Moving Manual Therapy

Movement therapy (what you’re doing in Pilates) is extremely powerful, but manual therapy and movement therapy will make the fastest changes in your body. We’re super excited to take manual therapy and movement therapy to the next level by combining them in one session.

Meet Celia Downs. She’s been practicing a multi-disciplinary approach to manual therapy for over 18 years with modalities like structural integration, craniosacral, and visceral organ therapies. She also graduated from The Pilates Center Intermediate Plus teacher training program in 2016 and has been taking regular private lessons with Sophia for six years.

She’s had a vision of melding fascial postural re-education with movement and now that vision is becoming manifest in a new offering at Kinesis Pilates called Moving Manual Therapy. For months, she and her massage therapist peers as well as Sophia having been working out the details and we’re excited to officially launch this new option in February 2023.

Celia will offer a four-session series that will explore spinal, hip and shoulder mobility. This series is designed to give you freer movement with a deeper understanding of where your body lacks strength or where bound tissues limit the muscle’s potential. Her hands on approach will help you put your bones where you want them then educate the soft tissues to hold them there.

This work is intense, but also intensely powerful. In our experience, it creates more profound change more quickly in the body.

Get a 4-pack for $380, then individual sessions for $100 once the intro package is complete. Sessions are available on Thursdays at 10am, 11am, 1pm, and 2pm starting in February. Get started here.

Testimonials:

“I have worked with Celia Downs on Moving Manual Therapy at Kinesis Pilates since February 2023. I am thoroughly grateful for the learning, growth, and change my mind and body have experienced, as well as the confidence I feel as I become stronger and empowered and my body is more organized.

I often show-up with an unusual gait pattern due to neurological conditions, or cardio or digestive issues. Celia integrates many modalities into her work. Over a few sessions, I understand what is occurring, and through movement, touch, and deep bodywork, I am aligned and connected. Celia has helped me discover and embody the full capacity of my lungs - my breath is full, and my heart rhythm is steady. Additionally, she has helped me with digestive issues, and I continue to use her homemade remedies for digestive support.

It is remarkable to witness and experience her extensive knowledge of the human body and its complex systems, as well as all the networks of blood and lymph vessels and so much more! Celia is truly a skilled manual therapist. She intuits, palpates, assesses, feels, and hears what the body is saying. She ‘knows’, and she listens.

My experience with Celia has been transformative, and I wholeheartedly recommend Celia.”

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“Working with Celia has been enjoyable and enlightening. Celia has helped me change some fundamental things in my posture and gait to have more flexibility and more stability. I walk differently because of Manual Movement Therapy, which has changed some habits I've had since childhood. It's easy to see how knowledgeable and experienced Celia is, so I'm not worried when she asks me to do something unfamiliar or presses hard on a muscle. She listens to me when I tell her what I feel (or what hurts). And she patiently answers my questions about how things work anatomically. She's great at explaining anatomy in just enough detail to help me understand what I'm doing with my body and how I might want to change that movement.”

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“Manual therapy with Celia was working specifically on how to retrain my body to undo maladaptive positioning and bias I had developed over years of injuries and surgeries. I am a very active person who has had spine surgery and through long term chronic compensation asymmetries and unbalance of effort and musculature use had led to misalignment. Through our work, I was able to correct some of those, via practicing the principles during our sessions to my everyday life and activities outdoors. I improved by ability to maximize by strength and technical abilities to climb, hike, mountaineer while staying healthy.”

Meditation and Movement

Did you know that 90-95% of your brain activity in subconscious? This includes the way you hold and move your body—the very thing we are trying to address in Pilates.

Most waking, conscious brain activity is beta brain waves. However, through meditation, you can calm your brain waves into alpha and theta waves, which allows you to better connect with your subconscious mind and body. In this state, you can have greater influence over your body—its tensions, its patterns, your attitudes and reactions to your body.

