FULCRUM - A NEW "GRAMMAR" FOR TOUCH - PART ONE
“Touch”, as Margaret Atwood said, “comes before sight and before speech. It is the first language and the last...”
Touch is the first sense experience we have – in humans by 8 weeks of gestation.
It conveys information in the womb first of an elementary sort and from birth on, widely varied sorts of communications. It can communicate warmth, love, anxiety, frustration - an infinite range of gradations and mixtures of feelings.
It is said that face-to-face communication is 70-95% non-verbal. 55% of communication is body language, 38% is tone of voice, and 7% is words. Meaning is conveyed not primarily through words!
When it comes to touch, meaning is conveyed by a variety of sensations - these include rhythm, pressure, vibration, movement, temperature, pain, texture, and proprioception.
A useful – I would say necessary – term for how we communicate through touch therapies – is the fulcrum. I first learned this from Dr. Fritz Smith, the founder of Zero Balancing. Fulcrum is distinct from “technique” because a fulcrum, applied to touch, is a balance point, much like the mid-point of the see-saw. The see-saw moves up and down from side to side but the middle, the pivot point, is the fulcrum and it’s still - the part that doesn’t move. In a therapeutic fulcrum it is the presence in the touch that is the pivot point for the client’s inner movement of body and mind. Ironically it is the stillness in the therapist’s touch that, like listening, evokes the most change. Interestingly, psychotherapy was originally called “the listening cure.” Massage and bodywork in their own unique ways are also listening cures.
High quality touch, “articulate touch”, gives the client the opportunity to let go of tension, come to a new state of internal equilibrium. We forget it is not our touch itself that is the effective agent in bodywork – it is the client who does the letting go. it is the client’s nervous system (aka energy) that does the letting go of muscle tension as well as the release of emotional or mental tension. It is a learning. And it is often a wonderful surprise to clients when they experience the letting go of tensions, often accompanied by new insights and new feelings or sensations.
The essence of analysis is surprise. When people are themselves surprised by what they say, that’s when they are really making some progress.
- Sigmund Freud
If we just change in the above quote “what they say” to “what they are experiencing”, that applies perfectly to mindful bodywork.
The language of touch is composed of significant movements of mind and matter. The concept of the fulcrum contributes a grammar for healing touch. For a sentence to make sense, to have meaning, it has to have at least a noun and verb, with other optional parts of speech, in a particular order. For touch to have meaning, significance and power we must make specific ordered movements with our physical structure and our energy. Just as a sentence uses parts of speech arranged in order to make sense, the fulcrum uses “parts of touch,” particularly arranged to facilitate bodymind change.
Here’s a metaphoric example.
Consider the steps of a visit from a friend. They come, knock on the door and wait to be let in.
Then they come into the entryway and pause. Then they are invited in to the living room, likely, for a chat. Pause. A conversation takes place. At a certain point, there’s a pause in the conversation and the friend senses it’s time to leave and they exit in reverse order of their arrival. These are archetypal steps of relationship – whether it be applied to driving a car, reading a book, preparing and eating food, or touch. Similarly enlightened touch honors each of the client’s sensory boundaries through touch by pausing at anatomic and energetic boundaries. The pauses allow our touch to be systematic in the level or engagement. Otherwise we are just mashing on tissue.
The steps of touch in fulcrum are:
Centering ourselves
Take out the general looseness in the connective tissues (e.g. bone, muscle, fascia) – then pause. This can be through gentle stretch-engagement or through direct pressure.
Take up the slack, making the contact crystal clear - pause
Add additional movement(s) – this can be going slightly deeper or adding micro-movements
Then, holding this contact (essentially a long pause), while the client is given the opportunity to let go from inside out
Monitoring for change – caringly observing the client’s response to get a sense of when to exit
Clearly and cleanly disconnecting
Using the nervous system as the metaphor for this:
Therapist relaxes before touching, then
Contacts the touch receptors - pauses
Contacts the pressure receptors - pauses
Contacts the proprioceptors - pauses
Allows time for the proprioceptors’ messages to be received by the cerebrum and cerebellum
Allows time for the client’s conscious and unconscious response
Takes one’s hands off the body
There is no way to assure the safety and meaningfulness of the touch without caringly honoring the client’s boundaries through this fascinating grammar of touch embodied by the fulcrum. Otherwise we just substitute force for intelligence.
Ida Rolf – “It’s the forcing that you have to avoid at all costs.”
Or as the great musician, Sidney Bechet, said in his autobiography,
“Treat It Gentle.”
The logo of Zero Balancing showing a fulcrum inside a circle.