Postpartum and Diastasis Correction

Erika’s postpartum care supports mothers through healing movement and hands-on therapy during the post birth experience, a time where much of the focus revolves on caring for the baby.

As baby grows and the belly stretches, comes a weakening of the pelvic floor and a shift in alignment and fascial tone. Erika helps to guide the body back into alignment if there are any imbalances or shifts in the body from pregnancy that didn’t naturally recover.

When a woman has postpartum pain, discomfort or injury, Erika’s method offers healing work that can help with all postpartum conditions.

Her approach addresses consequences from labor or birth, including pelvic pain and pelvic floor dysfunction, and the day to day effects of motherhood, such as the ergonomics of holding a baby, not sleeping and stress.

Alongside her postpartum care specialties is Diastasis correction, a combination of hands-on manual therapy, breathwork and healing-based movement.

Diastasis recti is the separation of the two sides of the rectus abdominis at the linea alba, the fascial connection in the center of the abdomen. The majority, about two-thirds, of women have diastasis recti postpartum.

It affects both the appearance of the abdominals, and the functionality of the pelvic floor, deep core, back muscles, organs, respiratory diaphragm and alignment of the entire body. It can lead to serious digestive issues, back pain, neck pain, pelvic floor dysfunction and prolapse.

With the right combination of bodywork and movement, Erika’s methodology addresses the holistic relationships, fascial tensegrity, and visceral alignment in the body to correct the problem of diastasis, where there’s often a full body pattern contributing to the separation.

Surgery that does not allow the core to be flexible and functional is not the answer. Through Erika’s knowledge and experience, she believes that diastasis recti is healable and correctable.

Erika is a trained birth and postpartum doula with decades of postpartum experience, including her own self-healed diastasis recti and is joyfully a mother of two.

Structural Integration

Structural Integration is a hands-on process that focuses on the fascia, or connective tissue, that surrounds and gives structure to the muscles, bones and organs in the body, and surrounds every cell.

Structural integration is based on the ideas of Dr. Ida Rolf that our fascia largely affects the state of our wellbeing and should be addressed as part of healthful movement and life.

Fascia gives muscles their shape and the body its structure. An endlessly connected web, bathed in lymph, fascia is its own communication system, which affects our body’s innate ability to heal itself.

When we’re trying to make changes in the body, fascia is integral to the work of establishing balance and order. This fascial integrity leads to informed, integrated movement.

Erika is an expert in helping guide the body through this hands-on practice to address balance, alignment, length, texture, tension and restriction in the fascial system and decipher how it is affecting structure and function.

A balanced, aligned body moves and breathes with greater ease and requires less energy to function. Through this results-oriented work, the body improves in flexibility, coordination, athletic ability, and as your body renews its own subtle energy, you leave a session feeling completely restored.

Erika’s Structural Integration work is always informed by the response of the client, and can affect great change by being intelligent, specific and easeful, so that pain doesn’t have to be a component.

A licensed structural integration therapist, Erika’s philosophy is that this process will help move you toward feeling more like a river than steel, and therefore more at home in your body.

Correction of Biomechanics for Pain Management

Erika believes pain is not something to be ignored.

As an expert biomechanist, she defines pain as your body’s way of communicating that there’s a biomechanical issue that needs to be addressed and cared for. She also believes pain is not just a given when we exercise a lot or as we age.

We can find our way out of pain and into free movement with both strength and mobility. No matter your body’s history of age, accidents or surgeries, there’s a choice in the mechanics your body can make to keep you free from pain.

In our analysis of biomechanics, we’re looking logically at each joint, each bone, each muscle, each fascial line, as well as looking globally at the whole body pattern both in posture and in movement. Each part of the body has a way that it has evolved to function and the body has a holistic pattern that we can learn to honor.

Erika’s individuated approach involves a body read of both posture and movement locally and globally combined with structure integration, body work, and corrective movement integrated into full body exercises, somatic release and neuromuscular repatterning.

Beyond looking for imbalances in muscle activation, Erika looks at organ alignment, breath patterns, joint function, fascial tensegrity, the patterning of the nervous system, proprioception, intrinsic muscle activation, deep core patterning and then layering the firing of the muscles on top of that.

So many of the corrections on form we often hear are in fact not supportive of our natural evolutionary movement patterns and so Erika’s process involves building language around knowing your own body and how it moves correctly, so that you can take the learning out into your life.

Erika’s sessions address the full spectrum of pain, whether she’s keeping the body moving while an injury is healing or implementing healing methods that directly address the injury and related imbalances.

Breathwork

Erika believes breath is the first essence of proper movement.

Through gentle guided practice, Erika helps to restore your natural breath pattern and inform breath led movement.

The body’s first response to stress or trauma is through the breath and the unhealthy pattern that shifts us out of respiratory homeostasis becomes our primary way of breathing.

Through Erika’s detailed therapy, you will retrain your muscles of respiration to come back together. As you move and connect to your proper breath mechanics, your posture and alignment is addressed from the inside, where it should begin.

When our breath reaches into the deep inner cylinder of the fascial system, and we engage the diaphragm, pelvic floor and the intrinsic musculature of the core, we can stand in good posture with ease.