Our newest workshop—Meditation and Movement—is a chance to calm your brain waves and then go through gentle movement that allows you to connect deeply with your body and better appreciate it and understand it. It will leave you deeply relaxed and give you tools to release your tension and change your mind and body on your own. See how this kind of practice can calm your nervous system, enhance your breathing, reduce tension, change your relationship with your body, and promote an environment in which the body can heal.

Next session will run in the Fall of 2023.

18 months of Face Pilates

I first began practicing Face exercise regularly in July 2020, which means this month is exactly 1.5 years of Face Pilates for me. Here are the things I did regularly, the first two pretty much daily:

• Face, tongue and neck exercise

• Massage, intra-oral massage

• Gua Sha

• Constructive rest or Still Point Induction and breathing exercises

And then about six months ago, the live Face Pilates courses evolved to add new protocols. I do the first two daily now too:

• Lymphatic stimulation, face brushing

• Skin rolling massage

• Osteopathic techniques to support the cranial nerves and nervous system

These are the improvements I’ve personally noticed from my practice:

• Eyes less sunken and brighter

• Forehead creases practically gone and reduced 11-lines

• Smoother skin tone

• Pinkish skin color from improved circulation

• Better resting facial posture and oral posture

• Less jaw tension, no more clenching at night, no more mouth guard needed

• Less nasal congestion, easier to breathe on the side of my deviated septum

• Fewer headaches and tools to calm headaches once they start

• Reduced brain fog

• Less pain from talking for hours (aka teaching Pilates!)

• Better vision (both eyes improved according to optometrist and astigmatism in one eye improved)

• Better sleep, especially when I practice right before bed

• No more gum recession, gums are pinker and plumper (dietary changes recommended in the course helped with this)

• More self awareness of inadvertent facial movements and expressions, hence fewer forehead creases

• Much less neck tension

My only wish is that I’d started in my 30s instead of my 40s. What I love about Face Pilates is that while it improves appearances, it also improves the little declines in the health of my skin, head, mouth, teeth, neck, and nervous system that I’ve been noticing slowly accumulating with age. To not only look younger but also feel younger and more resilient is worth all the time spent practicing. And even after 1.5 years of Face Pilates, I still look forward to it every night. It feels so good and is such a simple yet potent form of self care.

The Lymphatic System and Pilates

When first studying Pilates, I found it odd how frequently Joseph Pilates had us changing positions. In mat, it’s lay down on your back, sit up, roll over, lay face down, on your side, stand. So many frequent positional changes that it seemed almost ADHD to me. The reformer order too.

Then I started studying the Lymphatic System and suddenly I had a whole new lens on Pilates. The method isn’t just about moving bones, joints, and muscles. It isn’t just about the breathing mechanism or the core or the spine. A huge part of the brilliance of Pilates is that it moves fluids! Not just blood but also lymph—the clear fluid that bathes all our tissues and is the primary pathway for the removal of waste products. Changing positions often means none of your fluids ever get stagnant.

The Lymphatic System of the body is enormous and undervalued. Just like the plumbing in your house—it seems unimportant until the day it no longer works. Similarly, we often take our body’s waste removal system for granted.

We have three times more lymph than blood and a hundred thousand miles of lymphatic vessels (enough to circle the earth four times). We need to clear and reproduce 3 L of lymph each day. The majority of our immune system is housed in the Lymphatic System. Why are we not paying more attention to this?

I’ll tell you why I started paying attention. I contracting Covid in March 2021 and despite recovering nicely (no lung issues, I can smell and taste fine), I had strange brain symptoms that lingered. It felt like I had jetlag or brain fog, and suddenly my sleep was very disrupted. I take such good care of my health—eating well, reducing stress, doing Pilates and walking the dog every single day. What was I missing?

And then there were my clients who also were practicing Pilates diligently and taking good care of their health, but minor concerns lingered.

My answer to both these problems was lymph. Sometimes it just gets stagnant and needs a little extra boost.

