March 05, 2007 - 2:00 AM.

A new bodywork language

Thank you everyone for your sympathy and good wishes. I am on the mend.

In related news, I have been taking a long series of classes from a local massage therapist, and it is changing my thinking about pain and my approach to my clients. Now, while I am in my little office, working away on my clients in my cozy treatment room with the Dean Evenson music playing and the Twelve Corners massage lotion smelling so sweet, it's all very well and good to have different thinking. My clients get better, I work faster, my rates are higher, everybody wins.

The problem comes when I discuss work with colleagues who don't work this way.

There is a real "deep pressure, trigger-point release, search-and-destroy" pattern to what massage therapists are taught. And this new work, which clears up problems that we normally would work on for months or years, does not do any of that. We find involuntary contraction, shorten it to allow it to reset to resting length, gently open fascia to move it off the bone -- and then *move ON.* And I cannot find a way to engage in the old discussions any more. I find myself thinking, "But if you just positioned them for 90 seconds, your work would be done and you could move on to the feel-good stuff!" But who want to hear that? Nobody, I find.

Not that people aren't open to ideas. But I come into discussions where Cyriax, or pin-&-stretch, or neuromuscular facilitation are being suggested as ways to basically force an insulted muscle to submit, and I just want to cry. These are good and gentle healers, and the tools we are mainly taught to use are ones that, compared to my new work, are pretty much designed to get the body to give up, to wave a white flag, when all that poor muscle tissue has been trying to do all along is finish its job. The new work helps it do that, so it can rest and get back to its regular work. The old work, in the guise of persuasion, so often just ends up bossing the body around. (I find this to be particularly true of Rolfing and most other 10-session stuctural recipe programs.)

I know I will come to a more reasonable way of looking at this. Again, I cannot stress enough that my colleagues are compassionate, careful people with amazing skill at helping the human body heal and align - often much more than I have. I just feel at sea, mute, locked in silence with my peers because my language is now totally different.

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