We've all been there, right?
You have a crick in your neck the last few days that won't budge. A worrying lower back pain that has overstayed its welcome. That punishing deadline at work is finally behind you, but somehow your shoulders still feel pulled up somewhere where your neck should be.
You really need a massage! All you need is someone to make it go away. You want to flop down and surrender to someone's expert hands, who will magically put you back together. So you go online, find your nearest therapist, and suddenly you are confronted with a baffling smorgasbord of choices.
You might have heard of Deep Tissue, Swedish and Holistic massages, but what about Chi Nei Tsang, Abhayanga, or Pinda Sweda? Yes, they are all out there, people.
So, how are we supposed to know what our bodies need?
I stumbled across a massage website the other day which tried to match complaint with treatment.
It went something like: 'Battling to sleep?... Aromatherapy is for you! Desk Job?... You need Deep Tissue" This kind of mix-and-match approach seems at best reductionist to me, and at worst misleading.
It got me wondering how on earth we have become so disconnected from our own bodies that we need to reduce ourselves to over-simplicity such as this.
It over-promises on what massage can do, and hints at a 'fix it' culture that is increasingly perpetuated in the complimentary health community.
I have a lot of sympathy for anyone who has faced a consultation form or a booking page asking them to choose what kind of massage they need. ( And yes, I include my own clients here! )
Faced with treatment modalities we've never heard of, many of us are stumped at the first hurdle. At best, we have a vague sense of the options, but have no idea what would work best for us.
The choices can be both overwhelming and also, critically, disempowering for the client.
It's an obvious challenge for many, and one that's widely overlooked.
So, what's behind the jargon?
From a massage therapists's perspective, we may spend many years in ongoing training, spend thousands of hours and pounds honing our skills and adding more and more treatment tools to our belt through our careers.
This is essential for our ongoing learning journey. It deepens our understanding of the body and gives us those essential options to draw on when meeting a client on the table. It also adds vital credibility to our public profile. It clearly says: 'You can trust me. Look at all my experience. I know what I'm doing'.
And so it should. But often, I wonder if an arm-long resume like I see on many therapist directories doesn't also feed into that modern societal hunger we all jokingly like to refer to as FOMO. That never ending search for the next thing.
Sadly, it also appropriates an approach borrowed from Western medicine: that a particular tool will fix a particular problem.
Generally speaking, Western medicine as we know it today roots itself in a view of the body as a clockwork. Something goes wrong, you fix the problem, or replace the part. It has, on the whole, little interest in the relationship between parts, or idea of human health as a system of balances.
Mainstream, or Allopathic medicine treats symptoms by treating it with it's opposite. (as opposed to say, Homeopathy which treats like with like).
Massage, which has its origins in pre-recorded history has had to evolve and survive alongside mainstream medicine (And here I refer to that term as we understand it in the West). No doubt the advances in Allopathic medicine has gone a long way to support and inform bodywork. To become certified in the UK as a massage therapist, one has to qualify in rigorous anatomy and physiology exams.
Speaking from personal experience, it left me, as a newly qualified therapist, well equipped to explain the inner workings of the kidneys, but somehow none the wiser as to what actually happens when I softly place my hands on someone's body.
The answer to that last question is far more subjective and slippery. Mysterious, even. And it's one I still reflect on deeply with every client I see.
There appears to me to be an incongruity in massage work: on one hand we bow in deference to mainstream medicine, which was founded on the anatomist's dissection table. This gives our training and reputation, not to mention our sense of self-worth a degree of credibility in the face of often sceptical, empirical science. Subtly, it informs the way we market ourselves and informs the claims we make. In turn, this engages the wider community we serve, by engaging them in the same loop by promising outcomes we cannot always back up with research.
Which is not to say that the benefits of massage has not been well researched.
A study conducted Australia found that massage after a workout could reduce soreness by 30%. Another found that cortisol dropped by 31% while dopamine and serotonin increased by 30%. These are mere tips of icebergs in the field of research being conducted into the benefits of massage.
Tiffany Field, research director at the Touch Institute at Miami University has positively linked massage to pain reduction, immune function and relief from depression.
But on the whole, studies into the benefits of massage is controversial, mainly because it is impossible to perform double blind studies that would rule out the Placebo effect.
Furthermore, such studies demand that outcomes must by definition be clinically duplicable. An obvious obstacle when we try and measure one encounter between two human living energy fields to another.
Perhaps, as Marion Rosen put it: ' On the whole, its not so much what we do to clients as it is who we are with them'.
I would suggest that next time, when trying to decide what you need your treatment to achieve, you pause and rather ask how do I want this treatment to feel?
This simple change in perspective will naturally guide the question away from the analytical, thinking mind into the feeling, sensing bodymind.
There is great, untapped intelligence in the body that we largely ignore in our day to day decision making processes. By asking directly into your body, you might be surprised by perhaps getting a response you weren't expecting.
Often clients come into my practice asking for a deep tissue massage. The vast majority of these clients will respond, when asked why they feel they need a deep tissue treatment by saying something like: 'This tightness between my shoulders just feels like it needs an elbow in there.' Or they might add something like: 'Don't be scared to really go fo it!'
It is always surprising to see a subtle shift when I ask them in return: ' Does your discomfort feel like it needs force, or does it simply ask to be met deeply and profoundly?' When we reframe the question with language that embodies more compassion towards our bodies, it is as if an entirely new possibility opens up for the client. One that invites a kinder, more receptive dialogue with their embodied experience.
Sure, your body might be asking for pressure this time, or it might feel like being stretched, or moved. It might want something to wake it up, or slow it down. And sometimes, it might just ask to be touched with presence and kindness.
The possibilities, when we attune to the body's responses, are literally endless.
Equally, the reasons why our bodies show up with pain, discomfort and tightness are inexhaustible and largely mysterious.
We cannot always resolve the issues by choosing one technique over another. But miraculous things happen when we really show up for our bodies and attune to them with the intention of listening, rather than fixing.
A skilled therapist will know all of this, whether they have that impressive resume or not.
It is not so much in the technique, as it is in the ability of the therapist to listen with their touch and respond.
When you join them for the journey, things get really interesting, but that's a story for another time.
Thanks for reading and hope to see you very soon.
Pieter
Ready to come for some bodywork?
I'm available in Hackney at Healing Space on Chatsworth Road and on Broadway Market at Holistic Health between 9am and 7pm, every Monday to Saturday.
I will be away from March 17th until April 8th to connect with the big blue skies and the ocean in Cape Town, so get in touch soon if you'd like to see me before I go.