REPLETION MASSAGE…

Exhaustion.

Client after client gets on the couch and says something like:

“I feel bone weary” or “I am running on empty”

These statements are often followed by a request for "more energy, please!". What they are really asking for (but don't know it) is repletion.

My acupuncturist, Sam, says that it is because we don't stop and rest enough in winter - when the rest of nature is smart enough to go into hibernation.

A Repletion Massage is a style of Massage that enables the client to literally ‘refill’ their fuel tanks and leave the session feeling ‘full’ again. With NO HANDS I have identified that there are six basic ‘umbrella’ styles of Massage. This took me about 15 years of full time clinical practice to actually work out for myself.

It started because all the books and all the teachers that were doing the rounds of advanced courses in my day seemed only to focus on what I would loosely term structural Massage. This is largely the domain of the Sports Massage therapist and involves the business of basically lengthening short muscles and loosening tight and held joints.

Everywhere I looked there was one proponent of structural Massage after another teaching me ‘smart techniques’ I should learn in order to ‘fix’ that tight muscle. Many of them were not even Massage therapists, but osteopaths or physiotherapists.

The only trouble was this….

In my actual clinical practice, structural tightness was only one of six different reasons why clients came for a Massage. Another one of those six reasons was exhaustion. Whilst I was busy trying to ‘fix’ their problems and utilise my deft structural techniques, I sometimes thought I could hear my client’s body whispering the immortal words of TS Elliot’s Alfred J Prufrock:

“That is not what I meant.

That is not what I meant, at all.”

What I was missing was this:

Depletion…

And a depleted client needs a Repletion Massage. This involves a lot of stillness and gentleness – as if we are nudging the body to fill itself up again. The analogy would be money.

Depleted clients often have depleted bank accounts. Not always, but often. Depletion is the result of giving out more than you have and not paying due diligence to the need to ‘gather in’ (save money) and rest. Financially this is known as bankruptcy. Energetically it is known as depletion.

If someone went to a financial advisor with only a hundred pounds in the bank account, what would we think of the advice to invest it all in a risky venture?

Not a lot.

Yet when a depleted client goes for a Massage, what they often get is precisely that. Misguided therapists trying to ‘give’ the client lots of energy by massaging them furiously and vigorously in the mistaken belief that giving a very energetic Massage will in some way impart ‘energy’ to the client!

That was me I am talking about, by the way….

Yet what I discovered was that the exhausted clients left the session even more tired than they arrived.

I was so busy trying to ‘invest’ their reduced energy that I actually ‘spent it’ by dispersing it all around the body.

So I began to think about saving. I introduced more stillness into the Massage treatment and began to witness the body’s own amazing ability to simply ‘recharge itself’. I started to go slow and give myself time to feel for the really ‘cold’ places in the client’s body. Where there is depletion there is coldness. Chronically exhausted people often feel the cold.

Then, when I had located this cold area,  I would let my hands rest there and just breathe… Gently pressing in and out – but not too fast and not too much.

Gentle palpation really…

The stuff that the structuralists taught me to do before the ‘real’ treatment really got under way. The diagnostic stuff that preceded all those flashy and impressively named ‘smart techniques’.

Yet when I stopped, when I really listened, I didn’t want to ‘get busy’. If I dealt with my own fear of stillness – and did it anyway – I could feel this cold area of the client’s body warming up underneath my hands. It was as if the body knew how to heal itself all on its own with only the gentlest of touches, the tiniest of support.

It dawned on me that this was not diagnosis at all.

It was the whole treatment….

What I had discovered was Repletion Massage.

Just stopping and being still. Trusting the client’s own body to know how to heal itself. All I needed to do was simply provide the touch.

Strange. Everywhere I turn, all I see is the same view:

The unending landscape of touch….

I shall be writing about the other 5 reasons why clients come for a Massage shortly - right here!

Gerry

ABOUT GERRY:

Gerry has been a full time Massage therapist and teacher for over 25 years. He also qualified as a UKCP registered Psychotherapist (TA) in 1999.

He is the creator of The NO HANDS Massage Therapy System, which is now one of the most popular Massage approaches in the UK. He has also recently launched the PSYCHOLOGY OF CHANGE, a unique new approach to making lasting change within your life. To learn more about these courses go to www.nohandsmassage.com