TRANSFORMING TOUCH: The Spirituality of Touch

This is the sixth in a series of seven articles about NO HANDS^® Massage. After over twenty five years of working zero strain, and training 3,000 UK therapists to do the same, this is what I have learned about this approach from clients, students and teachers.

In my last article, I wrote about the concept of Healing Synergy. This method of Massage has revealed an aspect of touch that is often misunderstood and poorly explained: spirituality. I am not talking about religion here, or prayer or passing esoteric healing energies “into” the client from the hands of the presumably “divinely inspired” practitioner. What I am describing is something far simpler and much more down to Earth. Touch.

When the focus is simply on delivering deep and powerful touch, touch that utilises ALL the bodyweight of the practitioner in a gentle and expert manner, something remarkable happens. Instead of “imposing” spirituality upon the client, it simply emerges.

Because this depth of touch connects us with who we really are then we see before our eyes proof positive that we humans are all deeply spiritual beings, however we like to language that. What actually emerges from clients after NO HANDS^® Massage treatments are comments such as “I feel whole again” or “I am in touch with my true purpose in life” or “I feel unbelievably connected with the universe”.

If this is not spiritual, I don’t know what is.

Whilst the structuralists push and pull the body into its “correct” shape, telling it just how it “should be”, NO HANDS^® Massage therapists simply deliver expert touch, touch that connects and accepts. Paradoxically, it is this powerful acceptance that is the primary trigger for personal and spiritual transformation.

This spirituality of touch is not an idea or a philosophy or a belief. It is simply what happens if we listen to what clients are saying after the treatment and see how they walk. Of course, this is scary stuff. For those Massage therapists who signed up to playing God themselves and being “the expert” in the treatment room, the ego must retreat to an obsession with muscle and symmetrical balance. Just like an ant crawling around the altar during communion concerns itself with a piece of bread. For those who signed up for providing a nice “bit of pamper” now and again, such depth can be a shock.

This is because it involves discovering nothing less than what unites therapist and client is the same fundamental human need for connection with something profound within all of us, some part of us that is “bigger than the sum of its parts”. Discovering our purpose and our place in the universe is one way to understand spirituality. Massage that is powerful, deep and courageous does that. It connects us with the truth of who we really are.

NO HANDS^® Massage started off as a simple methodology that enabled me to keep on doing what I loved. It enabled me to keep paying the mortgage and supporting my young family. But once I realised I could deliver unbelievable weight and power through my touch without injuring myself, it forced me to see the simple power of touch. It was as if a gentle giant walked into the treatment room and said “Here, let me have a go. I am a bit simple, so all I can understand is delivering touch”. I became a witness to a level of healing and personal transformation normally reserved for psychotherapists, priests and healers. This became a regular occurrence. All through simple, deep touch, with hardly any words.

Not everyone and not all the time. But always there, always an option for each client…

To download a short booklet about this three day TRANSFORMING TOUCH course click here

To find out which schools are offering NO HANDS^® Massage courses in the States, click here

TRANSFORMING TOUCH: Effective Structural Massage

This is part three of a series of seven articles about NO HANDS^® Massage. After over twenty five years of working zero strain, and training 3,000 UK therapists to do the same, this is what I have learned about this approach from clients, students and teachers.

In my last article I explained my belief that Massage is the only therapy on the planet that deals with all five aspects of the human being; the physical, energetic, emotional, mental and spiritual aspects. It does this with every treatment, but only if the practitioner is properly trained and continually supported in understanding and developing all five aspects of this powerful therapy.

In this article I want to address the issue of what constitutes effective structural Massage. As I mentioned in my last article one of the main reasons that clients will turn up for their first treatment is because “something needs fixing”. This is most often a tight shoulder or a neck, a recurrent lower back pain or headaches.

The response of the Massage profession as a whole, is to identify the area of tightness and pain and apply neuromuscular, trigger point or myofascial techniques to this area. There are two problems with this:

1.    It displays a massive ignorance or discount of the degree to which the traditional Swedish Massage strokes of Effleurage, Tappotment and Friction already deliver powerful neuromuscular, trigger point and myofascial effects on the body’s tissues.

