What is “Myofascial Release”?

Different people in the bodywork and movement worlds would probably say different things. I’ve heard some people talk about “myofascial release” as something they do with a ball during a yoga class. I’ve heard general massage practitioners talk about feeling and engaging with fascia in their work, who may or may not have a refined language or framework to describe what elicits a true “release”. Many practitioners seem to think that myofascial release and deep tissue massage are more or less the same thing – which, depending on the way you define these terms and practice them, could be true!

This presents a challenge for me, as a budding MFR practitioner who wants to be able to talk about my practice, and help people understand what’s on the table with my offerings.

I don’t want to knock standard massage or self-massage, with or without tools. I’m obviously a huge fan of massage in general and find many different forms of it to be genuinely therapeutic. I also don’t mean to criticize yoga as a vessel for doing deep fascial work. The first sincerely functional education I received about fascia was via a book about Yin Yoga. Yin Yoga engages fascia in a very effective way, provided that the teacher isn’t shortcutting the long holds. The time element is the essential part that turns a basic stretch into a true fascial elongation where release of restrictions and solidified ground substance is possible. Whenever I use MFR with clients who have experience in Yin Yoga, they pick up on it more quickly and are able to receive it more deeply.

What I hope I do with this piece is to help draw a distinction between the generic introductory myofascial release I was taught in massage school, and something like John Barnes MFR, which in my opinion and experience goes many layers deeper. I mean to relay to you some of the rich layers and textures I’ve found in this particular sub-slice of the bodywork world, and to help clarify what I mean when I personally talk about “Myofascial Release”.

To explore the field a little bit, I signed myself up for some “myofascial release” bodywork sessions locally in San Francisco – both in the Barnes lineage of training, and outside of it. I hope that sharing about those experiences here will help illustrate some of my convictions and educate people in my world about what to look for when seeking out good MFR work.

My MFR Exposure: From Massage School to John Barnes MFR Workshops

This section describes my own relevant educational background, for those interested.

I went into my training at the San Francisco School of Massage with a lot of curiosity about fascia, in part due to the influence of my colleague and friend Elena, who has developed her own therapeutic modality of fascia-forward bodywork.

I was given a cursory introduction to the topic of myofascial release in my basic massage school training. It was enough to begin to understand how to connect with fascia – the living, continuous matrix of connective tissue that gives structure to our whole organism – and to integrate that understanding into a Swedish relaxation or Deep Tissue massage. But it was certainly not enough to step into the new league of possibilities that opened up for me when I took John Barnes’ MFR1 workshop.

Barnes’ work with fascia was not simply an expansion of understanding… not just a new way of working with tissues… not just a set of techniques… it was actually a total paradigm shift in the way we can understand and approach a person with their unique body and pains. It combined a new awareness of what fascia is with a technical approach to engaging with it that works. Barnes was one of the first people to breach this new level of integrated understanding of the human organism and the way that life flows through our structure, and his work has had an amazing impact in the worlds of both alternative and traditional medicine.

When I first heard a recording of John Barnes, I immediately felt that I was in the presence of a man who had a deep grasp on what true healing is. I learned through MFR1 and reading his books that his wisdom had been hard-earned through his own painful yet cathartic healing journey. I resonated deeply with the way he expressed what he’d learned through that journey, and with the ways that his approach differed from a traditional Western or allopathic paradigm of healing.

As I heard more and more healing stories in John’s books, and directly from MFR practitioners I’ve been meeting at workshops, I’ve become more convinced of the efficacy of his methods and approach, and the seemingly universal applicability of MFR to address a very wide variety of health and wellness issues.

I now am on the path of learning and using MFR and growing connections in the world of MFR practitioners by taking workshops, going to study groups, and continuing to receive sessions for myself. To be specific, I am four months, three workshops, two study group days, a handful of MFR trades, and many client sessions deep on this path.

I already am actively using MFR in my massage practice. Time after time, clients are telling me that the MFR portions of our sessions are the most effective and profound thing I do. They say things like “this feels completely different” and “I don’t know what you just did to me but it was exactly what I needed”.

So I continue to be more and more convinced that this is a good path for me to follow as a budding somatic therapist. Spiritually I feel aligned with it; that it’s meant for me. And because there are so many different understandings of the term “myofascial release” in the movement and bodywork field as a whole, it feels important for me to take some time to detail and explain my evolving and particular knowledge of this work — to share the gems I am discovering, in hopes of spreading it!

On The Receiving End: My John Barnes MFR Sessions

My JB MFR experience as a receiver has been deeply spiritual at times, bridging my physical pains with past emotionally traumatic experiences and bringing me a cathartic experience of inner-reconnection and emotional release. At other times, it’s been a gentle portal into a deep state of consciousness and inner awareness, a state entirely inaccessible to me in my standard modes of operation.

It’s hard to talk about this in a single-session way, because the benefits have compounded so deeply with multiple exposures. I now see a local MFR practitioner regularly, which means we’ve been building up trust together, and that counts for a lot as well.

Still, for the purpose of this comparison, allow me to share some points of my experience as a receiver.

In our first session, I didn’t have a deep emotional catharsis, but I did have a strikingly “different” experience than a massage. I walked in with some pain in my knee that I hoped to address. In our hour together, my practitioner assessed my posture and pelvic alignment, then chose a few different positions in which to initiate a fascial stretch and hold, mostly around my hips and quads. The work was gentle, slow, and deep. It changed the feeling of my walking stride and made my pelvis feel more balanced. It wasn’t dramatic, but it was compelling.

