massage feels pleasant and leaves you feeling relaxed, its goal is to address patterns of disharmony within your body. Tui na benefits a variety of musculoskeletal problems, digestion disorders, women’s health, and stress.
Cupping
Cupping therapy is a relaxing therapeutic technique that improves blood and lymphatic flow, fascial glide, and circulation. Dating back to ancient cultures, we use cups to create suction and relax your muscles with negative pressure. Instead of pressing with pressure directly, cupping lifts and draws skin, muscles, and soft tissue upward. Cupping may be used on the face, chest, back, stomach, arms, feet, and legs to ease muscle and soft tissue problems. It is also particularly useful in the treatment and release of scar tissue. Cupping can be a stand-alone session or incorporated into other work based on the request of the client or suggestion of the therapist.
Gua sha
Gua sha is an East Asian healing technique sometimes called “coining, spooning or scraping.” We use a tool to rub or scrape the skin’s surface in long strokes to move energy, known as qi or chi, around the body. The technique produces an anti-inflammatory and immune response in your body that helps improve circulation, increase blood flow, break up scar tissue, reduce chronic pain, and improve overall health.
Craniosacral Therapy
Craniosacral therapy (CST) is a gentle hands-on technique that uses light touch to examine membranes and movement of the fluids in and around the central nervous system. Our work relieves tension in the central nervous system to promote a feeling of well-being, eliminate pain, and boost health and immunity. CST compliments the body’s natural healing processes and aids in pain relief for migraines, chronic neck and back pain, motor coordination impairments, central nervous system disorders, scoliosis, and more.
Integrated Therapy
This therapeutic massage session is driven by allowing your body tissues to speak to their major theme of tension or disharmony. The therapist determines this through detailed palpation following principles of osteopathic touch. Treatment is determined based on the results of the palpation and may include visceral manipulation, cranial sacral therapy, Thai massage, lymphatic work or nerve and myofascial joint release. Therapies are generally delivered with the client remaining clothed. If disrobed, full draping will be used. These sessions are ideal for people who want to work in concert with their bodies and nervous systems for optimal health. Outcomes include better physiological function, decreased pain and stress, and improved movement and ease.
Services for Children
Children benefit from therapeutic touch. For many kids, physical and emotional stress and pain is often difficult to verbalize. Bodywork may help support healthy body image and sports performance for younger kids. It improves digestion and elimination, mental focus, emotional processing and reduces stress. Sessions are holistic and may include multiple therapies. These sessions are for kids 15 and under.
Contact Heartwood Healing Collective
in Wauwatosa to rediscover
your heartwood and ignite
your transformation.