Issue link: https://www.massageandbodyworkdigital.com/i/72103
ROSEN METHOD BODYWORK WHAT IS ROSEN METHOD? At the heart of Rosen Method is the belief that chronic muscle tension comes from the suppression of feelings. Practitioners are trained to develop a listening touch that bypasses the intellect and goes straight to the muscle tension. In a bodywork session, practitioners meet the tension with their hands and stay present, allowing for clients' long-held, unconscious feelings and memories to surface and release—for barriers to dissolve. The work includes dialogue, which increases awareness of what is occurring. Awareness is the key to the process: helping people unlock and explore the unconscious allows them to become aware of choices they made early in life around which they have unconsciously shaped their lives. Through the Rosen Method, clients often discover more aliveness, new possibilities for freedom of movement, more authentic self-expression, and the ability to make new choices, as well as decreased pain, greater mobility, and easier breathing. Marion Rosen, PT, one of the pioneers in the German tradition of psychosomatic healing, developed Rosen Method in the 1970s in Berkeley, California, and started her first school there. At age 96, Rosen still has a private practice and teaches Rosen Method around the world. This work, she says, is ultimately about transformation. SPREADING WELLNESS The Executive Wellness Pilot Program housed at Synergy was developed to monitor an integrative approach to achieving sustained changes in health and wellness, and was tested by objective and subjective outcome measurements. The program aimed to test the assumption that if the individual executive could experience a state of personal wellness and Author Sylvia Nobleman practices Rosen Method's listening touch. Tom Scheibal photos. optimum health as a result of program participation, he or she would be much more likely to support and endorse allocation of resources to an employee wellness program.1 A review of the literature supports a strong associative relationship between the level of executive leadership support, the promotion of employee health initiatives, and the amount of employee engagement and positive outcomes.2 Increasingly, businesses are finding ways to encourage employee wellness through employee health promotion programs and policies. Such programs make good business sense because workers with healthy behaviors are, on average, more productive at work and incur lower health-care costs than workers with less healthy behaviors. This contributes to a more sustainable business model as less money is spent on unhealthy and underproductive employees.3 The pilot program was conducted in 2008 within Synergy's integrative wellness and medical fitness facility, which is a freestanding primary and secondary disease prevention service 60 massage & bodywork may/june 2011 center on the campus of its parent medical center, Queen of the Valley. Synergy's mission is to integrate medical fitness, primary and secondary disease prevention, complementary and alternative modalities, and rehabilitation programs into one facility. Queen of the Valley is part of a larger Catholic health-care system made up of 14 hospitals and health- care facilities throughout the region. Participants in the pilot group included nine executives from the sponsoring medical center and the local community who were randomly selected out of a larger pool of potential candidates. Historically, primary prevention wellness programs have consisted of fitness and dietary support components. The success of these programs has been adequate; however the long- term sustainability of the results has been unsatisfactory. Individuals might participate and have the desired outcome of weight loss and improved functional capacity, but as the program concluded and time elapsed, weight was regained and continued exercise habits slowly dissolved.4