Today we’d like to introduce you to Rhianna Sanford.
Hi Rhianna, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
My journey began at a young age while trying to navigate a series of acute and chronic health conditions. These struggles opened my eyes to the need for daily self-care, shaping my body mind awareness, and ultimately lead me to become the bodyworker I am today. Struggling with asthma from infancy, breathing was always a challenge, with fear of flare ups ever present. An unfortunate fall when I was a preteen resulted in fracturing my tailbone and tearing my sacroiliac joint before I had even hit puberty. And because this was before MRI, the SI tear wasn’t known for many years, resulting in misalignment and torsion in my hips through puberty. This left me with chronic back and hip pain that lasted well into adulthood. Growing up, I thought that everyone’s back hurt. I didn’t understand that it wasn’t normal to be in chronic pain all the time or having episodes of my back “going out”. Then there was a trip overseas when I was in high school that debilitated my immune system and left me severely ill with parasitic infection. That was a long journey of recovery. Paired with an untimely auto accident, I was pretty much drowning in my own misery and pain. Injuries and accidents my body knows well.
I tried it all: Physical Therapy, Massage Therapy, Chiropractics, Nutritional Healing, Traditional Chinese Medicine, Meditation, Counseling, Yoga, you name it. They all helped indeed! But I still felt helpless. My healing was still something outside of me, out of my reach, something that someone else did to me or for me. It wasn’t until I believed and trusted myself as my own healer that my perception of sickness and pain shifted. I had to learn how to become aware of my own sensations and discomforts and let them be with me instead of fighting them. In other words, I had to befriend my pain. This is how I discovered my body’s ability to heal. It was a long process, but worth it, as everyday of struggle helped me understand the importance of a daily practice and shifting perceptions.
These lessons proved invaluable during the pregnancy and birth of my children (one singleton and a set of fraternal twins). In my late twenties, while on bedrest with twins, no longer allowed to practice asana or teach Yoga classes, I started to explore Therapeutic Yoga. I spent ten weeks, confined to rest before the twins were born, practicing, studying and reading everything I could find on Yoga Therapy. I learned what it was to be Yoga instead of do Yoga. I learned that poses are just one branch, and there are many, many ways to evolve the mind, the essence of Yoga. Even though I was already a Yoga teacher for many years at that point, I was just beginning to understand how to practice for my needs. A dedicated yoga practice help alleviates stress, depression and anxiety, manage pain, and prepare and heal from labor and delivery. I learned that wellness is oftentimes a perspective shift, not just a physical condition, that revolves around our intention to be well and manifest in the layers of our being, from the inside out.
Finding my purpose in the work that I do is one of the most rewarding lessons life has offered. Believing that my passion will sustain me and my family has been an empowering and grounding experience further teaching me why devotion to Self Knowledge is so important. Knowing what we want to do it invaluable! Loving who you are while you do what you love is living the fullest!
My practice started as a personal journey to find my own healing and has grown into a comprehensive and therapeutic way of life for myself and my clients. Working on my personal Yoga practice for over 20 years has cultivated a holistic and non-dogmatic approach to wellness, melding methods and lineages in a deeply therapeutic process. I like to offer our bodies a place to learn and listen without a rigid mindset and encourage the development of body awareness and mindfulness.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
By using both Structural Massage and Yoga Therapy, we can address the whole body in a way that massage alone cannot. While massage is perfect for releasing soft tissue and dissolving adhesions, or my preferred word, releasing supportive scaffolding, it’s not very good at repatterning inefficient compensation, and it doesn’t help build muscle strength. Movement, however, does. And while movement, or asana, is only one branch of Yoga, there is perfect synchronicity in the practice of Yoga Therapy that helps us move body, mind, and spirit, creating balance and strength, ease, and peace. Yoga and Massage Therapy are my favorite methods for knowing who we are and how we function. Essentially, my job is to help you see and feel yourself and then create your own practice of self-massage and yoga to further balance how your body deals with daily stress.
Assessment is a core principle in structural bodywork and a major method in my practice. Although not everyone comes in with chronic pain or injuries, a lot do, and even more start the conversation admitting to tension. Structural bodywork is all about understanding the individual’s balance, or lack thereof, and selecting specific bodywork to bring things into balance again. Using kinesthetic or orthopedic assessment or muscle testing, I am able to establish a baseline for what works well and what doesn’t, based on your body type and movement patterns. Essentially, I’m looking for what needs to be stretched versus strengthened, hyper or hypomobility, the ways in which you are using your body and whether they are functional or dysfunctional. This allows us to create a treatment plan, just like a map, so we have direction in our sessions. My goal is to help you build awareness of your body and to build a tool chest of remedies and techniques to help you respond and rebalance.
What matters most to you?
The belief that each individual is their best healer! This is what inspired my business mantra, “Oneness through Wellness,” giving voice to the inner healer within each of us.
Contact Info:
- Email: info@namastetherapies.com
- Website: namastetherapies.com
- Instagram: namastetherapiesatx
- Facebook: namastetherapiesaustin
- Youtube: Rhianna Sanford
Image Credits
All photos credit to Jeana Marina photography
