Meghan Sickner
Tools for Love

SRI... What is?

What Is Somato Respiratory Integration?

Somato (Body) Respiratory (Breathing) Integration (SRI) is designed to offer you new options in your experience of your body and your personal healing.

It educates you to your body’s rhythms and inner wisdom through focused attention, gentle breath, movement and touch. SRI provides you with a means of placing your attention on your body, the vessel of human spirit, and provides a tool for focusing your attention in a way that works for your healing and empowerment.


SRI Consent

Somato Respiratory Integration Wellness Information & Notice of Informed Consent

Somato Respiratory Integration Wellness Education is specifically designed to support you in furthering the strategies introduced in Network Spinal Analysis, while giving you new tools to deepen your connection with yourself (body and mind). Through the practice of Somato Respiratory Integration (SRI), you will develop greater access to, and more wisdom from, your body and mind that facilitates greater long term healing.

SRI is achieved by giving the practice member new tools to influence the rhythm of their body. One of the most powerful, and simple ways of achieving change within your body is by changing the pattern and rate of your breathing.

Have you noticed that when you are stressed out, angry, frustrated, or rushed that you breathe differently than when you are happy, relaxed, feeling no stress, or content with what is happening. When you are reacting to negative stresses, usually your breath will be shallow, constricted, rapid, and confined to an isolated region of your chest or abdomen. This breathing pattern puts your body into a defensive reaction, and creates an environment that is anti healing. In this way, your body has taken its energy and resources away from healing, and diverts them to bodily processes used for defending itself against a perceived threat (which the negative situations/feelings create in our mind and bodies). When this negative situation occurs, stress and tension build throughout the body, and it becomes harder and harder to focus on anything other than the threat. At this time, you create a disconnection between the mind and body.

When you are happy, relaxed, under no stress, and content your breathing is deep, expanded, slow, and spread throughout the abdomen and chest. This breathing pattern puts your body into a relaxed and peaceful state, and creates an environment that is pro-healing. Here your body uses its energy and focus for repair and healing because it does not need to spend the energy on defending itself. In this state, stress and tension leave the body, and the mind finds that focusing is much easier. When you are relaxed you are more connected between mind and body. Therefore, your body is more efficient in all of its functions and your mind is able to utilize its energy for critical thinking and coordination of healing processes.

With many people, the ability to “re-connect” back into states of peace and ease after a stressful event has taken place is difficult. Many times these stressful events can create long term patterns within us. You may notice that when you think of a particular event, time, or person that caused you stress in life, your body and mind still react as if the event just happened to you. Your muscles tighten, teeth grind, facial expression changes, tone of voice changes, posture changes, and overall you feel the emotion of it all over again. In this way, significant events or a series of significant events over time can change the body/mind’s pattern of reactions so that even when you are not directly under a stress, you body still stores tension and reacts as if it was.

SRI gives you the tools to break the long term patterns that lock the body and mind into defense. SRI is a combination of breath, movement, focused attention, and light touch that coordinates the body’s rhythms. These exercises give you the ability to connect to the stimulus of the tension, and then through the coordination of breath and movement “re-connect” back to states of peace and ease. Learning to control your breathing while consciously accessing the event(s) that caused your body to develop patterns of tension, allows you body and mind to let go of old patterns and start generating new ones.

It is common for self-awareness to heighten during the course of care in NSA/SRI. Since you will be learning to pay attention to the body’s subtle rhythms, area’s that have been disconnected from your awareness will start to ‘re-connect”. Also, you will learn to redirect your body/mind’s attention from a distressing circumstance to one of inner safety and peace.

During and after some SRI sessions you will likely be aware of emotional shifts. Sometimes the changes will be subtle, and sometimes more intense. You may experience physical sensations such as energy, vibration, heat, or possibly discomfort during or after the session. Connecting to areas/ideas/emotions in the body/mind causes you to become more connected to your truest self, and in these moments powerful changes can occur.

When utilizing these exercises during the session or at home, if you are uncomfortable with your experience or if you feel fear, slow your breathing rhythm and/or use less breath. Focus on directing movement into the chest or abdomen. Remove your hands from the area of distress and redirect your attention to an area of comfort and peace. We will teach you how to locate areas of peace and ease on your first SRI session so you’ll be well prepared to do these exercises.

SRI is made up of 12 different stages (aka breathing exercises). Each stage has skills and breathing patterns that are unique and only found in SRI care. Each stage will help you better connect to you body/mind, and re-establish peace and ease where tension and stress once were.

Please Read and Sign the Following:

I have read the above SRI Wellness Information & Notice of Informed Consent and agree to participate in Somato Respiratory Integration Wellness Education and Exercises. I consent to receive SRI Wellness Education, including learning the exercises. I understand during these classes I will be touching my body, breathing, and at times verbalizing my experience of my body. I understand that SRI exercises are not a replacement for any form of medical treatment. Also, I understand that my SRI Wellness educator will not diagnose, treat, or offer advice on any disease or symptom. Any medical advice or treatment for symptoms or diseases should be done with another health care professional.

I consent to allow my SRI Wellness Educator to touch my body for the purpose of assisting me in learning and refining my experience of these exercises. I give consent to my SRI Wellness Educator to share personal and clinical information with my NSA practitioner. I give consent for my NSA practitioner to release information from my personal and clinical history to my SRI Wellness Educator. I agree to allow such communication on an ongoing basis so that the exercises and skills I am to learn can be fine-tuned to compliment my circumstance and current NSA level of care.

______________________________________ Signature ___________________________________ Printed Name