Mia's story

From body dysmorphia to at home in my skin.

I finished a ten week series on my twenty second birthday and took my first dance class. It brought me home.

Mia Gleason, BCSI Mia's story 5 min read

Posture realignment before and after a structural integration series — The change I felt was not only in the mirror. It was in how I lived in my body.

I do not usually lead with my own story, but it is the reason I do this work, so here it is. For a long stretch of my early life I was body dysmorphic and deeply insecure. I lived at war with the body I was in.

Then I had a Structural Integration series, and something I did not expect happened. It was not just that I stood differently. I felt differently about being in my own skin.

What changed

Over ten weeks of the work, my structure reorganized, and so did my relationship to it. I went from bracing against my body to inhabiting it. From dysmorphic and insecure to, in my own words, an embodied lioness at home in her own skin.

A whole body map of release and integration — The relief was whole body, and it reached past the tissue into how I felt.

The first dance class

I finished the series on my twenty second birthday, and I took my first dance class. I had never felt able to move like that in front of anyone. It brought me home to myself, and I have been chasing that experience for other people ever since.

Your body is the vehicle for everything you experience. This work helps you come home to it.

That is why I became a practitioner. Not to fix parts, but to help people feel at home in the body they live in.

The short version

Mia came to this work through her own transformation.
A ten week series changed her structure and her relationship to her body.
The shift was emotional as much as physical.
It is the reason she practices the way she does.

This is educational writing about bodywork and movement, not medical advice. It does not diagnose or treat any condition and does not replace care from your physician.

Mia Gleason, CMT, BCSI

I am a Certified Massage Therapist and Board Certified Structural Integrator in Grass Valley, with nearly thirty years of hands-on work. I read the body like evidence and follow the lines back to the cause.

Mia Gleason Bodywork · Grass Valley / Nevada City