2.    It ignores the essential and powerful therapeutic component of weight and gravity. The arrival of NO HANDS^® Massage heralds the possibility of delivering breathtaking amounts of the practitioner’s bodyweight into the Massage treatment.

Regarding the first point, all good Swedish Massage is myofascial and has a deeply neuromuscular impact on the body. All good Swedish Massage releases the original cause of all Trigger points - tension.

Clearly the people who teach these osteopathic and medical techniques are missing a full appreciation of the power of Swedish Massage. This is because many of the teachers of these were not actual Massage therapists. They were either physiotherapists, doctors or osteopaths themselves, or they were taught by second or third generation “structuralists”. It also suggests a Massage profession that is so unsure of itself that it receives these medical, sports physiology and osteopathic teachings as if they are manna from heaven.

The simple truth is that Per Henrik Ling’s teachings travelled a very different route in the non medical establishment. Whereas physiotherapy became scientific and machine based, Massage became more and more touch focused, client centred and intuitive in nature. One developed the science, whilst the other developed the art. After over two centuries of listening to the client and listening to the instincts and intuitions of the self, it seems Massage therapists must now worship at the altar of medical science.

By reducing Massage to simply solving the physical aspect of the human condition, we have put a bit of earth into a matchbox and labelled it “creation”.  Thus do the structuralists act out their fear of the intimacies of profound human touch. So great is their fear of the human intimacies involved with the ebb and flow of intuitive Massage, that they must shun it for the intricacies of fascial pathways and ligament arrangements.

Regarding the second point, until we had discovered safe ways to drop the FULL WEIGHT of the practitioner’s body on to the client, it was only possible to deliver significant weight by injuring our wrists, backs and necks. What I have developed in my clinic over the last 25 years constitutes a complete revolution in Massage. It is now possible to deliver unbelievable amounts of bodyweight into the client’s tissues without any pain or injury to either client or practitioner. In fact it is zero strain to the practitioner as I explain in my  first article.

This delivery of IMMENSE weight in a safe professional and ethical way is the biggest revolution to hit the Massage profession since Per Henrik Ling. This is why no other approach teaches this: it is no longer about strokes but about letting our weight down safely and therapeutically on to the client’s body.

With this weight and the proper safe use of the practitioner’s body we move only in straight lines (effleurage), circles (Petrissage) and into specific points (Friction). In other words we have simply turbo charged the essentials of Swedish Massage!

With this much compression and decompression and this much power behind every movement (effortless to the practitioner, mind) we find that not only do clients experience ALL the benefits of myofascial, trigger point and neuromuscular work, but they experience this simultaneously. In a nanosecond. Suddenly the osteopaths are turning up on NO HANDS^® Massage courses and declaring it to be the most effective structural techniques they have ever learned.

One Harley Street (London) Osteopath with 30 years of successful business behind him wrote: 

"This course has not only transformed my touch but through the sheet elegance of the concept,the brilliance of the teaching and the support offered throughout, this has inspired me and I now look forward to another thirty years of practise and with even more enthusiasm." 

Peter Bartlett

Massage therapists who are just beginning their careers are training in NO HANDS^® Massage and within less than a year are looking the same as practitioners who have been practitioners for thirty years. I could not believe it when I started seeing this on my courses.

So if you want to learn the latest and biggest revolution in effective structural techniques, you will want to learn NO HANDS^® Massage. It is a paradigm shift in the delivery of Swedish Massage and leaves the rest standing. This is why so many NO HANDS^® Massage therapists in the UK report that a significant proportion of their clientelle are coming from osteopathic offices, and never going back.

Safe, soft, slow, ethical, professional, WEIGHT.

And lots of it.

With no strain to the practitioner. In fact, the more weight we pour onto the client, the less strain we experience…

This is why over 3,000 Massage therapists in the UK have learned this approach and why it is building practises right across the country.