OUR PERSPECTIVE
At Upper Valley Integration Therapy, our services are informed by scientific principles, not traditions or techniques. This allows for growth and adaptation when confronted with new data about the clinical relevance of science in relation to the human body and when introduced to your specific needs as a client.
OUR APPROACH
We provide you with a modern biopsychosocial approach to integration therapy – an interdisciplinary approach that considers the relationships between biology, psychology, and socio-environmental factors in the human being. It is the deep interrelation of all three factors that manifest any given condition – each component on its own is insufficient to lead definitively to health or disease.
OUR WORK
In private sessions, integration therapy honors the sensitive, affective, and cognitive aspects of your nervous system and provides a range of services that will engage you in bodywork therapy as well as health coaching.
Bodywork Therapy involves engaging your sensorimotor systems via hand-holds that are gentle, intentional, slow, intelligent, responsive, and effective. In this way, we allow your body to self-regulate and resolve habituated patterns of tension that inhibit posture, cause pain, and impede performance.
Health Coaching involves engaging your cognitive systems via exercises in critical thinking and critical feeling, to condition positive behaviors that build your sense of self-efficacy in your relationship with the ‘mind within your body.’
Personal Training involves conditioning your habits of movement. We train you to become attuned to your inward rhythms of breathing and the outward expressions of posture, guiding you toward a more integrated approach to athletics, exercise, and the motions of life.
Overall, our work is always an invitation, never an imposition. We reject dogma and doctrine politely; instead, we embrace a principles-based practice. In doing so, we invite you to invite yourself to commune with ‘the mind within your body’ in the present moment, to notice what you feel and what you think, what positions and movements you prefer, here and now, in order to be at peace within gravity.
Together, we practice witnessing your mind at work, learning about health and how to practice self-transformation, to love what you embody and embody what you love: yourself.
OUR APPROACH TO HEALTHCARE
A WHOLE PERSPECTIVE: The Benefits of the BPS Model of Healthcare
The Bio-Psycho-Social (BPS) Model of healthcare is a therapeutic approach to healthcare that recognizes the relationships between biological, psychological, and socio-environmental factors in human health.
This model provides a framework for people to consider all aspects of a condition when providing treatment. It emphasizes the importance of examining not only your medical history but also your physical, mental, emotional, and social well-being, in order to create an effective and comprehensive approach to your healthcare.
The Bio-Psycho-Social Model
Essentially, the BPS Model of healthcare recognizes that you are a complex biological being, and your overall health is a combination of unconscious, subconscious, and conscious factors.
This means it is not enough to simply treat your symptoms (i.e. lower back pain, anxiety, etc.). Instead, the best treatment is an education, bringing the unconscious and subconscious into your conscious awareness.
Healthcare providers must consider your relationship with the resources your body needs to be healthy as well as your sense of well-being, in order to provide the most effective treatment plan for you to feel empowered in practice of personal healthcare.
For example, if you visit a healthcare provider to treat your chronic pain, then they should not simply prescribe a pharmaceutical or perform hands-on treatment to alleviate the symptoms.
They should also consider the history of the symptoms and the habits of your daily life, such as:
When did this chronic pain begin?
What are your habituated patterns of breathing?
Are you well-hydrated?
Do you eat well and have healthy mealtime routines?
What is the quality and quantity of your daily movement and exercise?
How is your sleep hygiene?
Do you feel safe and supported at home and at work?
What is the influence of others on your habits?
By taking a comprehensive approach to your healthcare, a healthcare provider can better understand your condition and develop an effective treatment plan that does not just mask symptoms temporarily, but rather get to the root cause(s) and solve the problem there.
The Future of Healthcare
As we advance into the 21st century, we have faith the BPS model will become best practice among healthcare providers. Health is best achieved – and disease is best overcome – through a collaborative relationship between patient and healthcare provider.
As such, it is critical to evaluate the patient’s relationships with their biological needs and how the habits of their daily life may be impacting their experience of disease (pain) and/or health (performance). From there, healthcare providers can recommend lifestyle changes, such as diet, exercise, mental health services, to help support the whole person.
What BPS Means For Your Health
The Bio-Psycho-Social (BPS) Model of healthcare provides a framework for you to consider the unique combination of biological, psychological, and social factors that affect your healing, health, and well-being.
By taking a comprehensive approach to healthcare, you and your healthcare providers can ensure that you are giving and receiving the most effective care for body and mind.
At Upper Valley Integration Therapy, it is through the use of this model that we are able to create such effective and long-lasting impact with our clients – because once a client internalizes this approach for themselves, they become empowered beyond our clinic to make the best choices and incorporate the best practices for their health in daily life.
OUR TRUTH WITHIN OUR WORDS
Definition – “a statement expressing the essential nature of something.”
Words are influential. They offer us means of self-expression, and their definitions enable us to have a common understanding of a word or subject, allowing us to consider things meaningfully, in privacy or with others.
Therefore, it’s incumbent upon us to define the words at central importance to our work.
