What are the key principles of traditional bodywork practice?

When using the term 'traditional bodyworkers', I'm referring to osteopaths, chiropracters, craniosacral therapists and myofunctional therapists. I acknowledge there are significant differences between these disciplines or practices, and a range of expertise and qualifications. However, traditional bodywork practices have a number of fundamental shared principles or understandings about the human body in common. These principles have been increasingly accepted and encorporated by mainstream musculoskeletal medicine throughout my life-time.

You can find out why Complementary and Alternative Medicines and my own medical profession have much to learn from each other here.

Here are five principles upon which traditional bodywork practices build.

1. There is functional interconnectedness between all parts of musculoskeletal system, faciliated in part by the continuities of fascia or connective tissue.

2. Dysfunction in one part of the body may create dysfunction elsewhere in the body.

3. Spinal alignment is of foundational importance to the body's healthy function.

4. There is a relationship between stress, tissue tightness, dysfunctional movement, and pain.

5. Healing from neuromuscular dysfunction and pain requires change in neural and movement patterns, supported by practice (exercises) and mindful movement.

What is evolutionary bodywork in the Possums programs?

Evolutionary bodywork is a new term, coined by Possums to describe the kind of bodywork which is fundamental to the Possums (or NDC) programs.

Evolutionary bodywork draws on the same five key principles of traditional bodywork therapies, above. But evolutionary bodywork takes these principles and integrates them with the latest research emerging from the fields of evolutionary biology and evolutionary anthropology, to develop a different kind of bodywork approach for parents and babies in busy 21st century families.

Evolutionary bodywork supports enjoyable breastfeeding, dials down both the parents' and baby's nervous systems, supports healthy sleep, and supports the flourishing of baby's sensory motor development. Evolutionary bodywork helps parents grow joy in life with their baby.

• Rather than treating the infant as a tabla rasa, or blank slate, upon which we perform exercises in order to make baby's sensory motor system and breastfeeding function optimally, evolutionary bodywork views the infant as one part of a self-organising psychobiological process emerging out of millions of years of evolutionary history.

  • This self-organising creative unfolding, carried in the infant's genetic code, reaches its full potential in the context of a loving carer's body, as a single biological ecosystem.

  • The self-organising is also profoundly shaped by cultural heredity, that is, by interpenetrating systems of intergenerational and health system knowledge.

• Evolutionary bodywork acknowledges that the Homo sapiens infant is most accurately conceptualised as an 'exterogestate foetus'. That is, she is still developing neurologically at a rapid rate, similar to her rate of development inside the womb, except that now she is outside the womb. Because the human infant is an exterogestate foetus, she has a biological expectation for breastfeeding and abundant contact with her mother's or carer's body for at least the first nine months after birth.

• Evolutionary bodywork proposes that best possible infant development occurs in the repetitive daily interaction between the baby's body and his mother's body, and the baby's body and the external environment. This is the context in which the best possible musculoskeletal alignment, healthy movement patterns, and neural pathways unfold or mature. Evolutionary bodywork proposes that for a bodywork intervention to be most effective and to best support spinal alignment, postural symmetry, and painfree efficient neuromuscular function (including of sucking), bodywork therapy needs to be applied to the parent and baby as a single biological system, activating the parent-baby ecosystem's self-organising principles.

• Evolutionary bodywork acknowledges that no biological or body system is in perfect balance or symmetry. Evolutionary biology acknowledges that the nature of biological and bodily systems is flux or change or dynamism, of myriad interacting pulsing irregular feedback loops, which then maintain the balance of the whole within a fluctuating range of imbalance. That is, evolutionary bodywork doesn't strain for anatomic symmetry or functional ideals, which are static and unobtainable states, and are not biologically real. Instead, evolutionary bodywork aims for enjoyable, easy and healthy function which fluctates in dynamic homeostasis around an unobtainable ideal, but which the healthy function itself shapes or calls forth optimal anatomic development.

When we use evolutionary bodywork, we're not coming in from the outside with our fingers and hands or other tools to fix, improve, or make the infant's neuromuscular systems and fascia function better. That way of thinking about healing - applying an external fix - comes from the dominant biomedical scientific model of the past few hundred years (even when used by Complementary and Alternative Medicines).

Evolutionary bodywork calls forth the new human's two-million-year-old competence. It calls forth the great genetic powers, coded into her cells, which have been sculpting the anatomy, physiology, mechanobiology, mind, and soul of this strange and marvellous primate superspecies, the human, over billions of years. Evolutionary bodywork trusts the breathtaking mystery of the lifeforce rising up within a tiny child, we trust the unfolding of her stunning evolutionary competence (- even as, when required, we surround her with our brilliant technological tools to prevent injury, disease, or death).

As health professionals, our task as far as possible is to help parents provide the contexts in which baby's biological systems self-organise, self-correct, and flourish.

• You can find out why breastfeeding goes best if we think of the mother and baby as a single biological ecosystem here.

• You can find the Possums steps for optimal support of infant neuromotor development here.

Acknowledgements

I acknowledge Isabelle Coffey RN IBCLC NDC Accredited Practitioner who coined the term 'evolutionary bodywork' during one of our NDC Live Network Hours. At the time I had written and spoken about holistic bodywork, whole-of-system bodywork, and the NDC evolutionary approach to bodywork. Isabelle suggested simply calling the Possums or NDC approach to motor development 'evolutionary bodywork'. With her consent, I've gone on to use this term in the Possums programs.

Recommended resources

• You can find out the main differences between traditional bodywork therapy and Possums' evolutionary bodywork here.

• You can find out about the NDC evolutionary bodywork approach to optimising your baby's motor development here.

• You can find out about why it's best to think of you and your baby as a single biological system here.

• You can find out how evolutionary bodywork helps repair breastfeeding problems here.

• You can find out about the eight steps of the NDC evolutionary bodywork approach to protecting a baby's motor development here.

• You can find out about the gestalt method, an evolutionary bodywork approach to fit and hold in breastfeeding, starting here.

• You can find out about evolutionary biology and the Great Synaptic Flourishing of your infant's brain here.