TRANSFORMING TOUCH: Working Zero Strain

There can be very few professions that require such a high level of physical fitness, flexibility and overall health as Massage. Even professional athletes do not expect to continue beyond the age of 40. Yet many Massage therapists only “discover” our profession after this age, as a second or even third career. So we must take our own health very seriously if we wish to survive. I could write a whole series of articles about the measures we should take in order to stay healthy, however the simple truth is that none of them will make any difference at all if what you are using in your Massage consists of the conventional strokes taught on Massage, Reflexology and Chair courses these days.

The actual statistics show this very clearly. There have now been six studies into the health of Massage professionals, worldwide. Despite the fact that each was done without any reference to the other and had different methodologies, the results are almost identical. Whether it is in Taiwan, Canada the UK or the USA, the results of ALL these different studies is the same. 70% - 80% of any population of Massage therapists who are asked about their health are exhibiting the early or later signs of RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury) or MSD (MusculoSkeletal Damage). Click here to download a summary of these studies.

The only way not to know this is to make sure that every time you meet a Massage therapist you stick your head into the ground, like our proverbial ostrich. Frankly, I feel the same way about the Massage profession as Deepak Chopra feels about the world: “All you have to do is look at the news every day - if you don’t think you’re in a mental asylum, then you’re an inmate.”

The absolute insanity of a profession applying such damaging pressures and forces through the hands on a repetitive basis beggars belief. Likewise, it is quite beyond me how our profession has managed to get through 2,000 years of history without working out effective zero-strain solutions.

This unlikely discovery happened quietly in the treatment room of a single practitioner over 12 years - it started as a survival strategy after injuring both my hands on the same day. Click here for the full NO HANDS story. 

As word got around that I had not only overcome injuries to both my hands, but had built a highly successful practice using a totally original approach to Massage, therapists started asking me to teach them. So I met with small groups for one day a month over several years and showed them what I did. Only after we had completed over 250,000 treatments on clients using this approach, did I even begin to think about putting together a training course to teach this properly to the profession.

What I teach is not the “techniques” that all inexperienced Massage therapists clamour for, but the principles of movement behind all effective zero strain Massage. There are just 7 of them and when properly understood and used, they guarantee a career of clinical effectiveness, ease and health. These came out of the treatment room and have nothing to do with “Proper Body Mechanics.” 

After all, these are the very same “Proper Body Mechanics” that have created an 80% injury rate and a staggering  “brain drain” from the massage profession. Ralph Stephens wrote a searing article “Where did All The Graduates Go?” in Massage Today (Aug 2012). He researched the statistics and found for 75% of them “When reality hits, they fail, get injured or run away.”

Actually, the more “proper” your body mechanics become, the more likely you are to sustain injury. This is because if you align your body behind a Massage stroke and apply deep effective pressure you are putting that force through your wrists. Newton’s second law of Motion tells us that the client’s unmoving body, then sends those very same forces straight back into the wrist. Most therapists know this and so avoid putting much weight into their hands, which then creates back strain because they are getting no support from the client as they lean forward. The more we try to work with our hands, the more problems we create. We need to create a new paradigm for massage, one that is solidly based on Swedish Massage and protecting the hands and bodies of our practitioners.

It does not matter whether or not you use your hands or your forearms, actually. If you do not understand the postural principle of SUPPORT with the allied concept of VERTICALITY, then you “are up a gum tree” for your wrists and your back. This will not be a problem for you if you Massage in outer space, but for everyone else the simple laws of physics mean that Massage is intrinsically damaging. Which is why the Taylor brothers were both producing Massage machines within ten years of introducing Massage to America in the nineteenth century. I write about this in more detail in my first book about NO HANDS^® Massage.

“If you do not understand the postural principle of SUPPORT with the allied concept of VERTICALITY, then you “are up a gum tree” for your wrists and your back.”

Most advice that people give to injured Massage therapists is to either exercise the injured part or to rest. Exercising an injured part of your body is usually the worst thing you can do. The “rest option” is interesting because it suggests we all have a patron who will pay us while our clients go elsewhere. In the real world, the harsh reality is that you have to be healthy and turn up for your clients, or you simply lose them. 

