Body Tuning
Body Tuning is a form of bodywork based on western physical therapy, yoga, osteopathy, acupuncture, tai chi chuan and reflex therapy. The most well known practitioner of Body Tuning in the United States is Shmuel Tatz, who is based out of New York city. I got exposed to this work from one of his best students and at the time one of his co-workers Glenn Black. I attended a workshop Glenn Black held at Omega Institute.
From my experience of the work, it is a clothed table modality. It involves a great deal of movement, intuition, and understanding of anatomy and physiology. The work is very efficient often working on two or three parts of the body at the same time. The idea being that if you can distract the client sufficiently, they won't be able to resist, hold onto unconscious patterns, and block efforts to loosen up and rebalance the areas being worked on.
It is very difficult, to say the least, for someone to do this work the way Glenn Black or Shmuel Tatz does it without having done bodywork for decades. They multitask so much and are so efficient that they accomplish in fifteen to thirty minutes what most therapists cannot accomplish at all or at least without doing months of sessions with a client. Having said that, there are still many things that can be learned from the Body Tuning approach and integrated without being talented enough to command the modality. It shifted my point of view on bodywork considerably and it gave me a new guidepost to try to reach. It took me a couple years to digest what I was shown in that workshop. In August 2007, I planned to take another workshop at Omega with Glenn Black. He had a freak accident and his workshop was cancelled. Ironically, I ended up being in Gurmukh's class doing Kundalini Yoga.
