Visceral Manipulation

Visceral Manipulation (VM) is a targeted fascial release of your organs. Your organs are surrounded by connective tissue that holds them in place in the body.

Jean-Pierre Barral’s famous dictum, “Only the tissues know,” expresses that the tissues in the body have a deep and innate intelligence. Everything that has happened in our lives—injuries, diseases, stressors, etc.—is recorded in our tissues.

The purpose of VM is to re-create, harmonize, and increase proprioceptive communication in the body to enhance its internal mechanism for better health, thereby revitalizing a person, and relieving symptoms of pain, dysfunction, and poor posture.

Visceral Manipulation treats a person’s functional and structural imbalances with an aim to affect their musculoskeletal, vascular, nervous, urogenital, respiratory, digestive, and lymphatic dysfunction.

At the core of VM is ‘listening’ to the tissues with our hands. Through manual listening techniques, trained hands of a skilled practitioner feel where the tissues are pulling toward the areas of restriction, the areas where the body is not moving, and the areas of the greatest impact on the person’s wellbeing from the manual therapy perspective.

Jean-Pierre Barral, DO, The Barral Institute