The only thing that works for your clinical survival is to stop putting all this weight through the hands and use other body parts to deliver force and power.  This means that we start with the practitioner, not the client. We ask ourselves what movements will heal the practitioner whilst we are working? I will write more about this in the next few weeks - you can subscribe to this blog using the "Follow by email" box on the left hand side.

The one thing that you can be certain about this British Massage Revolution, is that what you are taught has been tried and tested and proven by THOUSANDS of Massage practitioners on all their clients over the last 25 years. These are not “nice ideas” designed to make someone money because they are bored of actually doing Massage so decide to teach. These are the most essential tools imaginable for surviving in the Massage profession.

This required a complete rewrite of the Swedish Massage rule book. When delivered with the full power and weight of the practitioner’s body, we discover that Per Henrik Ling’s Swedish approach really did have all the answers to any client’s “body” question.

Click here to download a short booklet about this three day TRANSFORMING TOUCH course.

To find details of courses in the UK click here. For details of schools offering TRANSFORMING TOUCH courses in the States click here.

The Therapy of Touch VII: Walking the Body

In my previous articles I have indicated that I ask my Massage clients to walk around the room after  they are dressed. This is to enable them to integrate their experience of Massage in their own words. I also do this with my psychotherapy clients at the end of a session. Very soon, I realised that to do this well, required three basic protocols:

1. GETTING OUT THE WAY

The first protocol is to 'get myself out of the way’, both physically and psychologically. Some clients are uncomfortable at first with the idea that they should know anything at all about their own bodies. The harder they find it to put words to their experience of walking, the more important it is to both therapist and client that they do this. If they want you to be the expert on their body or their life, you better plan on moving into their house and living with them, and to be around to help them get dressed in the morning. I step back against the wall, to allow them plenty of space to walk around the room and I say very little except “Tell me what you notice about this walk, and if it is any different from before the session?” I bite my tongue. Very hard. The more I think I ‘notice’ as such a great ‘expert’, the harder I bite…

2. LISTEN TO THE BODY

The second protocol is to encourage the client to feel how their body wants to walk. Most illness and tissue compression simply arises out of ‘the head’ dominating ‘the body’.  If people rested when they were tired and ate when they were hungry and stopped eating when they were full, we would have a much healthier nation. The key here, is to ‘follow the body’.

We encourage the client to feel ‘from the inside’ just how their body wants to walk. Some clients have had such massive structural shifts from the Massage, that they actually walk like babies learning for the first time. The cerebellum has not yet caught up with the changes in muscle, tendon and ligament configuration.  Some ‘wobble’ as they walk. Some notice that they are more than mere ‘structure’. Some will connect with their energy or their emotions. Others will feel their spirit or discover a new clarity of thought.

Above all, they are encouraged to feel how the body wants to walk, rather than imposing some previously established idea of walking upon themselves.

3. THE REST OF THE DAY

The third protocol is to ask “How will this walk affect the rest of your day, compared to when you came in?” If our therapy and our touch does not make a difference to people’s lives then we should probably do something else. Touch and therapy done well always make a massive difference - if only we let the clients have enough time to really feel it.

THE SOFT MAGICAL TISSUE…

Once clients start to “talk their body’s walk”, they start to describe how their body is actually feeling and moving. It is very different from “walking the talk”. This latter means we must force the body to walk according to our ideas and how we ‘wish to be’. ‘Talking the walk’ by contrast invites the client to feel just how they are right now. How it is. Now. Perhaps I have done such profound work that I am a bit shaky. That is how I am.

For Massage therapists this is very different from the rather ‘anal’ structural analysis that often goes on after sessions. It is a ‘feeling’ thing, a ‘now’ thing, not a mental thing. Nothing connects us with the truth of our deepest inner feelings better than feeling how our bodies want to actually walk. The movement of walking also sends out an array of nervous signals to the brain to help this ‘body mind’ connection. How we walk around this room is how we walk through life.

We are so much more than just ‘mechanical problems’ waiting to be fixed by ‘experts’. We are not cars. We are human beings made of the most incredible and magical soft tissue that will find its own balance, if treated with gentleness and respect. Giving me the space to “Talk my Walk” is one way to do this. This is why, for me and my clients, “the walk has it”.

I believe this is how we actually “sing the body electric” as Walt Whitman wrote.You don’t need a degree in psychotherapy or in bodywork to ask your clients to put words to their own experience of walking around the room. You just need to be human. And interested. Above all, you need to believe that the only expert in the room is...

the client.

