The beauty of your body’s wisdom: fascia, touch and restorative care

I was recently interviewed on the STIRRINGS podcast for a wide-ranging conversation about beauty, body intelligence, fascia, touch, regulation, restorative care, intuition, energy and craniosacral work.

We also talked about the relationship we have with aging and beauty, the importance of safe and tender touch, and what becomes possible when we slow down enough to listen to what the body is communicating.

Beauty as something whole-making

One of the places we began was with the idea that beauty is often dismissed as frivolous or trivial, particularly when there are more serious things happening in the world.

I’ve wrestled with this myself. There was a time when I rejected some of my own desire and love of beauty because I wondered if I should be focused on deeper, more important things.

What I’ve found through allowing myself to fully embrace my love of beauty is that beauty can be incredibly whole-making.

When we feel held by beauty, we can have more capacity to do the deeper, harder work.

Being at the beach can give you space to process your emotions. Feeling relaxed in your skin can give you the capacity to look at yourself more deeply. Beauty and depth do not have to exist separately from one another.

There is, of course, a real duality here.

Beauty is an industry, and fear and scarcity have been used to sell beauty to women for a very long time. We can be made to care deeply about beauty and then shamed for caring about it too much.

But underneath all of that, I believe there is another experience of beauty available to us. One rooted in pleasure, regulation, self-knowing, restoration and devotion.

Restorative beauty care

In my own work, I use very light-touch connective tissue and fascial work, lymphatic drainage, craniosacral work, energy work and other gentle approaches to support the body.

Whether someone comes to me because of sinus congestion, jaw tension or something more explicitly related to beauty, much of the foundation is the same.

I’m interested in creating the conditions for the body to downshift, soften and respond.

This is part of why I’m careful about creating a rigid divide between natural and unnatural beauty practices. People make different choices at different moments in their lives for very personal reasons.

For me, the deeper question is about wholeness.

What do you need right now? What helps you feel connected to yourself? What happens when beauty care is approached with less fear and more reverence?

Listening to the fascial voice

Fascia is the connective tissue network that interconnects structures and systems throughout the body. It helps give us shape and support, and it is richly sensory and responsive.

My own approach to fascia is very gentle.

When we work slowly, we have an opportunity to notice the subtler communication happening within the body: pulsation, twitching, softening, unwinding, changes in breath, fluid movement and spontaneous adjustments.

I think of this as the fascial voice.

One of the things I said during our conversation was:

Your body has its own agenda and our mind has its other agenda. When you move too quickly, you miss the conversation.

That principle influences so much of my work.

There can be an impulse to work harder on the body, stretch further, apply more pressure, manipulate more aggressively or immediately correct what we perceive as wrong.

But when we slow down, the body has an opportunity to show us something.

Even in stillness, there is movement happening within us.

The profound importance of touch

We spent a lot of the conversation talking about touch.

There can be a real starvation for safe, caring, non-sexual touch in adulthood. So much of the touch we receive can become functional, medical, hurried or transactional.

And our own touch can become that way too.

Think about the way you wash your face, brush your hair, apply lotion or massage oil into your skin. These are ordinary grooming practices, but they are also moments when your body is literally meeting your own hands.

How are you touching yourself?

How much pressure are you using?

Are you rushing?

Are you paying attention?

I hear from clients all the time that they realize they have been touching their faces much harder than they need to.

The invitation isn't to make every beauty ritual elaborate. It is to recognize that these seemingly mundane moments can become opportunities for tenderness, sensory awareness and connection.

There is something incredibly sacred to me about making the mundane sacred.

Attention changes the experience

My work has also become increasingly influenced by craniosacral and energetic approaches.

During an in-person session, I may be working directly with the head, face, neck, connective tissue, fluid movement and cranial rhythms. At other moments, the work can become extraordinarily subtle.

Sometimes the most important thing happening is attention.

When you give another person your full focus, you begin to notice very small shifts: a swallow, movement through the jaw, a change in breathing, softening through the face or a subtle adjustment happening somewhere else in the body.

The same principle can be explored in your relationship with yourself.

When you bring open attention to sensation rather than immediately trying to change it, you may begin to perceive things that were already happening beneath the noise.

What a snake taught me about restoration

We also talked about one of my favorite encounters with an unexpected teacher.

I once watched a snake on the beach battle an eel and end up with its jaw dramatically displaced.

Afterward, I sat and watched the snake for more than an hour.

It rested. It used the rocks around it to work its jaw back into place. It alternated between movement and stillness. Eventually it rested in the sun and later began interacting with another snake.

I was fascinated by how instinctively it knew how to restore itself after such an intense experience.

There was action when action was required.

And then there was restoration.

I think humans can be very good at the first part.

We work. Exercise. Think. Produce. Scroll. Drive. Carry things. Sit at computers. Move through stress.

But we don't always give ourselves adequate time to restore after all of that action.

Restorative care is part of the cycle.

Beauty, aging and the experience of being cared for

Toward the end of our conversation, we returned to beauty and aging.

One of the dominant messages women receive is that beauty exists within a scarcity model: you have a certain amount of it, you have a certain amount of time, and eventually it will be gone.

I understand why that fear can feel powerful.

But I am much more interested in experiential beauty.

Pleasure. Sensuality. Touch. Luxurious care. Feeling comfortable and cared for in your body.

I shared a recent experience of caring for my mother, who is getting older and can't move as easily as she once could. I helped her take a long, luxurious shower, conditioned and combed her hair and covered her skin in beautiful creams.

I watched her change through the experience of being tenderly cared for.

That kind of beauty doesn't have an expiration date.

In many ways, we can become more practiced in it as we age.

Beauty will transform. Our bodies will transform. We will transform too.

But our capacity to experience beauty, care for ourselves, receive care and remain in relationship with ourselves can continue to deepen.

A different relationship with beauty and the body

So much of this conversation ultimately came back to relationship.

What happens when we approach the body with attention rather than immediately imposing an agenda?

What happens when beauty practices become places where we experience pleasure and connection rather than only correction?

What can we hear when we slow down enough to listen?

And what becomes possible when we remember that our bodies are intelligent, responsive systems that we are continually in relationship with?

These are questions that live at the heart of my work, whether I am working with someone through restorative facial care, fascia, lymphatic work, craniosacral work, energy, movement, beauty practices or deeper conversations about her relationship with herself.

You can listen to my full conversation on the STIRRINGS podcasthere.