TUNING YOUR CLIENTS

The spider “tunes” its web by stretching or shortening its silk fibers. Check out this one-minute video - “Spiders Tune Their Webs Like A Guitar”  These silken threads then become literal lines of communication for spiders.  They can, through the fibers’ vibrations, get information about what or who gets stuck in the web and where.

Our body can be understood similarly as a three-dimensional web of fascia and connective tissues. This is our web. The lengths of the various connective tissues/fasciae in our bodies are monitored and controlled by the nervous system. Therapists feel these varying strands, bundles and layers of connective tissue web as they palpate and explore the amazing instruments we call human beings.

Within us is this vibrating, organized network of fascial and connective tissue strands. It ranges from the superficial fascia just under the skin, to the layers of fascia surrounding and investing muscles, to the tendons attachments to bone, to the periosteum covering the bone, and the fascia surrounding each organ. The bones themselves are considered connective tissues and it is easy to see that indeed articulate movement would not be possible without the collaboration of bone and muscle in every movement. The connective tissue of bone is a fundamental element of our web. 

Each of these tissues are sending receiving communications from and sending information to the brain.  With every touch we effect these communications, heightening the person’s conscious and unconscious awareness of and response to the ratio of tension and repose in the bodily webs that we are.

By feeling, stretching, shortening, or plucking the strings and planes of connective tissue, therapists get impressions of the client’s overall tensions and levels of freedom. They also identify and focus on specific regions, muscles, fascial planes, joints, bones, where individual tensions are most evident. We listen, in effect, to what the body is “saying” and what the client’s “mind” is telling their body to do. So with every knowledgeable, sensitive touch, we help the client re-tune themselves by amplifying the communications within their bodymind.  By the end of a session often there is a kind of re-imagining of the body as the client stands and moves with heightened awareness.

When we are literally out of tune, in disharmony, every action takes more effort than necessary. Fascial strands may be glued together, so that to move one muscle, the nervous system has to recruit adjacent fascial fibers, using more way effort than is ideally necessary. Range of motion here and there may be limited, preventing or compromising every activities and/or sports performance. Some muscles are “stuck” long, others short. When we hold tension unnecessarily, it restricts the movement of our bones and joints, it can overly thicken the places of attachment, the periosteum, and affect the bone itself.

If we take a close view of a plucked guitar string, we see it vibrates as a whole. The full-length vibration of a string or an air column creates the sound known as the “fundamental.”  The string or air column inside the wind instrument also vibrates in half, in thirds, quarters and so on.  These are known as harmonics. One can hear a given harmonic by pressing down lightly on the string at its halfway point, a third, quarter and so on.

How a stringed instrument or air column in a flute vibrates.

Since a string vibrates as a whole, in half and so on, in the sound of the string is composed of all these harmonics (aka “overtones”). They give the sound its characteristic.  So, for instance a clarinet sounds different than a violin because it emphasizes every other overtone rather than all equally. A flute’s shape results in the vibration as a whole (the fundamental) being not as loud and so the richness and softness of its sound is made more ethereal through the greatest presence of its harmonics.      

Thus, in bodies we can see, for example, that excess tension at the halfway point of the body, the sacrum and sacro-iliac joint, will limit the body’s vibrating as a whole, just like pressing down the 12th fret of a guitar will produce a sound an octave above what the string would sound like if not fretted. Any time there is tension in the body, we can see it as distorting the natural harmonics of the body or as amplifying certain harmonics but not others

When, in Zero Balancing and Deep Massage, we create a “half-moon vector” through the body, by contacting the backs of the heels, adding a little length and then holding a gentle upwardly curving pull to the whole body - this gives the client the opportunity to feel engaged from “head to toe,” amplifying the experience and vibration of the body’s full length. It amplifies our experience of our “fundamental”. By then going to the sacrum, we also, with a clear touch, encourage the body’s connecting at its halfway point. In acoustics this would be playing the octave above the fundamental.

