How Releasing benefits the body

In Releasing, we slow down long enough to perceive some of the organizing, often quiet forces beneath movement. Through breath, gravity, stillness, awareness, Releasing (or SRT) explores how our spine, pelvis, limbs relate, how function and imagination can mutually support each other. The Releasing approach invites change from within, and affirms self-compassion and self-care.

SRT, originated by Joan Skinner, shares features with the Feldenkrais Method® and Alexander Technique. Like those approaches, SRT supports subtle movement repatterning through gentle guidance, attentive touch and respect for the body’s inherent intelligence. (Skinner was herself directly influenced by Alexander Technique, as well as the Ideokinetic work of Barbara Clarke and Mabel Ellsworth Todd.) Importantly, Releasing recognizes that we are an interaction, that we are always in context, shaping ourselves in relationship to our surroundings, people, nature, etc.

While there are no exercises adapted for table work per se (SRT originates as a studio practice) we can bring its principles to bodywork: freer articulation in the body, a fresh sense of spaciousness, integration and wholeness.