The Therapy of Touch II: Masculine Massage

The current obsession of the Massage profession with ‘fixing’ the structure of a body is rather worrying to me. Have we really not had enough of this ‘masculine’ leadership of the Massage profession? Do we really have to ‘subjugate’ and ‘control’ the body? Must we still follow these apparently ‘touch phobic’ leaders of the Massage profession (whether male or female) who seem so very frightened of simple nurturing touch?  Do we really have to follow blindly as they insist on our touch becoming so ‘male’ and so ‘medical’?

If I had wanted to be ‘medical’, then I would have trained in Medicine. Yet so many of the profession’s ‘leaders’ seem to want me to become a ‘wannabe doctor’. “Be like me!” they proclaim. “I couldn’t be bothered to train properly as a doctor or a physiotherapist, but I want to do their work, nonetheless”

Well, that dog simply ‘don’t bark’, for me. You see, I chose Massage because the body is the most magical self-healing organism on the planet, and guess what triggers that self healing? Simple Healing Touch. 

Any Massage practitioner who has spent any time at all in the treatment room observing their clients’ reaction to touch, knows that the muscles in the body have only one ‘origin’ and one ‘insertion’ - the mind. Experienced Massage therapists KNOW that nurturing touch enables clients to release all their  tight muscles in just one breath. Because they are ‘letting go’ in their minds.

Now is this structural, emotional or psychological Massage? You tell me. Annoyingly, the human being has this habit of confounding all our healing systems and crying out instead “I am unique, I am complex and I am made up of all five P.E.E.M.S.”

So if I am your client, please stop trying to tell me which bits of my body are in the ‘wrong’ place and trying to put me ‘right’. Just give me touch that respects the journey of my life, and properly values the history that twisted my spine and compressed my tissues. Then I will release what I am ready to release. In my own time. In my own way.

Please don’t just sit there taking a ‘case history’ that only addresses one fifth of what makes me human. I am more than just muscle, tendon and bone. I am made of SOFT tissue. This is the softest tissue on the planet and it responds to the slightest thought or mood that passes through me. Don’t you realise that 90% of my tension was created by my MIND? Over years?

See all of me. Listen to all of me. I will not think you a prostitute if you touch my body gently.  I know the difference between therapeutic Massage and sex. Do you? I come for touch. Deep touch. Soothing touch. Touch that connects me with

my very soul.