What is Radix?

 

​"The Radix Institute, founded in 1963, is a nonprofit organization that trains and certifies people to do Radix work, a somatic form of bodywork and psychotherapy that addresses 'dis-ease' in a profoundly transformational way.  Radix supports a holistic therapy that works with the body, mind and emotions to achieve healing and to develop the capacity to engage fully with life.  'Radix' is the fundamental energy or life force that moves, pulsates and finds form in each of us.  Freeing the flow of Radix brings aliveness, insight, self awareness, discovery, resolution and acceptance."  -from Radix.org

 

​Radix mind-body therapy helps clients work on deeper core issues. These old issues may be felt and expressed through body movement and with words or sounds. Sometimes the full expression of these issues includes emotional tones and feeling re-enactment.   A Radix session usually involves a verbal check-in sometimes followed by body awareness, grounding and breathing exercises. Typically a client then lays down ,clothed ,on a mattress on the floor and works with the breath, movements, sounds or words in an inner exploration of their body, energy and feelings. Touch is sometimes added to facilitate body awareness and release repressed emotional holding in different parts of the body and being.                                                                                               

 

Radix can help prevent dis-ease including cancer and pain syndromes, by connecting to repressed feelings. Holding the breath or not breathing deeply, combined with muscular tension in the diaphragm and throat, suppresses the life force, can shut off the voice and is a way to contain strong feelings.  Breathing exercises, heavy physical exertion and using the voice as in singing, humming ,yelling, screaming or repeating strong vocal expressions, can help to open the throat and deepen the breath. A typical way to cut off from body awareness and feelings is by keeping excessive energy in the head.  This is accomplished by unconscious tightening of the neck muscles. Meditation plus mindfulness, neck and head loosening, grounding and centering exercises can create greater mind-body balance.        Health can be negatively influenced by not realizing the emotional connection to tension and holding patterns in the muscles and organs of the body.  Massage, body awareness, exercises and expressive movements as simple as hitting, kicking, bouncing and trembling are ways to get in touch with the feeling needs of the body.  Holding in, holding back, not feeling and not expressing the emotional currents that are part of life can cause stagnation and ill health.      

 

Radix Therapy Combined with Therapeutic Massage     

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Randy has developed a style of bodywork that brings together elements of Radix-body centered emotional therapy, combined with various massage techniques. A few other body work pioneers have previously used and taught similar concepts of client interaction combined with massage. One school is called Hellerwork and another is Jack Painter's Postural Integration. Both of these are based on Rolfing, which is a very deep form of bodywork combined with Reichian style body psychotherapy concepts. Reichian therapy comes from the work of Wilhelm Reich, a student of Freud and the first psychiatrist to explore the mind/body connection and change the western view of emotions, therapy and body-energy flow (like in the eastern concept of chi).  Today therapists, psychologists, bio-molecular theorists and body educators are coming to realize the importance of the body/mind connection.  Working through unresolved issues with the whole person involved in the process is of high value. Randy has been studying Reichian psychology since college in the 70's.  He started the Radix process as personal therapy in the early 90's and finished Radix practitioner training with certification in 2009. Part of his massage training has been in Postural Integration, a deep fascial form of body manipulation somewhat like Rolfing. His interactive style of massage brings together the experiential Radix processes along with the massage table bodywork.  These interactive sessions almost always involve a deepening and lengthening of the breath. People have trouble sustaining a full deep breath for many reasons. Massage manipulations, sounds or words are used to help to increase the full inhale/exhale. The breathing and sounds may access feelings that are close to the surface and connected with tight muscles and holding patterns in the body. Client movement is used to work different angles and layers of the muscles and tissues. Movements may be soft or hard, helping to bring an awareness of emotional tones or feelings connected to the region of the body that is in movement.  The total experience can lead to deep relaxation, greater body awareness, the opening of tension patterns that normally resist change and a deeper connection to sometimes rarely felt emotions.