Autumn Rebalance: MELT Self-Care for a Change of Season
Autumn changes your rhythm. Let your self-care change along with it.
September is a natural time to review your self-care routines. The freedom and spontaneity of summer give way to more structured routines, workdays become more concentrated, and the season asks your body to adapt along with the rest of your life.
That makes autumn a perfect time to think about rebalancing, rather than simply adding more things to your schedule.
Rebalancing your self-care practices can mean prioritizing self-care treatments that help you feel more comfortable in your body, recover more easily, and maintain the physical resilience you need for everything else you want to do.
Instead of booking visits to a physical therapist or the chiropractor for chronic pain, you can learn how to use MELT Method to improve your body’s natural healing ability.
This autumn at Kinesia Pilates in Seattle, we're launching new programming for people who want to bring the MELT Method into their daily self-care routines.
What does MELT have to do with resilience?
MELT is a gentle self-treatment method using specialized soft therapy balls and a Soft Foam Roller. This is not the same as foam rolling your muscles, or using a theragun to blast the knots and kinks out. Instead , MELT gives you effective self-treatment tools that work through your connective tissue and improves the flow through your fascial system to help your nervous system do it’s work for physical recovery.
Instead of pushing at your muscles and increasing the inflammatory response, learn how to improve circulation so your muscles heal and become more resilient.
A resilient body can respond to demand and then recover from it without triggering chronic pain.
Learning ways to reduce unnecessary physical tension can make it easier to move, exercise, and recover without continually piling effort on top of effort.
Your hands may have more to say than you think
Stress isn't experienced only in your thoughts. A demanding week can show up physically as gripping, bracing, altered posture, restless sleep, or a neck and shoulders that never seem to get the message that the workday has ended.
For our first Autumn Rebalance program, we'll pay particular attention to an area that gets an extraordinary amount of daily use: the hands, arms, shoulders, upper back, neck, and jaw.
Reduce chronic neck and shoulder pain
Improve mental clarity
Heal elbow or shoulder mobility issues
Think about how much your hands do in a typical day. Typing, texting, carrying bags, gripping a steering wheel, gardening, cooking, lifting weights, holding Pilates apparatus, or participating in racquet sports all ask something of your hands and forearms.
Grip strength matters, but so does the ability to stop gripping when you don't need to.
MELT self-treatment techniques for the hands, wrists, and forearms give us an opportunity to explore what changes farther up the chain. Your shoulders and neck don't exist independently from everything happening below them.
That's one reason our Autumn Rebalance material will explore grip strength and finger dexterity alongside shoulder stability, upper-body mobility, and tension through the upper back and neck.
And then there's your jaw...
Many people don't realize how much tension they're holding there until they deliberately give themselves an opportunity to let some of it go. Rather than thinking of the jaw, neck, shoulders, and upper back as separate collections of body parts, MELT gives us a way to explore the relationships between them.
Improving lymphatic flow around your face reduces sinus pressure
Self-treatments to relieve tension headaches
Reduce or even eliminate TMJ symptoms
Improve your ability to turn your head freely
Our MELT work this autumn will include facial and jaw self-treatment, along with neck decompression and techniques for reducing stress that accumulates in your neck and shoulders.
The goal isn't to chase every tight muscle.
It's to give your body a different sensory experience and see what changes when you reduce some of the effort you've been carrying around.
A self-care routine doesn't have to be elaborate
This may be the most important part of Autumn Rebalance.
A self-care practice only helps if it has some chance of surviving contact with your actual life.
You don't necessarily need an hour. You don't need to perform the same routine every day. And you certainly don't need another ambitious wellness project sitting on your to-do list.
Learning a selection of MELT techniques gives you choices. Your hands may need attention after a long day at the computer. Your neck and shoulders may need something different. Another day, you may simply want a few minutes to feel more grounded and clear.
Over time, you can begin to recognize which techniques are useful to you and build your own repertoire for relaxation, recovery, nervous-system regulation, mental clarity, and physical resilience. These are some of the broader ideas we'll explore throughout Autumn Rebalance.
🍂 Autumn Rebalance MELT Workshop in Seattle
Sunday, September 27 | 10:00–11:15am
with Christl Marcontell
The Autumn Rebalance Workshop is a 75-minute seasonal MELT self-care experience focused on the hands, arms, shoulders, upper back, neck, and jaw.
Using MELT therapy balls and the Soft Foam Roller, you'll learn gentle self-treatment techniques to ease accumulated tension, improve upper-body mobility and stability, and help you feel more grounded and at ease.
The workshop is appropriate for all levels of MELT experience and can be taken on its own or as an introduction to the six-week series.
$65 | Early Bird $60
$5 Discount available 9/7-9/20. Use code: autumnearlybird
Workshop participants receive $10 off the six-week Autumn Rebalance series or a MELT self-care product, including a Ball Kit, Soft Foam Roller, or Fascia Hydrator.
🍁 Autumn Rebalance: Six-Week MELT Series
Fridays, October 2–November 6 | 8:00am
In Studio + Online | $288
For those who want to go further, the six-week series provides time to explore MELT self-care more deeply, become more confident using your MELT tools, and develop a practice you can continue throughout the season.
We'll explore treatments and techniques related to:
Neck and shoulder tension
Grip strength and finger dexterity
Self-care for the hands, wrists, and forearms
Grounding and mental clarity
Nervous-system regulation
Recovery and physical resilience
Building a practical personal MELT self-care routine
The series welcomes newer and experienced MELT participants. You can participate at our Pioneer Square studio or live online by Zoom, with recordings available to registered participants through the completion of the series.
REGISTER FOR THE SIX-WEEK SERIES
Bring your self-care rhythm along with you
You can attend the workshop, join the six-week series, or participate in both.
Wherever you begin, consider one question as the season changes:
This autumn, how do you want your body to feel?
Stronger? Calmer? More comfortable? Clearer? Better able to recover from your workouts and your workdays?
Your answer doesn't need to become another goal to accomplish. It can simply help you choose the self-care practices worth making room for this season.
Autumn changes your rhythm. Bring your self-care rhythm along with it.
Have questions about joining the workshop, class series, or getting private lessons in MELT Method? Email us at hello@kinesiapilates.com for details.