Here are the words at the heart of Upper Valley Integration Therapy, followed by my own definitions and brief explanations:
Body
Mind
Self
REMINDER: Reality transcends language. There are infinite ways to define these words and to illuminate their true variance and distinction, their true equivalence and uniformity. You may express these words differently, and in truth, I hope you do. That’s what makes us all special – and human.
BODY ~ MIND ~ SELF
BODY
The human body is a structure of existence. It is a form and a system, and a system of systems.
Your body is the home of your being – a temple of existence all your own.
At Integrity Yoga, we define the Body, in reference to a human being, as:
Body – the autonomic, non-neural structures of life.
The term ‘autonomic, non-neural’ refers to physiology that is involuntary and unconscious. This physiology includes mesodermal derivatives (e.g. muscles, cartilage, and bone) and endodermal derivatives (e.g. digestive tract and organs).
It is important to understand the biological origins of these bodily tissues, because you cannot control the operations of these tissues directly.
Therefore, bodywork techniques that claim to target mesodermal derivatives, such as fascia via “myofascial release” and the lymphatic system via “lymphatic drainage”, and endodermal derivatives, such as organs via “visceral manipulation” should be considered with skepticism.
That said, the body is a divine biological entity, with a powerful innate tendency toward health – when it is given proper input, space, and time.
MIND
The human mind is a function for existence. Like the body, the mind is a form and a system, and a system of systems.
Your mind is the director of your body – an instrument of existence that belongs to you.
At Integrity Yoga, we define the Mind, in reference to a human being, as:
Mind – the sensory and perceptual system of governance within a living body.
The term ‘sensory and perceptual’ refers to physiology that is voluntary or conscious – or in possession of this potential – within a body; and the term ‘governance’ refers more directly to the responsibility of control, influence, or regulation. When you examine a living body, this physiology and mechanism is derived from ectodermal derivatives, namely the nervous system.
Again, it is important to understand the biological origins of this bodily tissue, because wonderfully you can control the operations of your nervous system, which coordinates all activities of your body, enabling you to predict, respond, and adapt to changes both internal and external.
Think about it, and additionally, consider how I’ve defined Body in the plural (‘structures’) and Mind in the singular (‘system’). This is because your body requires a primary mechanism to determine its complex needs for survival (i.e. your nervous system).
For a moment, imagine if you had multiple systems of governance within a body, and how basically that might cause conflict. (Well, actually, it turns out this conflict does occur, but it occurs within the subsystems of the nervous system.)
Therefore, bodywork therapy works via the nervous system. Regardless of what a therapist believes or intends upon the delivery of a treatment, any therapeutic intervention must primarily influence the nervous system, and then the nervous system determines what matters within the body take precedence.
The mind is a true marvel of biology, with a commanding instinct for survival and health – when it is given proper input, space, and time.
SELF
The human Self is an awareness within existence. Unlike the body and the mind, the Self is not a form nor a system. Instead, it appears to be an emergent product of both form and systems.
Your self is the steward of your mind – an expression of existence that is truly you.
At Integrity Yoga, we define the Self, in reference to a human being, as:
Self – the essential being of the mind within a body in relationship to the world.
At present, the physiological mechanisms of this biological phenomenon are unknown.
What we do know, however, is that your sense of Self is neurobiological phenomenon that offers the mind within the body to engage itself as the object of its own reflective consciousness.
Since your Self is a reference by a subject (i.e. your mind) to the same subject (i.e. your mind), this reference is necessarily subjective; however, your sense of Self should not be confused with subjectivity.
Ostensibly, your sense of Self requires presence (‘…the essential being…’) that is directed (‘…of the mind…’) to refer upon its own internal condition (‘…within a body…’) and its external condition (‘…in relationship to the world.’).
Ultimately, you may consider Self basically as an occurrence that validates the phrase ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts’. It is perhaps the greatest scientific curiosity.
At Integrity Yoga, we acknowledge your sense of Self to empower your sense of mindful embodiment.
In the tradition of Yoga, we ask ourselves simple questions and listen to our own answers.
Who am I? What am I? When am I? Where am I? How am I? Why am I?
These are the simplest questions, with infinite answers.
Yoga teaches you that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, even as a complex biological being – and that, ultimately, you already know the answers to these questions:
I am a human being, alive, here and now, always changing, because it’s my choice.
This is the truth of your Self.
One way or another, to know your Self, you must do the work of yoga with integrity.
In bodywork therapy, you work to serve your Self in that vital work we call “Self-definition”.
As the ancient Greek aphorism states: Temet Nosce, “Know Thy-Self”.
You’ve already begun.
Word Origins
Body – originates from the Old English word bodig; meaning: unknown.
Mind – originates from Old English gemynd ‘memory, thought’, of Germanic origin, from an Indo-European root; meaning: ‘revolve in the mind, think’, shared by Sanskrit manas and Latin mens ‘mind’.
Self – originates from the Old English, of Germanic origin; meaning: used to express an emphatic sense of identity [i.e. (I) myself, (her) herself, etc.].
“Truth is One – the wise know it by many names.”