Melting the OCI muscle: Unwinding Muscles: Unwinding the Atlas and Axis:
To recipients, Melting Muscles is a pleasant and effective way to release muscle tension, stress and to resolve guarding. The reason your muscles are tight is because your brain is contracting them. No amount of force, stretching or mashing the muscles, will convince the brain to relax them. Melting Muscles politely asks your brain, would you feel safe relaxing this muscle? When the brain feels safe, it will respond, and within seconds you and the giver both feel the muscle soften. Once the brain has decided to relax a muscle, it keeps its word, and the muscle remains relaxed.
To therapists, Melting Muscles is a new language. You learn to speak to the brain in a kind of sign language. You speak this language by positioning each muscle in its shortened position, and then by pressing the same muscle gently.
What position is short? This requires you remember or review the origin and action. The recipient's brain can tell if you have forgotton.
Once you have reviewed and memorized the origins and actions, Melting Muscles is very simple to do. The brain immediately senses when a muscle is shorter. The proprioceptors in the muscle and the joint tell the brain the muscle is shorter. The brain calculates the muscle and joint are safer in the shortened position so it is far more likely to reduce its contraction settings. It seems like magic the first few times you feel the muscle melt, but its not magic. Its simply learning what the brain prefers.
When I introduced Melting Muscles to groups of students in massage school, only a third or less were interested in slowing down enough to feel muscles melting. Melting Muscles requires a bit more patience, presence and curiosity from the practitioner. It is not as slow as craniosacral.
Melting Muscles can easily be blended with a full-body Swedish massage. Since the brain decides to relax each muscle, the person becomes systemically very relaxed.
Melting Muscles can also be used on a single area for a medical massage. Even if you only work one leg for 75 minutes, the person will still be systemically relaxed.
How To Learn Melting Muscles:
Try it! I believe you can learn it yourself, just from the instruction I provide on this page! You can also learn from the Articles page on this website.
Attend a Workshop: Around 600 therapists have attended Melting Muscles trainings from Baltimore to Juneau. Trainings still happen several times a year in Tucson, AZ, please check the classes page. I teach these two, one-day workshops:
1. Melting Muscles Supine, 7 CE hr.
2. Melting Muscles Prone, 7 CE hr.
After you've taken these two, you'll be able to do a full-body session.
In 2002 I began printing a Workbook one at a time on an inkjet. After a thousand or more copies, I have decided to send the workbook to a Print-On-Demand company. Sorry but the workbook is not currently available until the POD is finished. I hope this will be available by January, 2012. When complete, the book will be available on this website. at our products page, please check back in 2012!
Melting the Atlas and Axis:
There is one little muscle that controls 90% of the motion of the atlanto-axial joint. The muscle is called the Obliquus Capitis Inferior (OCI). When you learn to melt this one muscle, decades of tension can melt away.
A person whose OCI muscle needs melting is someone who can't turn her head all the way to the left or to the right. If one OCI muscle is guarded, you will lack rotation to the opposite side. For example, when she drives, she may not be able to look over her left shoulder to see overtaking traffic.
Placing the OCI into its shortened position is easy; you just turn the person's head her easy way. However, finding the muscle is tricky once the head is turned. Once you press it in its shortened position, and if the head feels safe and supported, the muscle will melt like butter. Range of motion increases with each second of melting. Melting the atlas and axis can happen in as little as five minutes, though the method can easily require a whole hour. A series of sessions may resolve injuries and stresses that have been guarded for decades.
Learning To Melt the OCI muscle;
I'd love to teach this to you in writing, and I tried in an article published in Massage Therapy Journal in 2003. But very few therapists were able to get it just by reading about it. You really need to attend the 6-hour workshop, called
3. Melting the Atlas and Axis, 6 CE hr.
Your hands need to be in certain positions in order to both rotate the head slowly and to press the indicated muscle at the same time. Treatment is simple, once your hands have learned the landmarks and practiced a few dozen times.
I have also shot many hours of video and am editing DVDs about the AA joint and the OCI muscle. . The first DVD, "Actions of the Obliquus Capitis Inferior," has already been approved by NCBTMB as a distance-learning CE course. Still, I feel the need to edit and improve it before I begin to sell it. When complete, they will be available through this website
Unwinding Muscles requires a bit more patience, presence, and curiosity than Melting Muscles does. The speeds of motion are slower.
Muscles all contract slightly during cranial motion. The therapist matches these tiny variations in muscle contraction. Soon you'll be able to pick up any limb and feel which way it is contracting. Extra contraction in any direction tells you exactly which muscles are more guarded. Then you press those indicated muscles, just as you would in Melting Muscles. Now, when the muscle begins to melt, you also sense the cranial motion switch directions, and you assist the limb to move the other direction. Doing Unwinding looks like you are moving the person.
Learning Unwinding
Here is a 10-minute video of an unwinding session where I am working with the muscles that rotate, elevate and depress the left scapula: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ltk4tBKWwRc
Unwinding is easier to do with people who are dressed, wearing stretchy clothing.
I teach these Unwinding workshops:
4. Unwinding Muscles Supine, 6 CE hr.
5. Unwinding Muscles Prone and Sidelying, 6 CE hr.
6. Unwinding the Atlas and Axis, 5 CE hr.
This is the gentlest way to treat the AA joint. The Atlas and Axis are small bones that hold up a very large head. The joint is quite dainty and the muscle is tiny. It is no wonder this joint is so strongly guarded by so many people. The glacier-slow motion of unwinding helps the brain to feel safe enough to relax it's decades of guarding.
After attending the Melting the Atlas and Axis and Unwinding the Atlas and Axis, you are on your way to being a neck specialist.
What else would you like to know about Melting and Unwinding Muscles? Feel free to contact me with questions :)