In our second session, I did have an emotional catharsis. Not that I was planning on it, but that it was what emerged from my own restricted tissues and painful body patterns.

I walked in with an angry-feeling pain in my shoulder/neck area, which is an area of chronic dysfunction that I’ve been actively working with through bodywork and movement for a long time now, and mostly with Myofascial Unwinding over the past few months. My practitioner had me sit, and he started with gentle touch around the affected area, just enough to make contact with it. It helps that I’m familiar with this style of work, because I could go into my own unwinding process pretty immediately and he was able to just hold me in it and offer support and gentle guidance.

I found myself moving into slow neck and shoulder movements – circles, twisting, bending; some innate motion of my inner being guiding me through the painful-feeling edges. Through surrendering to being held in that movement and in my pain, I sank deeper into the emotional aspect of my experience. I would describe it as a gentle descent into deeper unprocessed layers of both my physical and emotional being — and by being held there, I was able to see and process something that had been inside me a long time in a half-baked state. Old memories came to the surface for me to see with new eyes. I cried tears of grief, compassion, and understanding. I walked away with a refreshingly new understanding of not only my body but also my whole life’s story. And yes, physical relief was one of the results. Not all at once, but enough to mean something to me.

That process is something that in the Barnes world we call “Unwinding”. I wrote about my understanding of “Unwinding” in my first blog post about MFR here – it’s cool for me to look back and read my own past description of it, which at that time was more from the outside as an observer. Now I’ve lived it and experienced it for myself, and can vouch more deeply — this is really amazing work!! I went on to take the 3-day MFR Unwinding workshop, an immersive experience of giving and receiving Myofascial Unwinding sessions with a group of 50-ish practitioners, having experiences like what I just described that went even deeper.

For example, in one of my receiving sessions, I re-lived being a baby in the crib, crying and angry at my parents for what felt at the time like abandonment. There were several other very old un-processed life experiences that I re-visited, felt, and integrated all within the container of an MFR Unwinding process. After that workshop I felt myself inhabiting my body differently – and this change has been on the level of palpable love, not just ease of movement and a pleasant sensory experience. I feel myself moving through the world in a less fearful way, more open to the moment and to the ever-present force of love that infuses it.

This is the kind of work that helps my soul feel more whole and integrated. In its deepest forms (multiple sessions and openness to genuine, deep spiritual shifts), it matches the value I’ve received from Ayahuasca and other plant medicine ceremonies, or from my most transcendently healing dance journeys. And it’s taken me into these kinds of processes in the most gentle way — unlike a high-dose psychedelic, I have no fear of this work taking me or my clients beyond our true capacity for integration.

General “Myofascial Release” Sessions

A detailed description of this session is probably not helpful. I was mostly disappointed by it. I received a generic “myofascial release” massage from a local independent practitioner who I found on Google. It was basically a Swedish massage with some trigger point work. She found and worked out some trigger points in my QL (Quadratus Lumborum muscle). She put me into a few brief stretches. There were moments where she touched at the barrier of fascial resistance… but, disappointingly, she seemed to have no sense of those moments or of the value of staying there at the barrier and allowing time to do some work.

She did tell me at the end of the session that I had some stored emotion in my liver that she helped me release; if that’s true, I appreciate it! But there’s something odd about being told that, while not having experienced the emotion myself. So there was no soul-level healing component, which is what lights me up the most about the John Barnes work. I did leave feeling a general sense of bodily wellbeing, as I’d expect from any decent full-body massage.

Obviously my experience with one practitioner can’t paint the full picture of what everyone else is doing outside of the Barnes style of MFR. But it’s proof to me that the term “myofascial release” by itself doesn’t guarantee much.

Reflections

My experience was just one data point, but it’s a data point that confirms my overall suspicion about the relative meaninglessness of the term “myofascial release” when used by practitioners who haven’t trained with John Barnes or in his lineage (or perhaps another dedicated, specific school of study — I’m still very open to learning more about other schools of myofascial release, when opportunity arises.)

I can see why so many practitioners may be quick to use the term “myofascial release” because they do feel themselves to be working with fascia in some fashion. I did it too, prior to taking MFR1, and I didn’t know any better because I wasn’t taught any better. In a way, it’s not a lie to advertise that you’re doing fascial work, even if you don’t have a deep understanding of fascia. It’s kind of impossible not to work with fascia when you do even generic massage, because fascia weaves in and around all of the structures and soft tissues of our body. You can’t touch a muscle without also touching the fascia that surrounds and weaves through it.

But what way of working with fascia is genuinely effective? What causes fascial restrictions to actually release? What’s the difference between simply touching or moving a restricted area, versus eliciting a meaningful therapeutic change in the tissue?

Speaking of change in the tissue – we’ve all had the experience of coming out of a massage feeling relaxed and limber, only to feel familiar tensions resurface as soon as we return to our usual responsibilities and stresses. Is there such a thing as a long-term shift in tissue quality versus a short-term respite?

These are the kinds of questions that were not answered in depth by my basic massage training, but have been answered in a way that compels me and sells me, in the John Barnes approach to Myofascial Release.

In Summary…

I hope my experience was entertaining and that you walk away armed with new knowledge about how to traverse the landscape of “myofascial release” bodywork – in particular, take my sincere encouragement to go experience some John Barnes MFR work for yourself! Either with me, or with another trained practitioner. I’m happy to provide references!