THE DESTINY OF MASSAGE
I have been involved in massage for over 45 years and, in a greater sense, for my whole life - because touch has meant the world to me. I think I’m like you. My life is in most respects dedicated, to what we learn from touch, from massage and from massage education. Yours too I expect.
“under my skin I’m just like you” ~ Keb Mo
Touch is an undercurrent, a deep nourishing fact that has affected all of us to our very core.
We work with three things doing massage and in general in the promotion of health.
1. Dis-ease – Dis-ease, physical or otherwise, is often clients’ excuse to get a massage – to feel better – to help with physical injuries, pain, excess tension, confusion, stress, being beside oneself. Dis-ease treatment is an important part of what we do.
2. Dis-position - addresses misalignment, persistenly dysfunctional habits, both in movement, emotion and mind. This can include massage and bodywork helping to recalibrate the “set point” of the autonomic nervous system. This is “somatic education”.
Ida Rolf talked about how common structurally “random bodies” are. So often we find ourselves and our clients challenged with “random” minds. We bounce from one random thought to another. Then there are dispositions that are overly narrow-minded, leaning unhealthily in reactionary directions through lack of knowledge or prejudice. Massage, by bringing compassion in with touch and waking up the bodymind, helps people, through hands-on psychosomatic education.
3. Destiny – Finally we come to a third level – perhaps the highest level of health - that of DESTINY. In both Western and Eastern models of health this is identified with “self-realization”, actualization, enlightened living.
Think of your clients. What are your highest hopes for them? What do they want? What are their dreams? If this person on your table could blossom and become the best possible version of themselves, what might that look like? How would they talk, walk, hold themselves, what pursuits and attitudes would feed their deepest happiness?
What is more precious than our dreams and the means to make them come true? We each strongly desire fulfillment in work, in love, in life. It’s what we all want – what the Declaration of Independence identifies as “unalienable rights” - life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
As much as our clients’’ dis-ease and dis-position grab our attention again and again, we cannot afford to lose sight of ultimate goals - these highest hopes that our clients consciously or unconsciously manifest. Ultimately they want to, and we want to see them, fulfill their human potential, their destiny.
It is no accident that modern massage in the U.S. was a core element of the so-called “Human Potential Movement.” This was the mass movement, which exploded from the culture of the Esalen Institute and other progressive communities around the world beginning in the 1960’s. These seminal individuals began to join the rigors of Western thinking and science with inspiration from the wisdom traditions all around the world, particularly from Asia.
This was an essential key to what Aldous Huxley cited as the primary direction for the Esalen Institute and the human potential movement. He spoke of the deep need for the study and exploration of the “non-verbal” humanities.”
Human potential never goes out of fashion. People just sometimes lose sight of their individual and collective higher goals. Human potential is not a movement; it is an evolutionary obligation.
We are the only animal that can evolve itself in one lifetime. We see this when so many massage students tell us, “My life has fundamentally changed as a result of what I learned and experienced in massage school.” We hear it from clients, “Massage has changed my life.”
That brings us to the question of how might we conceive specifically of the strategies for the fulfillment of human potential through massage? How can the study and practice of massage contribute to human-kind, to the fulfillment of our best destiny?
Make no mistake; we therapists as a community have our dis-ease. We have conflicts – political, philosophical, legislative. We operate sometimes at cross-purposes to each other. We may get burnt out physically or otherwise through overwork or challenged by the business side of our work. We may suffer from giving too much and receiving too little.
We also have dispositional differences. In our field there are the scientists and the artists, the healers, the researchers, the sports therapists and orthopedists, the mechanics and the magicians.
Yet science and art and care for the spirit are not opposed – despite polarizing arguments. They are an essential unity – they must be if we are to attain true health care.
There is above all no question as to the essential role that touch plays in human life. Touch is the first sense to develop in the embryo – as early as the sixth week – and it derives from the same embryonic layer as the nervous system! As such, it is the foundation for our entire world. It is the most fundamental of all communication media and we need to remember, with Aldous Huxley, that 93% of communication is non-verbal.
I write this and teach because I and we all care so deeply about the destiny of massage – where are we headed? How can we optimize the realm of education and of therapy?
Health is not an individual “property” – it is something produced by the community of which we are integral part. There is medicine based on the individual’s immunity and then there is the even higher goal of healthy community.
How many times I have been teaching a group of students and hear a voice nearly shouting inside me - “THE WHOLE WORLD NEEDS TO KNOW THIS!” — whether it be the vital intricacies of the autonomic nervous system; the vast role of touch in human connection and health; the ultimate value that kindness and love play (or should play) in our lives; the structure and function the brain; the mindbody connection; the incredibly complex yet unified miracle that is the human body and psyche.
Our world is in danger of the lessons taught by touch to be ignored. The communal disposition so often seems to be locked in disagreement and duality. There is horrible violence, painful income inequalities, racism, sexism, diseases that run rampant especially among poorer people and nations, and the devastation of our environment.
Everywhere the water’s getting rough
Your best intentions may not be enough
I wonder if we're gonna ever get home tonight –
Patty Griffin – “When It Don’t Come Easy”
We are all confronted as therapists by the urgency with which the lessons of touch are so desperately needed in our world.
Sometimes it hasn’t been and sometimes it won’t come easy. But the hardest thing is if we forget the evolutionary and revolutionary role of touch. Loving touch and the experience of connection are what every person and the whole world most depend upon. These days often we often see a kind of domination of virtual reality – cell phones, computers, and social media sometime taking the place of direct communication. By definition, however, virtual reality is not REAL. We, as therapists, touch, embody, and are representatives and proponents of ACTUAL REALITY. In a virtual world, the hunger for the actual, for what is real, is the greatest hunger of all. We know in our hearts it is touch that we need - to be in touch with ourselves, with each other, in our schools and in our businesses and in the world as a whole. An essential element in all massage is education of the heart.
The message of touch is irreducible and irreplaceable. Let us join forces and make the biggest difference in the world that touch and massage can provide.
So let remember and be emboldened: Through touch we are communicating more than manipulating. Each session calls upon us to try to communicate, through this most fundamental non-verbal medium, what this person may need to most know in body and mind. Let kindness, the experience of connection and actual reality triumph over disconnection and virtual reality.
Touch with clarity, graceful body movement, enlivened by our own breathing, manifesting care and understanding of this person on the table - sets the stage for what may be the deepest form of bodymind learning.
The deepest learning results in self-evolution. Viewing that collectively, touch is bearing a precious message for human kind – let us make peace on earth through valuing human potential more than profit potential.
“The thing that brings human value back to experience is the touching of it with human presence.”
- Steve Gilligan
We never know what touch may change a life.
One day in Chicago I was a little lost. I was standing up on an elevated train, trying to get my bearings and unsure of how to get to my destination. I asked a young Asian woman standing by me for directions. She calmly and clearly gave them to me and then she touched my arm. That touch has remained with me to this day. It was given along with the specific directions, but much more deeply than that communication of information was the care which that touch conveyed. It changed my whole life. I arrived successfully at my appointment that day. But I am still fulfilling the sense of destination that her touch gave to me. I really don’t know where this leads, but like every great adventure and like destiny itself it is ever unfolding, thanks to that young woman and to the deep knowledge that touch brings to us.
from Collage by Julie Lauterstein