What is Your Visceral Body?

Viscera is the fancy name for organs. (At least we aren’t calling them offals).

The organs are all supposed to move in gross patterns like breathing and your heart beating – called mobility.

They are also supposed to move in subtle patterns called motility.

This subtle movement pattern called motility is not the motility of your gut. According to Dr. Barral (of The Barral Technique) motility is the embryologic movement pattern of the organ. It indicates how happy the organ is doing its job.

All the organs, in fact, all the bodies I speak of here, should be happy doing their jobs.

Just as we are designed to be happy in life.

If an organ is not happy doing its job there will be alteration in its motility pattern.

Why might an organ not be happy doing its job?

An organ’s happiness quotient will decrease if there is inflammation, stagnation, or restriction (like adhesions) that prevent it from its intrinsic movement patterns. An organ also will be less happy if it is not optimally positioned in relationship to its neighbors.

Organs that are not optimally positioned or optimally moving can still appear to be functioning great from a biomedical perspective on imaging and lab.

But you might not feel like you are as comfortable in your body as you would like to be.

An organ that is not experiencing proper mobility or motility often will not provoke pain, and the pain associated with an organ that is not moving properly is the pain of the fluid system being constrained because of the organ.

There are some organs that predictably are associated with pain patterns when not moving properly.

For instance, a kidney that is a grade one or grade two ptosis (falling down) will present with stereotypical flank pain.

Also, if the pericardium is not moving properly, it can pull on the lower neck and upper back and create pain that only temporarily subsides with chiropractic adjustments and massage.

What is Visceral Manipulation?

Visceral Manipulation involves listening to the organs with our hands, and determining if the organ is moving properly. An organ that is not moving properly can impact the function of the musculoskeletal system, the vascular system, the nervous system, and the lymphatic system. Basically everything. Optimizing the movement patterns of the organs helps to support and stabilize the infrastructure of the body so everything works better, and you will be less likely to experience pain.