How to recover flexibility with diaphreotherapy

From muscle stretching, the obscure origin of contractures is reached. Our body and bodily attitude say a lot about our history.

"They have been shaped according to the answers that each one has generated to adapt to the social and family environment in which he has had to live" Explain Malen Cirerol, creator together with Swiss Linda Jent diaphreo therapy or diaphreotherapy.

Thus, according to Malen, "we have blocked somebody areas, inhibited specific responses, and isolated conflicting information. Or we have had to change a position to no longer subtly feel physical pain.

The price has been the loss of flexibility, spontaneity in specific movements, responsiveness, and connection to some memory regions. "All this also means a loss of part of our identity."

What does diaphreotherapy mean?

Malen Cirerol studied nursing and physiotherapy, trained in anti-gymnastics with Thérese Bertherat and in the Mézieres method with Françoise Mézieres, became interested in psychoanalysis and, finally, 28 years ago, Together with Linda Jent, a student, and former Bertherat collaborator, she created a method to seek the integral harmonization of the person.

From muscle, stretchingdiaphreotherapy releases the tensions and expressions stored in the body's memory to recover health and coherence between what we feel, think, and express.

Stretches are practiced in group or individual sessions. The global prevents the tension from moving to another point.

Like the word diaphragm, diafreo comes from the Greek diafrein, "to let go," meaning "I let pass."

Its objective is to restore "the communication between the physical, energetic, emotional and spiritual to travel the path towards the inner space of each one," continues Malén.

Bodywork is based on the principles of the Mézieres method, which adopted the RPG: the muscles act in a chain, and the back of the body, from the neck to the feet, behaves like a single muscle always shortened because our habitual movements require its contraction.

In Diaphreus, it is considered that these shortenings and chronic contractures do not respond only to physical causes but are also configured and accelerated by adaptation to the environment and by psychic traumas.

For example, to avoid crying, we use the tension of the front of the neck muscles, among others. When that inhibition of crying is maintained or repeated, the answer is memorized and can produce chronic and unconscious tension.

 

Diaphreo in the first person: Esther's depression

Esther resorted to diaphoresis and was diagnosed as chronic depressive. Through bodywork, in a few months, he regained his balance.

Esther was very skeptical about what this therapy could do for her. She worked as a translator and interpreter and dragged from adolescence a sadness and exhaustion that he did not understand.

"I had traveled through psychiatrists, doctors, and therapists, and in the end, I had been diagnosed with chronic depression." Medicated as such and somewhat desperate, I began to feel better when starting the bodywork of this therapy eight years ago.

"The result was spectacular. I graphically felt as if I had been plugged in in a few months, and I reconnected with my identity."

Esther specifies that "It's not that diafreo gives you happiness," but it allows you to be yourself, “which is what happiness consists of for me. Now I have my good and bad days, but I feel like I am myself and not the image that I learned to project to please.

How diaphreotherapy works

Therapy begins with a body reading of the person to identify the main blockages, muscular and energetic. This lecture guides the basic postures of global stretching, which must be reported to release excess tension.

The tensest muscles stretch and give way painfully, although the sensation is of relief later. Observing how and why these tensions are organized, and acting on the entire muscular chain, what Mézieres called "hidden pain" is reached from which he fled at the time and caused a spiral of muscular compensations.

 

What is diaphreotherapy? Acknowledge your emotions through the body

Because the origin of a symptom is rarely found at the site of the sign. In stretching, compensations that transfer the tension to another segment of the muscular chain must be avoided: from the neck to the lower back, for example.

Another of the pillars of diaphreo is the breath release which also helps relax deep tensions.

Listening to the body: reconnecting with internal sensations

By preventing alternative pathways and releasing the tension, images and emotions experienced as traumatic may arise whose information or response was retained in these contractures.

"Once unlocked, it is necessary for the person not only to allow and elaborate but be willing to transform a system that until now, for better or worse, had allowed him to adapt and survive," continues Malén.

From this work, diafreo invites observation, which is when the muscles contract and breathing are blocked to realize what the body is expressing with its attitude.

The therapist directs with his knowledge and warmth this delicate process of opening the defensive system, in which the person has to assimilate old and new experiences.

After 28 years of experience, Malén concludes that "The goal of therapy is for people to come to terms with themselves. We live in a society of the image, narcissistic, disconnected from internal sensations. And one has to rediscover one's deepest being, to be able to be what you feel you are, not what you have to be".

For Esther, the job of therapy is to balance: "when you balance, you see everything clearer."