About Me
I’ve been a physiotherapist for over 25 years, working extensively in musculoskeletal and sports rehabilitation. My practice is evolving to work on the deeper core levels of how pain is held in the body
Every day, I use hands-on treatments such as manual therapy, massage, and joint techniques and I know that the most powerful tool I have in my physiotherapy practice is you: your ability to engage with targeted exercises, adapt movement patterns, and make the small but meaningful changes that allow your body to heal.
I moved with my family to Fernie in 2012 and have been working at Fernie Physiotherapy for nine years where I continue to see patients 2 days a week. However after a recent personal experience I have taken additional training and expanded what a classical physiotherapist would work on, going deeper into how incidents, trauma and pain are held in the body.
I developed severe upper back pain with no clear physical cause. As a clinician, I did everything “right”, regular physiotherapy sessions, chiropractic care, massage, acupuncture, osteopathy multiple times a week for over a month. Despite all of this, nothing changed. It was both frustrating and did not make sense.
Then, during a therapeutic mental health session, my clinical counsellor asked if she could try something different. In just ten minutes, she guided me through a combination of EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) and somatic techniques—helping me tune into the sensation, explore it, and process what my body was holding.
The pain disappeared. Completely.
It didn’t return the next day, the next week, or the following month.
That experience fundamentally shifted how I understand pain—and how I treat it.
As your clinician, I’ve been trained in science, research, and evidence-based practice, so it’s natural to approach these different treatments approaches with intrigue and maybe caution. And yet, if I look at the way people speak every day, our language and expression reflects a deep awareness of the body–mind connection:
“A gut feeling”
“The hair on the back of my neck stood up!”
“A lump in my throat”
“My heart skipped a beat”
“I can feel it in my bones”
These aren’t just expressions, they’re descriptions of real, physical sensations tied to our emotional and internal experiences. Your body is constantly communicating with you. Over time, many of us have simply learned to stop listening.
After my own recovery, I became deeply curious. I searched for others in the field of physiotherapy integrating these approaches and found very few. So I pursued advanced training with some of the most respected experts in the field, and began carefully integrating somatic EMDR principles into my clinical practice alongside traditional physiotherapy.
“Pain is real. I help people understand and recover from pain by working with the body, the nervous system, and the patterns that lead to recurring symptoms”.
— Rachel Cline