Your First Session

Where is Unalome Therapy

Unalome Therapy is at 4 Church Street, Green Island, Dunedin 9018. There is a small duck-egg blue cabin in the front yard where the treatments take place. Church Street is quite narrow, Unalome Therapy strongly suggest tucking in your wing mirrors or considering parking in the carparks behind the Night and Day dairy at the bottom of the street. It is a very short walk from there.
Arrangements can be made to use our driveway if access is challenging.

When to arrive

There is a ten minute buffer between appointments, sometimes people need that little bit of extra time, especially if they have had an emotional release. Please be aware if you arrive early someone may be in the room when you arrive. If you arrive 5 minutes before your appointment that is the safe zone and allows for me to clear the room and set things up for your beautiful session. As we do not have a waiting room; doing a little life admin, meditating or mindfully people watching in your car is advised, this means you will feel unrushed when you do choose to arrive at the door of the cabin. Just have a little peak on arrival, generally, if the curtains are all pulled back everything is ready for you and I can’t wait to start.

What to wear

Wear clothing that you feel comfortable in. All treatments involve clients being fully clothed. Be aware that your body may move, some bodies move a lot! Most clients choose to be covered by light blankets, or really rugged up. You will come to know your own body, some people do feel hot or cold during and following the session so bring a few clothing options for your first few sessions.

Drink water

It is important that you are well hydrated for your session and continue to drink water following your treatment. Obviously, this can mean you also need the toilet more frequently. Unalome Therapy does not have toilet facilities so it is wise to go before you treatment. There is a public toilet nearby on the main street of Green Island near the vet. Many people find coconut water extra soothing for these treatments, some people are not fans but worth trying if you haven’t. Energy drinks, caffeine, fizzy drinks etc do not hydrate or support the nervous system, even those with advertised benefits of electrolytes are no substitute for water due to the sugar content. Alcohol will undo any benefits from the sessions and in particular following IRM sessions should not be taken for 24 hours.

Headspace

Read the information provided on the website and in the information sent to you for your first assessment session. In particular focus on your expectations or doubts, both of which are healthy, especially trying something new. You should be discerning and informed before you trust someone to work with you and your body. If holistic healing is new for you it helps if you try to stay open to what your body and system might want to teach or show you. Focusing on a particular outcome; could stand in the way of something that is important to your system but may not be “logical”. The body processes your experiences very differently to your mind and this work is body-led. In saying that, if there is anything you feel strongly about not wanting; your system will not allow that boundary to be crossed.

This work is not about bypassing things that are important to you for greater benefits in the long-term, this healing is completely focussing on what feels most important to your body, what you need to feel safe, resourced and abundant. We work with release, not pain; we work with returning to a fully relaxed and flowing nervous system which can then correct and adjust as it was designed to do. All we do is trust, trust in your own system as the medicine. This may require you to rewrite the relationship and understanding you have had about what your body has been doing for you, especially if you have had an ongoing injury. We are working holistically, sometimes that is in a circle and a bit upside down and back-to-front but that is part of the magic. Our physical bodies and body systems are part of the material world and subject to many forces; we all have limits; none of those limits should prevent you from having a positive and loving relationship with your body. You can experience, learn from and further respect your body through health challenges. This honours your experiences and your body and is distinctly different to fighting your body’s reality and attempts to help you.

Integration and After-Effects

Following the session you may experience a variety of after-effects. These vary between clients and sessions. You will be supplied with more information following your treatment but when booking your first and second sessions especially consider that you may benefit from some time following your appointment to rest and process or integrate your session, make plans for some me-time. Maybe organise things like healthy take-aways or cut back on other commitments so you have some time and space. The healing and stimulation from the session can continue for a few hours/days following the session. It is difficult to predict how much after effects might need your focus or time. Preparing for giving yourself some rest and reflection time will not be wasted, if you have made time for yourself and do not have after effects to manage that time to rest will still benefit your journey greatly.

