Reclaiming Your Livelihood: Neurovascular Release for the Jaw and Head with Kieran Schumaker

2 CEs NCBTMB, pending approval; 2 CEs IASI Cat. 1

Kieran’s online NVR techniques are adapted from the manual Neurovascular Release techniques that they have been teaching for seven years. The online approach is a guided self-treatment method that uses client movement, simple hand contacts, and gentle stretching of the neurovascular tracts to reorganize and balance the body. The results of the online work are surprisingly satisfying!

Benefits from the techniques taught in this webinar include a freer range of movement for the neck, head, and jaw, and help with repositioning the head over the body. (You will feel yourself emerging from any tendency toward a forward shift of the head, and you will feel it is easier to open your jaw wide. Jaw clicking may be reduced or for some people even eliminated).

This two-hour webinar is a sequel to the Neurovascular Release webinar titled Reclaiming Your Livelihood: Neurovascular Release as an Online Practice.

If you watched the previous NVR webinar, we will be starting with the neck work you already learned, and then we will expand upon those ideas and techniques, with the goal of releasing artery tension to jaw muscles, and other vascular limitation to head movement that originates above the clavicle or within the upper thorax.

This work can be taught to clients or students in one-to-one zoom sessions or in-office sessions or private movement training sessions.

As a manual therapist, because of COVID concerns and mask-wearing, you may be feeling limited in what you can do to address jaw tension and the TMJ symptom of clicking. Or you may never have worked with jaw muscles and you are curious about how you can help your clients have freer movement and reduced head, neck, and jaw tension, without you actually touching them.

As a movement therapist who is an anatomy geek, you may be interested in refined head, neck, and jaw self-care techniques that you can pass on to your students.

Structural Integrators who are accustomed to doing manual intra-oral work (for relieving strain on the sphenoid and balancing the cranium during the 7th or 8th session in a classic SI series) will be delighted by how easy it is to target individual jaw muscles with this hands-off technique.

In preparation for the jaw release work, Kieran will review/teach the relevant jaw and cranial anatomy, and the functions of the individual jaw muscles, so that the jaw release techniques make sense. Also preparatory for this jaw work, Kieran will introduce work for the internal thoracic artery.

As a bonus, a PDF of practitioner notes are provided as part of this webinar. (Manual therapists can teach themselves this technique for working in-office with a client).

Note: This is a recording of a live Zoom webinar Kieran delivered on August 7, 2020

Run time: Approximately 2 hours