I studied lymph through a series of workshops with Dr. Perry of Stop Chasing Pain. I started applying it to myself, my family members, my clients. And I love the results! Here’s what some people have noticed:

• Better sleep. Either falling asleep faster or sleeping for less time yet feeling well rested.

• Improved range of motion in joints from the ankles, to hips, to spine, to shoulders, to neck/head.

• Improved skin. Complete reversal of chronic eczema for my son who struggled with it for over a decade. Pinker, more glowing, and toned skin for myself and clients who moved their lymph and then did Face Pilates.

• Reduced joint and nerve pain

• Reduced bloating and digestive issues, like constipation

• Increased mental clarity, creativity, and motivation

• Improved mood and feeling of well being

• Weight loss

• Feeling empowered and in charge of one’s health

In the circulatory system, the heart pumps blood through blood vessels to capillaries. At the level of the capillaries, some of the plasma leaves the vessels and enters the interstitial space (the area surrounding the cells and tissues). Once here, it’s called interstitial fluid and about to become lymph. The blood that remains in the capillaries eventually moves into the venous system and is returned to the heart. Like a circle, hence the name circulatory system.

But what happens to that fluid that left the system? Where does it go and how does it move?

The design of the body is that muscle contraction, movement of the body, and positional changes (like having your feet elevated above your heart) will help the lymph move from the interstitial space into lymphatic vessels. From there, it moves through nodes located along the vessels. The nodes have a very important job of filtering the lymph. This is where a lot of our immune cells like macrophages exist. They consume and eliminate any pathogens because that lymph is headed back into the circulatory system and if it picked up some bacteria or viruses along the way, they need to be properly dealt with before being distributed to the rest of the body.

But sometimes those nodes get clogged, like from a stationary lifestyle, from poor breathing (which is less movement!), or from dehydration that turns our fluids to sludge. If the nodes get really clogged, then fluid can’t move at all and the waste products are stuck in the extremities or abdomen. The accumulating waste can obviously have very negative consequences for our tissues, but also something else that is really important. You see, alongside every blood vessel, vein, and lymphatic capillary is also a nerve. And nerves surrounded by fluid filled with waste and potentially even pH changes get grumpy. They don’t function as well and they may be more likely to signal pain. So clearing out the lymph not only makes the cells of your organs, muscles, skins, and bones happy, it makes your nerves and brain happy too.

There are 600+ lymph nodes in the body, but some of them are especially important in the pathway of fluid flow. In The Lymphatic System and Pilates workshop, we’ll learn how to stimulate these nodes and clear the pathway for lymph. Then we’ll learn what kind of movements encourage fluid flow and how the brilliance of The Pilates Method especially does this.

Once lymph is collected, filtered, and transported, it returns into the circulatory system via veins near the collarbones. Then the body can deal with the waste via its detoxification processes. Eventually that waste is excreted by the body through sweat, urine, feces, or exhaling.

Getting more waste out means healthier cells that are in a better position to absorb nutrients like oxygen, vitamins, and minerals. It’s hard for tissues to absorb all the good stuff we put in our bodies if our bodies are filled to the brim with waste. Like trying to put fresh produce into a fridge full of rotting food, there’s just no space for the new until the old is eliminated.

By better understanding The Lymphatic System and how exercise supports it, you can take your Pilates practice and health to the next level. Join our workshop to learn more.

Next workshop meets on Zoom on Wednesday November 8th, 2023 at 8am mountain time 6pm Dubai time for three hours.

Workshop Reviews

This workshop is simply brilliant and I am so grateful that you shared your knowledge with the rest of us. You explore a benefit of Pilates (enhancing the functioning of the lymphatic system) that I have felt in my body all along yet couldn't quite nail what it was - and now I can.

This is such valuable information and I have felt healthier and more rested with less sleep since I began doing lymphatic stimulation regularly.

I just watched the workshop & it was amazing! Clear, concise information presented in a really organized, understandable way. And fascinating!! Thank you so much for offering it!

Certified Pilates Teachers can earn 3 CECs for this course.