If you do need to do things following your session make sure you do schedule a little time to reflect and rest as soon as you can. It is not a great idea to have your first session prior to a highly stressful or busy event or to rush back to a high pressure situation following your first or second treatment. As you get to know your body and how your system processes sessions you will be able to predict a little better how you may experience the after-effects and you will develop amazing skills and resources to begin to work with your own system without even having a session. This natural releasing in your everyday life is the ultimate goal of these journeys. To be able to direct your own inner healing journey once you have re-established connection with your full holistic self. The more integration time you allow for yourself and the more time you spend trying new practices and reflecting on and working with the after-effects of the sessions the more you will benefit and learn and the faster you can see and feel changes. The first session is a mini one as far as the length of treatment after the assessments and crafting some plans, this helps build trust with the body the second session therefore may result in stronger after-effects.

Generally the after effects from Spinal Flow are milder than Inherited Release Method with some exceptions when realignment/adjustment takes place.

Typical After-Effects

The following list is for your information and awareness. We can be extra aware following a new experience and start to pay attention, therefore, some things that you think are after-effects might just be you taking notice of your body. Tuning into your body is a major focus of this work so that is fabulous.

You will not experience every one of these, typically people feel very mild after-effects and only one or two of the following:

Detoxing- a lot of trips to the toilet (saving the details here but if your body needs to detox you will be aware of it, frequent urination and other signs of rapid digestion and clearing). Digestion in general can be/feel a little different.
Phantom type pains, itching, sensations of hot and cold and tingling- these are all nervous system responses. You should be aware of the sensations but it is not the same as being in real pain, it is pain-like. This can often occur on old scars or areas where you have had pain in the past. It is a bit like the impression on pain-ghost pain. If you were in severe pain seek medical advice as you usually would, this is not related to your treatments as everything in these modalities is very gentle and involves the lightest touch.
Emotions and memories randomly reoccurring- this can be a bit strange and distressing. This is a wonderful sign that things have released that the body has held on to. The body has held incomplete cycles of experiences it was not sure what to do with, you may re-experience these as they leave. This process is natural and exactly like feeling and working through issues in real-time; but this experience is delayed so it makes it a little confusing for the mind. This will occur at your level of processing skill, your body has decided it has space to offload these things. This is where you can build a lot of new skills and this process will become easier and easier.
Slight muscle type pain as if you have been exercising or overused a body part. This should not be unbearable. If your body moves a lot on the table you will probably understand exactly why you have this pain.
Headaches are particularly common for people who do regularly get headaches or migraines. A little like the emotions sometimes you have an experience of what is healing. This can be great feedback to know your session made an impact, but it can be a bit unpleasant. These sessions very slowly adjust the alignment of your pelvis and spine. Misalignment is what contributes to dizziness and experiences like migraines. These same adjustments therefore have similar effects for a short-time following the session. If you are concerned or things are worryingly painful seek medical help, after-effects should be milder than your usual experiences of headaches, dizziness even a bit of wobbly vision. Be reassured if this does happen it is unlikely to follow another session, it usually is a one-off after-effect typically lasting around 24 hours. Headaches can also indicate you need to hydrate more.
Random body movements, twitches or shakes. These are natural nervous system responses and your body may start to feel more free to make these on its own as you spend more time in your natural relaxed state. This is our natural state and many of us have got stuck in high stress mode. It might feel strange but it is absolutely a wonderful sign. You are recalibrating, nerve pathways are waking up!
Altered energy levels, you may feel very tired or quite energised or a little bit of both at different times.
Cold and flu like symptoms, this is less common but some people do experience something like being unwell with a flu following their session. The nervous system is connected with every system in the body including the immune system. Being unwell does include a number of the body’s natural ways of releasing or detoxing, so runny nose, or coughing even an allergy type reaction can be experienced. This after effect also occurs if you are releasing from around the throat area and you were coughing etc in your treatment. Or, you may have a virus and it happened to coincide with the treatment.
You can have lovely blissful feelings of deep peace. It surprises some people that they have repressed a lot of positive emotions, perhaps in times when being happy wasn’t allowed- some people do release fits of laughter.

The after-effects should settle down as you have shifted a lot of the material that was holding you in a stressed response and you should find your system becomes fit to processing and releasing things in much more efficient ways. If you do have a particularly strong response following a session, please know that this is not going to happen every time.

Also remember if you have been having frequent sessions and feel you have the after-effects under control, your body might surprise you at times. Be guided by your schedule and the time you personally need to integrate your sessions before booking in your next treatment with IRM especially.