CAZ’S JOURNEY
When my daughter was born in 2006, I knew I didn’t want to go back to an office life. As I had experienced the benefits of yoga myself since my teens, had a passion for helping others to feel better through moving well (and I’d been teaching in my lounge for years), I decided to formally train as a Teacher to postgrad degree level with the British Wheel of Yoga.
Shortly after graduating, we moved to Bejing, China where the culture, particularly in health and wellbeing, had a profound effect on me. When we returned to the UK a few years later, I took a deep dive into the world of the connected tissue body (fascia) and holistic healing through movement.
Studying with some of the worlds leading teachers, I spent the next six years learning about anatomy in movement, fascia research and manual therapies that work with connective tissue.
In 2015, my first business, Intelligent Movement was born – the first yoga inspired, body sympathetic movement classes with a strong scientific knowledge supporting it.
The changes being affected in students by this approach to movement was amazing to see, particularly as I was working mostly with people suffering from chronic joint pain and other issues that excluded them from everyday movement classes.
‘Intelligent Movement’ was also providing a foundation for my own health and wellbeing for at the time I had been diagnosed with a hereditary condition called keloid scarring. Keloid scarring is when the body lacks an ‘off switch’ when creating scar tissue to heal wounds.
I had undergone three rounds of surgery on my right side, which left me with long scars on the outside, but what we couldn’t see was what was happening inside.
In 2018 it all caught up with me, and I became very poorly very quickly. It transpired there were significant adhesions wrapped around my liver and other major organs in the right side of my tummy.
I spent nine months of 2018 in bed in terrible pain, something along the lines of fibromyalgia or the flu. The Doctors couldn’t do much except prescribe heavy-duty painkillers and offer yet more surgery.
I didn’t take the surgery. I went back to the movement ‘lab’ (aka my bed) and starting researching what was causing these acute and debilitating symptoms. As well as my usual work with my Teachers in fascia and scar tissue, I also consulted a herbalist who treated me for peri-menopause.
At 38 years old, it was the last thing on my mind…menopause was over a decade away, right? Wrong. My body was going through the first of many changes and I needed to rapidly adapt if I was going to navigate this journey well.
By 2020 I’d created an approach to movement far more sympathetic; addressing inflammation, stress and other menopause symptoms. I’d drawn on all my trainings in meditation, breath work and the new information coming from the world of neuroscience to create something truly holistic working with body and mind to great effect. I got myself pain-free and the Gravity Technique was ready to be shared with the rest of the world.