The wear and tear of osteoarthritis can often affect a person’s hips, sometimes requiring a hip replacement operation or resurfacing procedure, this is not an uncommon procedure amongst the elderly. We may believe that excess exercise is the reason our joints suffer or that we are just deficient in important minerals and vitamins that our bones need, or it’s a natural part of ageing – all these things can certainly be a contributory factor but have you ever considered that mental and emotional health could have an impact also?
Nadia Smith is a Tui Na master practitioner and qualified Qi Gong instructor with over 25 years experience, she’s been practising traditional Chinese healing arts in her clinic since 1999 and as well as Tui Na, Nadia’s skills include Cranio-Sacral Therapy, Skeletal realignment, Psoas Muscle release, Trauma Release Exercises and a special interest in hip replacement maintenance.
Nadia is also the owner of two metal hip resurfacings and through her years of experience she has gained a tremendously rich knowledge and appreciation of body mechanics and how desperate its call for attention and love can be. Nadia’s book ‘How Did I Get These?’ details her agonizing search as to why she developed osteoarthritis in both hips resulting in two hip replacements.
Through her own self-detective search, she learned that our bodies’ ‘core’, or psoas muscles, which are deep-seated muscles that directly connect our lumbar spine to our thigh bones, and form a shelf for our reproductive organs, intestines and bladder – these muscles react directly to our ‘fight, flight, or freeze’ mechanism – so, when stress and emotional turmoil are present in the body, this core will be affected.
Being subjected to any form of stress, abuse or fear in early life, causes the body to ‘freeze’, which in turn creates tightness and a shortening of these core muscles. This can then become the root cause for various misalignments in the body which can become an issue in later years. This makes it a problem not just for ageing people but also for younger people who are suffering from Osteoarthritis.
An imbalance can often be made worse by a lack of body awareness when moving and generally how we go about life. Nadia has her own experience as a Fitness Instructor, having worked through the pain till she could hardly walk and was forced to heed her body. She believes that there are emotional reasons for these issues and she dedicates her work to body alignment and taking care of emotions and energy. Because of her Qi Gong practice and many personal experiences, Nadia is very skilled at clearing energy fields of any unwanted or unnecessary entities or attachments and helps enhance health and performance through body awareness.
In her clinic she offers ‘True to our Roots Qi Gong’ and ‘Spontaneous Qi Gong’ which she developed herself to stimulate the primordial movements that are the fundamental basis from which formal Qi Gong was developed. Also, Cranio-Sacral Therapy, Qi Touch (Energy Touch)/Posture/Moving Meditation, self-healing through internal stretching and connecting with the meridians/internal organs/emotions, and trauma releasing exercises.
