Your organs are part of your body, too.
We tend not to think very much about our organs unless something goes wrong with one of them.
When we think about posture, movement, pain, or tension, we’re much more likely to think about muscles, joints, bones, or perhaps fascia. But your organs are always there, occupying much of the space inside your trunk—and they aren’t separate from everything around them. They have fascial connections and relationships with one another, with the diaphragm, spine, ribs, abdominal wall, and pelvis. They move as you breathe, walk, bend, twist, and change position. And like every other part of the body, their surrounding tissues can have more or less mobility.
If we’re interested in how the whole body moves and organizes itself, it makes sense to include them.
Nothing inside us exists by itself.
An organ isn’t simply sitting loose inside the body.
The viscera are supported, suspended, contained, and connected through fascia, ligaments, membranes, blood vessels, and other tissues. Those connections become part of a continuous physical relationship between the contents of the body and its more familiar musculoskeletal structures.
The diaphragm is an obvious example. It is a muscle of breathing, but it also forms a physical boundary between the chest and abdomen and has direct relationships with the ribs, spine, lungs, heart, liver, and other structures around it.
The pelvis has similar complexity. Bones, muscles, pelvic floor, bladder, reproductive organs, bowel, connective tissues, and abdominal contents all occupy and move within the same space.
How something inside the abdomen can matter somewhere else.
One of the interesting things about visceral work is that its effects don’t necessarily stay local.
The liver, for example, has fascial and ligamentous relationships with the diaphragm and surrounding structures. The stomach has its own relationships with the diaphragm and tissues of the upper abdomen. Those structures, in turn, participate in the organization and movement of the rib cage, spine, neck, and shoulder girdle.
So when someone raises an arm, turns their torso, or takes a deep breath, the movement isn’t occurring only at the joint we happen to be watching. The rest of the body has to accommodate it.
There have even been small clinical studies exploring these relationships. Researchers have investigated whether working with the liver or stomach can influence shoulder movement and symptoms elsewhere in the musculoskeletal system, with some studies reporting changes following visceral manipulation.
The research is still limited, and I wouldn’t take that to mean that a painful shoulder is secretly a liver problem.
Where someone feels a problem and where we find a useful place to work aren’t necessarily the same place.
That’s also part of why I don’t think of visceral manipulation as simply “organ work.” It’s another way of working with the structure of the whole body and the relationships within it.
Working with the spaces between things.
Despite the name, visceral manipulation isn’t necessarily about manipulating an organ.
Often I’m more interested in the relationships around it.
The work may involve gentle contact through the abdomen, ribs, chest, or pelvis. Sometimes the movement I’m following is quite small. Sometimes the work becomes more direct.
I’m not trying to put an organ back into a “correct” position.
I’m exploring whether there is more movement or adaptability available within the relationships that are already there.
How does the liver move relative to the diaphragm and ribs?
How does the abdominal wall relate to what’s underneath it?
Does a surgical scar move easily with the tissues around it?
What happens through the spine when the abdomen has a little more mobility?
How do the pelvis and abdominal contents respond to breathing?
Scars change more than the surface.
Surgical scars are one of the clearest examples of why these relationships can matter.
A scar that we see on the skin is only the most visible part of a healing process that may have involved multiple layers of tissue underneath it.
Those layers don’t necessarily glide and move in exactly the same way afterward.
That isn’t inherently a problem, and a scar doesn’t automatically need to be “released.” But sometimes its relationship with surrounding tissues seems relevant to someone’s movement, breathing, tension, or sense of restriction.
In those situations, working with the scar may mean working with much more than the scar itself.
What people may come with.
Someone doesn’t usually walk into my office saying, “I think my viscera aren’t moving well.”
They come because of what they’re experiencing.
That might be a sense of tightness or restriction through the abdomen, ribs, or pelvis; difficulty taking a comfortable full breath; persistent back, hip, shoulder, or rib tension; pulling around an old surgical scar; or a feeling that an area doesn’t move as freely as it used to.
Sometimes visceral work becomes relevant when someone comes for something that initially seems completely unrelated.
And sometimes it doesn’t.
I don’t assume that because an organ is nearby, it explains a symptom.
Part of the whole, not a separate system.
Visceral work has influenced the way I understand the body even when I’m not explicitly doing “visceral manipulation.”
It reminds me that the body isn’t a skeleton wrapped in muscles with some organs tucked inside.
Everything is living together. Muscles, bones, fascia, nerves, blood vessels, organs, fluids, breath, pressure, and movement are continually affecting and accommodating one another.
So I don’t necessarily separate visceral work from Rolfing®, craniosacral work, movement, or the rest of what I do.
Sometimes the most useful place to work is a shoulder.
Sometimes it’s the diaphragm.
Sometimes it’s the relationship between the two.
We don’t have to decide where the problem is before we begin.
You can come with what you’re actually experiencing. From there, we can explore the relationships that seem relevant—including the ones we don’t usually think about.