How ConTact C.A.R.E works

It started with a horse and a twisted knee

Dale Speedy was asked to look at a horse with a twisted stifle, and it wanted nothing to do with him, aggressive, pushing him away with its hip. But when he leaned in to keep his balance, the horse leaned back, harder, until they were locked together like a tepee. Then its eye went soft. It curved its body around him, settled its weight onto his shoulder, and began to rock. At the top of the bone Dale felt a pop, a burst of pressure that dissolved away. The horse took a few steps, had a pee, and stood up sound.

It was the rock that did it, the pressure in the horse's body shifting. As a martial artist, Dale recognised what he'd felt, not muscle moving, but a pressure drop.

It took weeks to learn to recreate it. The breakthrough came when he did the opposite of his training, his striking hand turned upward to support, his movement became still. Because stillness, he realised, is the language of bone. He worked alongside Kym Summers to shape what they'd found into a method, and called it ConTact C.A.R.E. Dale describes it as nature's language. The body already knows how to do this; it just needs the right conversation.

A martial arts based discipline

ConTact C.A.R.E is a martial arts based discipline and describes itself as a practical study in the nature of stillness. He holds a sixth-dan black belt in Kiaido-Ryu, and that training runs through the whole method, not the strike, but the stillness underneath it. The body answers pressure with pressure, lean on it and it leans back, and it was watching that principle at work in a horse that led to ConTact C.A.R.E.

What a flinchlock is

When a bone takes a sudden, unexpected hit (a fall, a collision, a fright) it does what any material does under shock. It braces. In Dale's understanding, the bone tissue contracts and, in that instant of surprise, can get stuck there, frozen mid-flinch, knocked out of its natural rhythm. He calls it a flinchlock, a locked flinch, held in the bone itself.

A flinchlocked area goes quiet and dense, numb, dumb and immovable. A flinchlock can be likened to a black hole, the surrounding muscle, tendon, fascia and ligament drawn tight into it. Over time, that pull takes the body out of its easy, natural movement. Much of a ConTact C.A.R.E practitioner's skill is exactly this, seeing what isn't moving in a body full of movement, and knowing where the real cause sits.

The remarkable part is how it lets go. A flinchlock can't be forced or pushed out. But when it's met with steady, equalising pressure (the same rhythmic one, two, three rock the horse first showed Dale), the bone is, in effect, surprised out of its surprise. That's what a session works toward: the held pressure converting and dissolving, so the area can move more freely again. No clicking, no force, no cracking, just contact, working with the body's own natural rhythm.

I don't make anything happen. I create the conditions, and the body takes it from there.

What a session is like

ConTact C.A.R.E is precise and non-intrusive. Rather than manipulation, it works by re-creating the original pressure the body braced against. Most people find it deeply calming, even when little seems to be happening on the surface. Every body is different, and so is every session.