Kathy Kerber of Persensa is fantastic! She has taught me how to release tight muscles in my neck, shoulders, and back like nothing else I have tried.
If you are not familiar with the Hanna Somatics approach, it involves learning how to feel internally and contract problem muscles, and then release them very slowly. This might sound trivial -- like those annoying and tedious progressive relaxation exercises. But this approach is quite different in that it directly addresses sensorimotor amnesia, where certain muscles stay tight all the time (due to an injury, for example) but your brain stops feeling the tightness in the muscle itself. Instead, you may develop chronic pain issues elsewhere, such as areas that are fed by nerves that pass under the muscle that you no longer realize is perpetually contracted. If you have had trigger point bodywork, then you are probably familiar with this already. In my case, doing Somatics exercises works better than trying to address my own trigger points using a Theracane (which sometimes makes my trigger points worse).
If you are already familiar with Somatics, I can say with confidence that Kathy is a superb practitioner. I have worked with 4 different Somatics practitioners -- including one in San Francisco with several dozen 5-star Yelp reviews -- and Kathy is by far the most effective. The other practitioners I have seen rely on teaching you a standard set of exercises and seem to run out of steam if those don't suffice or if they hurt. Kathy, by contrast, is much better able to adapt exercises because of her superb familiarity with anatomy, and because of her perseverance, humility, and problem-solving mentality.
She also frankly works harder. She creates custom home exercise instructions for me after each session that include extremely helpful anatomical illustrations to help me learn which muscles I am learning to release. These instructions are nothing like the fill-in-the-blank copies physical therapists have given me in the past. The homework instructional guides Kathy creates after each session are so thorough and tailored to my particular needs that they alone have helped me achieve breakthroughs in learning to sense and release very subtle muscles, such as the ever-troublesome scalene and levator scapula muscles in my neck. It wouldn't surprise me if she spent an hour or more just creating some of these documents for me. I don't know about you, but I've never had a practitioner do something like that.
You owe it to yourself to give Kathy a try. read more