Our musculoskeletal system becomes efficient, we enhance organ function, we help to heal myriad injury and dysfunction in the body, and our energy increases.

Our nervous system experiences one of the biggest benefits of proper breathing. As we return to the parasympathetic state, we change how we react, how we think and how we see things.

Through breathing properly we find our way to peace and calm in the body from a place of deep connection and strength, all through the day, all through life, whenever we need to call on it.

Postural Analysis and Correction

Posture is your unconscious resting state. Erika is a longtime postural expert known for being able to see how the body is aligned and therefore affecting the shape your body takes.

The correction involves structural integration, a hands-on therapy, to release areas of the body that are restricted and improve support in areas that lack integrity.

This is then followed by neuromuscular repatterning through touch and movement.

Through this balancing of the tissue and strengthening of neurosomatic connection, ideal alignment becomes natural.

Living in beautiful posture provides the understanding of where one’s spine should be, restoring its natural curves, and how the body distributes weight on your feet, balances the weight of the skull, and creates ease within your stance.

From this architecture, your body learns where to direct breath, where to find softness and where to create connection and activation. These postural shifts are then applied to your alignment within any other movement or activity.

Healthy posture is about finding the mind-body connection that allows you to know when you’ve shifted out of balance, hearing the signals from your body, giving you the power to hold your nervous system in a sympathetic state, a state of rest and digest, so you can live injury free, accessing your full strength, with ease and fullness of energy.

Erika’s postural correction trainings include Kendall Method, Alexander and Structural Integration, amongst others.

Gait Analysis and Correction

As most of us take on average 10,000 steps per day, walking is our primary human movement.

Erika is passionate about gait correction and feels it’s imperative if you want to change the way your body looks and feels.
The way we walk affects blood flow, lymph flow, muscular activation, organ function, digestion, joint health, how we access proper diaphragmatic breathing, immunity and whole body functionality.

Erika determines what your individual gait should be, based on your anatomy, honing the balance between mobility and stability through proper joint function and efficient fascial tensegrity.

As an illustration, walking correctly involves proper foot patterning and hip extension in order for the low back and hips to feel good. Furthermore, neck injuries can come from dysfunction in the thoracic, so when we correct rib rotation in gait, we ease neck pain. As a result, chronic pain or injury can be addressed through gait correction.

Restoring your natural gait rhythms will allow you to walk through the world supporting your natural whole body balance, healing and ease.

Erika’s gait correction work is informed by her studies of the biomechanics of human movement, a certification in gait analysis correction, and body reading training.

Autoimmune Management

Erika guides her clients to manage their autoimmune through conversation, nutrition, structural integration, and healing therapeutic movement.

The multi-armed approach helps to address symptoms through quieting the immune system and bringing the body into homeostasis.

She came into this work because of her own autoimmune disease, and the autoimmune conditions experienced by generations within her family. Deeply invested in providing healing for herself, Erika immersed herself in research that led to treating her own body and ultimately expanded her knowledge to provide healing for others.

The movement sessions are working one-on-one with Erika to create a daily exercise program to keep you healthy while honoring your body’s needs for gentleness and a shift away from stress-inducing aggressive exercise.

Through applied touch, breathwork and somatic movement, the nervous system is balanced and the body’s connection to self is restored to allow it to stay out of autoimmune flares.

Releasing areas of the body that hold tension in fight or flight supports a reduction of symptoms. Awareness around stress and environmental triggers, and continual conversations about how to move through the world and live in balance keep autoimmune at bay.

The nutritional approach includes support to implement the Autoimmune Protocol diet followed by tools and guidance to individualize it specifically for you and your autoimmune condition.

The journey of working with Erika helps uncover the changes that need to happen all through your life, including your medical approach and integrating with your medical doctors. The work serves as a guide for helping you figure out how to feel your best within living with autoimmune disease.

Erika’s autoimmune management program combines her experience healing her own autoimmune with her deep studies and certification in holistic nutrition, somatic movement, trauma release training, therapeutic Pilates and yoga, Feldenkrais, Structural Integration, and Zero Balancing.

Scoliosis Care

A proprioceptive disorder, scoliosis is an abnormal lateral curvature of the spine that relates to an imbalanced fascial tensegrity pattern. Erika’s care aides in releasing what’s holding the curves of the spine and teaches one to support new found expanded alignment.

She utilizes breathwork, as well as neuromuscular repatterning and fascial rebalancing through hands-on therapy and movement to open up areas of shortness and create integrity in areas that are unsupportive, and offer better strategies for living with scoliosis.

Her approach encompasses restoring fascial balance then teaching muscles to support that new balance including proprioceptive re-education to support the new patterning and release pain.

The work helps you to feel better, and provides a full body exercise method through safe movement, rather than reinforcing imbalances, that prevents scoliosis from increasing as you age.

Her trainings and certifications include scoliosis correction, Schroth, Kendall Method, Structural Integration, Zero Balancing, corrective exercise, and therapeutic Pilates and yoga.

Erika has studied scoliosis care to support her own scoliosis and worked with clients, sharing her healing knowledge, for more than two decades.