The Therapy of Touch VI: The Existential Question

If you are a Massage therapist, you don’t need to be a qualified psychotherapist to talk to your clients or find out why they are coming for a treatment. This is perfectly within your legal ‘scope of practice’. Interestingly, by training to become a psychotherapist I learned to say much, much less to my Massage clients. I learned to let the touch really do the work. Of course this is a bit of  a ‘no brainer’ as the thing that is most missing in this world is ‘a lot more touching’. You can get plenty of ‘psycho babble” at every coffee shop in the land, but getting powerful deep and safe touch is a true rarity.

However, even when dispensing healing touch in a touch starved society, I still need to know just why my client is here. Eric Berne, the founder of Transactional Analysis called this ‘asking the existential question’. He asked himself: “Why is my client here and not having fun doing sex, drugs and rock and roll?” He also asked himself: “Why am I here and not somewhere else, having fun doing sex, drugs and rock and roll?” It was the sixties, after all. You probably get the point.

If the client has a tight shoulder, what difference will it make to their life if it is alleviated? How important is it to them? What caused that structural problem in the first place? They are made of soft tissue that is more affected by energy, emotion and thoughts than any other substance on the planet. Do we just ignore this fact? If they have a knee problem, what was happening when they injured it? Were they under stress? Was life particularly hard at that time and is it possible that their soft tissue hardened at the same time?

Is any of this psychotherapy? Of course not - it is simple human interest. It is also good healing, by going to the roots of a problem rather than endlessly and tediously addressing the symptoms that will always keep appearing as long as these root causes are not addressed. My analogy of ‘the shrunken suit’ should explain this:

If a client walks into the shop with a tear in the shoulder of their suit, a tailor can build up a great income and lots of business by simply repairing the tear. Because the suit has shrunk, that tailor is guaranteed return business as other parts of the suit tear, year after year. The honest tailor asks how the suit actually shrunk in the first place? Perhaps we have grown. Perhaps we went out for a walk in the rain and left it damp for a while.The expert tailor says “we need to stretch the suit, not keep fixing the tears that will keep reappearing."

Are such questions invasive? Well, if I turn up with a tight shoulder and I don’t like being asked what the causes of this tight shoulder might have been, or how much difference it would make to my life to have it fixed, then I will make that very clear in my responses. I cannot help but show my discomfort or irritation. A good therapist is a good educator who may then explain that they need to ask these questions to properly help the client. Or a good therapist will realise that the fear levels are so high right now, for the client, that such questions are therapeutically counter productive.

Such probing for the real reason why a client has come only becomes invasive if it is done invasively. If you cannot tell the difference between a client keen to share their story and one who is uncomfortable talking about herself, then it is time to take up another profession. The art of all healing therapy is to know when the time is right to invite the client to share more about themselves and the right way to do it.

Knowing the full story and identifying the correct treatment is at the heart of all effective therapy.

I once met a physiotherapist who had no training or qualifications in psychotherapy, tell me how she no longer touched or did any physiotherapy with her clients at all. She simply asked them what was going on at the time of their injury. She said this speeded up the healing so much she found herself unable to ‘do’ anything that was more effective, as a healer.

Some of the most powerful Psychotherapy I have ever received or given has happened in the silence of simple touch. Being ‘held’ or holding someone else can be the most powerful psychotherapeutic transaction of them all, but only if it addresses the real reason why that client came for treatment.

The beauty of Massage is that clients turn up and simply pay to get powerful deep and healing touch. Rather like ‘being held’.

Asking the existential question is the only way to fully understand what I and my client are actually doing on the planet at this particular time and in this particular space. Once we know these basics, we can be much more effective, whatever therapy we practice.  Asking such questions is how we care for another human being. It is also discovering the essential causative factors of their symptomatic pains.

To simply accept a tight shoulder as a structural problem is no better than calling poverty “a shame” and carrying on regardless. These things all have causes and history. Like Sherlock Holmes,we must trace each symptom back to its historical cause, if we wish to be more than some kind of ‘Mr Fixit dullard’. That is not healing touch. It is squashing human beings into a tiny ‘physical only’ box.

Every human deserves to be seen and heard and to be touched. Do you really know why they have invested this money and this time in coming to see you? Do you dare to ask the existential question? Is the pain really just physical?

Yeah ‘right’.