One of the main reasons people come to me for bodywork is that they want support with their pain, tension and stress, and various forms of structural “mis-alignment.” While each person is a unique individual, with specific structural patterns in their body, a consistent thread that brings people to see me is a lack of flow - of grace and ease in how they inhabit their bodies. Sometimes it may be one symptomatic location - e.g. adhesions (knots) in the neck or shoulders, or it may involve related patterns (tension that runs between the left hip and right side of the neck.) It may also involve a full body pattern of tension and pain, or a general sense of disconnected numbness or lack of energy.
Massage helps people reach their intended outcomes, not through pushing on muscles, but through engaging in conversation with the soft tissues of the body - the neuro myofascial web. Touching the body’s structure is not just making contact with inert matter, it involves touching the person’s awareness, their being. This is one reason why it's so essential that the touch be both compassionate and neutral - free from ulterior motives and ego
The purpose of entering into physical conversation is not to simply create change or symptom relief - but to support the person’s own relationship with the experiences and structures in the body that they cannot control.
While these experiences may have “objective” correlates such as shoulder height discrepancy, an adhesion in the erector spinae muscles, etc, the direct experience that the person can access is typically one of disconnected numbness or painful tension that the person is not choosing to make happen, even if it involves volitional muscles.
For example, when someone says “Relax” (or my favorite “Calm down!) - whatever we can choose to relax on command lives on one side of this relationship with ourselves - the cognitive self and its intentions. What doesn’t relax expresses a different dimension of self, which in that moment is not responding to our volitional demand. Paradoxically, attempts to control or change this response often leads to increased tension and internal emotional conflict - “Why am I so tense, Why does this hurt so much?!” and in some cases, aggression and rage towards a body that seems to be betraying us. These feelings have their own validity, and we can honor them without tightening the knots that we are attempting to wrestle free from.
In my view, all effective bodywork involves shifting from treating these tense, painful, numb or unresponsive structures as others - as objects - to subjects, dimensions of ourselves that we can be with and learn from. While I learn immensely from all my clients, the primary learning in a session takes place between the client’s cognition or sense of self, and the places in their body that feel like “other.” My job is to safely and gently encourage this process.
When I apply pressure to a knot, I think of that pressure as a word or a phrase in a physical language. It communicates a direction, a level of intensity, and an invitation to open or activate in some way. Ultimately, I’m not creating this change, I’m inviting these parts of the body to remember choices, ways of moving, of holding on and letting go, that they’ve forgotten or become disconnected from. While certain kinds of pressure, friction, pulling etc can temporarily create a change in the soft tissue they tend not to last on their own if that body doesn’t learn something from them. Within a short while, it will resume what it knows how to do automatically, and our cognitive self will be no more competent in how to work with the painful structural pattern.
Direct physical work can of course, greatly support new learning for the body, but only if I as a Bodyworker treat myself as a facilitator of change, not the cause of it. I provide invitations for a person to get to know themselves more thoroughly, and specifically connect with parts of the fascia, muscles, and nervous system that the client has forgotten how to consciously engage.
This is one of the reason’s I refer to a primary goal of Structural bodywork as “Body learning.” In this sense, it’s no different from the other types of developmental work I offer. However, the directness of having a physical conversation with someone can lead to profound and rapid changes in how they inhabit themselves. It meets the body on its own level. This then offers places in the body that have been calling out for reconnection an opportunity to find their way back home .