Today we’d like to introduce you to Lauren Keller.
Hi Lauren, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
While an undergrad, I studied Psychology at Adelphi University, Long Island, New York. After taking the first-ever Somatic Psychology course offered on the East Coast, I came across Structural Integration and was immediately intrigued. I wrote a research paper on the subject after receiving my first ever Rolfing, aka Structural Integration session and was profoundly astonished that I had not known of this modality sooner. After spending many months of my life chasing pain through Massage Therapy and not getting results that would last, finally, Structural Integration (SI) changed much of how I was living in my body in just ONE session.
After graduating college, I worked in the homeless shelters in NYC for three years before feeling burned out, overworked, and underpaid. I had always kept Structural Integration in the back of my mind. I decided to leave my job as a Care Coordinator and travel to South America for four months solo backpacking. Upon returning to the states, I submitted my application to the New School for Structural Integration in Laguna Beach, California, and got accepted.
I graduated in June 2018, and in August 2018, I moved to San Diego full time to start my own private practice in Structural Integration and have been working full time ever since helping people find their way to a pain-free life with an elevated consciousness between body, mind a spirit.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
When I moved here, I did not know more than five people in this city. Building a private practice from the ground up was hard. I spent many months networking at every event I could find, cold calling local practitioners that I hoped to form referral partnerships and eventually joined a networking group. Slowly over the course of the last three years, I have built a private practice and have been happily working out of my own office in Mission Valley.
Thanks to many of my clients sharing about their success in working with me via word of mouth, writing many 5 star reviews on Google, Yelp and FB, promoting my work through Social Media (@LaurenKellerSI) I have built a very successful practice.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I specialize in soft tissue therapy, aka fascia (connective tissue) manipulation to help address pain, posture, and performance. Fascia surrounds all of our organs and covers all of our muscles, effectively connecting our innards together in a web-like sheath, kind of like plastic wrap. Fascia acts like a network of information, relaying nerve impulses and reacting to stress and tension in the body. When flexible, our fascia is healthy and unrestricted. When unhealthy, the fascia becomes restricted and sticky.
Mainstream medicine still considers fascia a relative mystery and largely ignores it in treatments for physical pain. When fascia is unhealthy, largely due to inflammation or injury, it becomes sticky and can form adhesions – areas of drier tissue, causing tension that you can imagine by stretching plastic wrap tight around an object, then pinching it on one side – it stretches and gets tighter in some areas to account for the pinch.
Many sources cause the inflammation that leads to adhesions, the most obvious being direct injury or trauma. Other factors include repetitive movement, sedentary lifestyles, poor posture, and emotional stress. Since fascia provides the atmosphere through which nerve interactions happen, it responds to stress and tension. Additionally, during an injury, it’s common for fascia to constrict around the injury in order to provide structured protection, tightening the whole fascial system and potentially causing pain and discomfort in an area of the body not associated with the injury.
My practice specifically focuses on using a global lens to understand local problems. Once I understand the underlying patterns and can slowly release these patterns through hands-on bodywork and conscious dialoguing coupled with movement education, clients not only begin to live a life free from the pain they get to keep these changes for the long term through taking part in their recovery process.
What sets my practice aside from others is my deep, unshakeable commitment to understanding the individual client’s psychology in relation to how they live inside their bodies. Through very mindfully directed dialogue, I begin to understand my client’s way of orienting their way in the world and gently begin to shine a light on perspectives that may be keeping them within their patterns. By meeting my clients where they are together, we take each step side by side on the path to embodied Integration.
How do you define success?
Success is keeping small promises you make to yourself every day. Staying true to yourself along the way to reaching your goals; allowing passion and joy to be the key motivators to your life is a true measure of success.
Pricing:
- Single Session – 90 Minutes 200$
- Ten Series Package – 1900$
Contact Info:
- Email: LaurenNicoleKeller@gmail.com
- Website: www.LaurenKellerSI.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/laurenkellersi/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LaurenKellerSI/
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/lauren-keller-structural-integration-san-diego
- Other: https://g.co/kgs/g99c7x