When we contact all of the body thoroughly, inevitably we interact with all the places where the body may be seen as vibrating in 1/3rds, 1/4s and so on. Thus, we underscore the individual’s overtones as well as the fundamental. Interestingly, the vibration in quarters has the nodes of vibration intersecting at the knees, sacrum and heart. The vibration in 1/3rds would have nodes around the mid-thigh and the dorsal hinge area around T11-12, the floating ribs, diaphragm.

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Now for some metaphysical aspects of helping one’s clients to be more in tune.

Friedrich Nietzsche titled one of his major works “The Twilight of the Idols or How to Philosophize with a Hammer”. It is tempting to understand Nietzsche as thinking along the lines of the Zen teachers who strike their students on the head or shoulders with a stick (the “kyosaku” – “the encouragement stick” - to wake them up literally or to stun them into enlightenment. In contemporary Rinzai Zen, the master receives disciples for dokusan consultation (teacher-student meeting)  holding a stick called a nyoi (Sanskrit chintamani, “wish-fulfilling gem”).

Many is the time, I myself as a teacher have bee tempted to strike a little blow to the cranium of the particularly resistant or thick-headed student! I have appreciated the hero of NCIS Jethro Gibbs as he often slaps the back of head of the hapless agent Tony DiNozzo who commonly spaces out on some of Gibbs’ important “rules.”

However, even more intriguingly, by hammer Nietzsche is actually referring to a tuning fork, that is struck then placed against an object. By the resultant vibration one can tell if that object is empty or full.  So Nietzsche is proposing if we place these tuning forks, “hammers,” against the outside of our idols (beliefs, theories, worship objects) we can determine if they ring hollow or full, true or false or empty at their core.

Indeed we therapists place our fingers like tuning forks firmly upon our clients. We and they may feel the quality of aliveness or dullness, tension or freeflowingness within. With that information, our clarifying touch may reveal the nature of the person more truly to themselves. What are we holding onto for dear life? What places feel fully alive and pleasurable? What places seem to be home to certain emotions? What tensions we previously didn’t even feel, do we now experience and can perhaps let go of?

Sometimes it feels like all I’m doing is pointing things out.  My fingers “say” how does this feel to you?

The man pulling radishes
pointed my way
with a radish.

-- Kobayashi Issa

The therapist doing massage
pointed my way
with a simple touch.

The image of the client as an organization of strands of thought, beliefs, local and global emotional states, and connective, communicative fibers can inspire a higher level of work.  Because visualizing the person vibrating as a whole as well as in part in strands of body, mind, emotional and spirit – gives us an imagery that amplifies our feeling and the client’s ability to live life in tune with themselves, with everything going on within them. And when we are in tune within, our every action resonates in a more positive harmonization with the whole world around us – we are more in tune with the universe around us – the endless web of connection through the pervasive universe spanning energy field physics and metaphysics recognize.

It enables us to have a intimate connection to what Pythagoras called “musica universalis” or the “harmony of the spheres.” Plato described astronomy and music as "twinned" studies of sensual recognition: astronomy for the eyes, music for the ear. To astronomy and music we can now add massage and anatomy for the sensual recognition of touch. 

The medieval consul and philosopher, Boethius, presented three branches of music:

·      musica mundana (sometimes referred to as musica universalis)

·       musica humana (the internal music of the human body)

·       musica quae in quibusdam constituta est instrumentis (sounds made by singers and instrumentalists)

We can see our bodymind work as similarly interacting with three branches of the person – their connection to the universe around them, their connection to the inner web of their bodymind, and their connection to how they manifest the themes of their lives through the individual expression.

I hope that this brief exploration of tuning our clients helps us see that, with the broadest vision, we can see ourselves as interacting and uniting with all three branches. With our enlightened and enlightening touch, we become more in turn with the universal music, the internal music of the body, the instruments of our voice, our actions, and inspiring the winds, horns, and strings of body, soul and spirit.