Berrywork is a physiotherapy method that combines corrective stretching and massage techniques to stimulate the body towards self-correction and balance. It targets the tissue surrounding muscles, joints, nerves, and blood vessels and is known to heal various ailments. The method was developed by Lauren Berry, Sr., and is taught primarily at UC Berkeley.
Berrywork is a physiotherapy method. It’s a combination of corrective stretching and massage techniques that engage cartilage and the tissue just under the skin, called fascia. Berrywork, popularly known as the Berry Method, targets the tissue surrounding muscles, joints, nerves, and blood vessels, stimulating the body toward self-correction and balance.
Berrywork does not simply involve rubbing and massaging the skin, but the gentle and subtle shifting of tissue around organs and muscles back into place. This shifting and stretching slowly forces the body back into its natural state, and is supposed to restore proper balance. Berrywork is known to heal ailments ranging from sinus problems, weak bladders, frozen shoulders, and hernias.
Berrywork heals the body through soft tissue manipulation. These techniques, popular in Sweden for centuries, consist of gentle massages. These massages work to relieve spasms, correct distortions, and heal muscles and skeletal organs. Berrywork often applies a mechanical understanding of the body and precisely works the joints and muscles into place through simple massage and slow, strong movements.
This work is known as muscle and organ positioning, and it showed the mechanical side of Berry’s method. Berry believed that the body had memory, and that it tried to return to a normal, healthy state, and thus allow the repositioning of muscles and organs back into place through massage. Berry believed that the distortion of the internal components of the body, the muscles, tendons, and ligaments, led to major mechanical problems in the rest of the body, especially the spine.
Berrywork was developed by Lauren Berry, Sr., a registered physical therapist who often thought of herself as a body “mechanic.” Berry viewed the body as an engineering project with a structural problem that needed to be fixed. He first learned from a neighboring doctor as a child, and soon began treating family and friends with his massage methods. After studying anatomy, physiology, autopsy rooms, and cadavers, Berry soon developed her method into an organized practice.
Berrywork’s method evolved after Berry’s death in 1983 with the Institute for Integrative Health, Inc. The institute was originally started by seven of Berry’s advanced students who learned and worked with the founder before his death. Berrywork is taught primarily at UC Berkeley and is only certified through a five-year program. However, there are many workshops around the world that teach the basic principles of the Berry Method. These provide one-on-one training on specific sites of common injuries throughout the body, such as the knee and ankle, two of the most famous joints corrected through Berrywork.
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