Do emotions and traumas stay in our bodies?
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What inspired Erica Ryan to explore the link between massage and emotional release?
Alive and kicking with Clare McKenna on Newstalk. Now, Erica Ryan is the owner of White Willow in Dublin. They give a range of therapies for clients with massage being one of the most popular. With over 20 years experience and a range of specialist training, Erica has found that often emotional release accompanies muscle relaxing. And she joins me in studio now. Erica, you're very welcome. Thank you so much. So, Erica, you came to say hello to me at a breathwork event and invited me out for a massage where you work because you have an important message you feel you want to share. There's something you're experiencing with your clients, particularly your female clients, but not just them. about how powerful massage can be.
And you really wanted to share that.
Yes. So I'm a massage therapist over 20 years. And in the last couple of years I went into, and a sports therapist, and a couple of years ago, I just noticed that the type of massage I was trained with was very topically based. So you're working on the kind of outer layer or the inside layer, the myofascial layer. Whereas a fascia, when I most recently trained more in that, it works in a deeper level to release any sort of trauma, emotions, any past experience that we hold in the body. And how did you come across this? So I went training twice last year. It was a lady from America, Maria Ferris, did training in the hotel I work in actually. And Mario as well, Mario Sanchez, he's from Mexico, came over and did a workshop that I attended a couple of months ago too.
So both very different style of trainings and a lot that I've picked up over the years, I kind of incorporate into using with what I learned from them. So I love adding my own intuitive style of training in with the work that I've learned too.
And one of the biggest bestselling books in this area is The Body Holds the Score. And that's by a doctor, one of the foremost experts in traumatic stress. And I think we have a way to go with completely understanding this, but there is an idea that Our body does hold on to certainly stress or emotion, and it's something that you're experiencing now that a lot of your clients are experiencing certain things, are feeling certain ways, but are sort of pushing it down. We're all guilty of it and just, excuse me, pasting on a smile and getting on with it.
Yeah, we're suppressing. So sometimes when something shows up in the body, it's not necessarily in the area we think it is. So it's really watching our emotional health, watching and dealing with emotions and dealing with at that time and not letting them build up. And I've noticed that I'm guilty of it myself over years of not really understanding emotions and how they're processed through the body or where they're held and what's held there. But it's, yeah, it's absolutely incredibly fascinating how easy it is to release any stored blocked emotions in our body. And it's not just emotions, Clare. It's, you know, trauma could be scar tissue. It could be an injury you had 10, 15 years ago. So it's everything is relevant.
It's a kind of a somatic build up of everything together that builds up in one particular area. And that's where it becomes chronic in particular areas in the body. So with the work that I do, you're dispersing that energy. You're dispersing any stagnant, tight energies that you just want to flow through the body. And working on emotions to release and improve emotional health is really important.
And you're right, people will assume, and I would have the same, that when you think about stress held in the body, we instantly go to the shoulders or the neck. But with the training that you've done, there are different areas of the body for different emotions.
Yeah, so you start, I start at the calf. So when you're working on the lower end of the body, you're working on the calf, you can assess the body as you're looking at it from that area. And you can see different parts of the hips, maybe move the arm, kind of move through the points that you're working through the calf.
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