Osteopathy & Field Healing

Listening to the Whole

For more than two decades, Sidsel Sommer has worked with the bodies of horses and people, developing a way of listening that begins with a fundamental osteopathic principle: the body functions as a whole.

Muscles and joints do not exist independently of fascia, nerves, circulation, organs, the craniosacral system, or the nervous system. A restriction in one place may reveal itself somewhere entirely different. With horses, even subtle changes in posture, movement, behavior, and balance can become part of the story the body is telling.

Sidsel's work has evolved from physiotherapy and manual medicine into an increasingly gentle osteopathic approach, one that relies not only upon what her hands can do, but upon what she perceives.

Today she offers that work in two forms: in-person osteopathic treatment and remote healing practice.

Remote Field Work for Horses & People

Over years of placing her hands on bodies, Sidsel began to recognize another dimension of her work.

Sometimes she seemed to perceive the pattern before physically finding it.

This sensitivity gradually became part of the way she practiced osteopathy. Eventually it raised another question:

What happens to that connection when the body is no longer physically in front of her?

Remote sessions allow Sidsel to work with a person or horse regardless of geographic distance. Instead of physically palpating tissues and movement, she enters the same deeply attentive state she has cultivated through years of osteopathic practice and focuses her awareness on the individual.

In-Person Osteopathy

The Intelligence of the Body

Sidsel's preferred osteopathic approach is a gentle method that works with the body's existing patterns rather than forcing movement against them. Her broader practice may also draw upon craniosacral work, myofascial techniques, manual medicine and other approaches developed through decades of working with human and animal bodies.

With a horse or a dog, the work begins before Sidsel places her hands on the body.

She watches.

How does the horse carry itself? How does the back move? Are the shoulders and hindquarters working together? Where does movement flow easily, and where does something seem blocked? Sidsel's current practice places considerable emphasis on observing the whole horse in motion before examining individual structures.

With people, the principle is much the same. The place where we experience discomfort is not necessarily the place where the pattern began.

The question becomes less: Where does it hurt?

and more: What is the whole body trying to tell us?

Two Ways of Working. One Way of Listening.

Whether working hands-on or across distance, Sidsel begins in the same place:

• See the whole.
• Sense before acting.
• Follow what reveals itself.

The body carries history. An old injury may no longer be an injury, yet the body may have reorganized around it. Movement adapts. Tissue changes. New patterns emerge. What happened in the past is not necessarily still happening - it is held differently now because it has become part of the body's history.

Art carries history in much the same way. A painting, sculpture, or cathedral holds traces of the hands that made it, the culture that shaped it, the people who stood before it, and the centuries through which it has traveled. That history is no longer occurring, yet it remains present in another form. What we see with the naked eye is only one layer of what is there.

For Sidsel, attention is a way of becoming receptive to those layers. In osteopathy, she listens for the history held within the body's present patterns. In remote work, she extends that attentiveness beyond physical proximity. In art, she looks beyond the visible object toward the human experience and history it continues to carry.

This is the deeper meaning of Ways of Seeing.

Whether encountering a painting, a cathedral, a horse, or another human being, we are meeting something shaped by everything that came before, yet alive in the present moment.

When we learn to pay attention, we begin to see more than what is visible.