by David Lauterstein

It is simply good science to work with what is real. For humans what is real is we have three-dimensional bodies within which we experience - in addition to length, breadth and depth - also sensations, emotions, thoughts, and, however you choose to conceive of it, spirit. So in bodywork naturally we touch all these things. The exploration of these seven primary dimensions of experience and how we can use and positively affect them, have been the subject of this column.

To recap for a moment the earlier dimensions of touch explored in the previous articles:

• Contact: with touch we establish literally a point or area of contact, an honored meeting place of two conscious beings.
• Movement: when we initiate thoughtful movements with our hands, the client and the therapist attentively engage in a healthy exploration of the self - the "two-dimensional" curving paths that constitute us.
• Breath: when the therapist breathes freely, a higher level of energy comes into play within the session; through breathing more deeply both therapist and client experience their three-dimensionality; and when the therapist breathes more freely, the client in turn feels, through the living example of the therapist, the permission to be more fully alive.
• Graceful Verticality: Western physics and all energy models depict the body's work/energy flow as being vertical in orientation. By standing and moving with graceful verticality the therapist "ups" his or her energy level. This is experienced in turn by the client as a heightened energy level flowing through his or her own body. Good bio-mechanics is also good energy mechanics.
• Heart: When the therapist truly cares for the client in a way that is clear and palpable, the client experiences trust, literally feels cared for within the body, and therefore experiences more love within themselves.
• Understanding: When the therapist takes the effort to acquire the skills to truly understand the client, then attends carefully during the session, the client feels understood. This translates not only into an experience of deeper physical ease, but also a letting go of the confusion that troubles their soul.

The seventh dimension, which I call alchemy, is ironically, the one that is most "out of our hands". By alchemy I am referring to clients¹ experiencing psycho-somatic transformation as a result of being touched, much as gold is produced from lead in the alchemist¹s lore. As therapists we are human alchemists. Some of the most treasured experiences of being therapists involve our excitement at the role we have played in helping others transform.

One of the feelings accompanying transformation is that we are merely mid-wives to a natural process. When our clients experience a metamorphosis, it is like we are assisting at a birth. Both of us are filled with a sense of humility at the birth of the new.

The assistance in creating a qualitatively higher level of health is the real meaning of massage/bodywork. The suggestions I've made with regard to the six earlier dimensions constitute a psychosomatic technology for the achievment of this. But the actual step, the movement of the self into a new world of health, is out of the conscious control of both the therapist and the client.

So how can we facilitate the alchemical role of touch? What we can do is - attend to the previous six dimensions. Beyond this, as the philosopher Wittgenstein said, we must be silent. We let go. Just like the midwife, we help with all the preparations, then we let nature run its course. The art and the science of letting go is perhaps the highest definition of touch therapy. How can we better understand and practice this skill?

The skill of letting go involves five essential steps:

1) recognize the limits of speed
2) slow down
3) stop
4) rest
5) choose a new path.

Let us first then acknowledge deeply the limits of speed.

The Epidemic of HST

"Hypersympathetonia" (HST) is a word I've coined to describe one of the primary conditions addressed by massage therapy. It means a tendency for the "set point" of the autonomic nervous system to be tuned overly much to the sympathetic, the fight or flight, part of the nervous system. HST is the natural biological consequence of being a people almost totally uneducated in rest.

HST is a phenomenon overdetermined by our history, our culture, and its interface with our biology. The industrial revolution values in an unquestioning way the production of things with ever greater speed. The information revolution even more dramatically worships the speed with which information can be processed. In this rarely questioned culture of speed, it is natural to believe that we just can't think, act, or feel fast enough. I think sometimes that we are hopelessly competing with the pace of computers, just as the legendary John Henry competed with the jackhammer and "died with the hammer in his hands." Sometimes I am afraid that we are witnessing the expiration of the human mind awestruck and overwhelmed by the computational superiority of computers.

HST is caused as well by one of the primary tenets of consumerism -- only what you don't yet have is worth having. This translates easily into the culturally-pervasive belief that only who are not yet is worth being. This combined belief -- that we don't have and are not what we need -- sustains a tone of desperation for many of us. We run around trying to become who we think we should be, to get what we don't have, all the while trying to match the tempo of our computer-modeled relation to time.

It is helpful to review a shortlist of the biological and social costs of this belief. In HST, circulation is shunted away from the internal organs causing them to become relatively dehydrated and undernourished. As a result digestive and assimilative problems of all nature multiply. It is no accident that the majority of pharmaceutical aids sold world-wide are for intestinal distress. With reduced fuel for assimilation, every single cell in the body is relatively undernourished, setting the stage for many chronic diseases, cancer perhaps most widely feared.

On the other hand, the heart and blood vessels suffer from too much stimulus since in HST the body is continuously readying itself for fight or flight. This predisposes us of course toward heart and circulatory problems. The endocrine system is out of balance as well which again affects every cell in the body as the whole self is awash in norepinephrine and other sympathetomimetic hormones accompanying chronic stress. This in turn may give rise to a variety of metabolic, immune, and reproductive problems. HST is of course implicated in the prevalence of insomnia and the physical and psychic problems attendant to it.

Let us recall that the majority of days of worker absenteeism have been shown to stem from musculoskeletal complaints. This again relates directly to the neuromuscular system's constant readiness for flight or fight.

The mental and emotional consequences of HST are vast, contributing to attention-deficit disorder, constant inclinations toward anger and fear, and addictions to substances that help us sustain our frantic doing or which artificially propel us into the parasympathetic when we just can't take it anymore.

We begin to see the outlines of the social epidemic constituted by HST. It is apparent spending any time at all in hospitals that a major component in accidents, in diseases born from exhaustion, in mental problems and in person-to-person violence is the chronically sympathetic bias of the world inhabited by these individuals. Imagine the total economic cost of HST!! It may well be argued that HST poses the single greatest individual and social health challenge we face.

"Deliberation is born of joy."
  Rumi

The Evolution of Slowness

Andrew Taylor Still, Osteopathy's founder, said that the body contains all the healing substances it needs. And indeed humans have within their nervous systems equally the antidote to HST. The autonomic system embodies the advantage of a speedy, whole body response to changing circumstance. However, we have evolved a yet higher capacity. We have, when under even the most trying of circumstances, the ability to slow down and to decide how we shall respond. This ability to make decisions deliberately is perhaps our most uniquely human characteristic. Between stimulus and response there is a vast realm. We have the ability to sort through our feelings, our thoughts and sensations and to consciously decide how we are to respond. This is the unique capacity of the human cerebrum. The cerebrum, housing the conscious mind, is, essentially, a mechanism we use to slow down our processes and to decide who we want to be and how we want to act, as opposed to speedy and automatic reactions that characterize all lower levels of the nervous system. The ability to consciously slow down is one of the great privileges of being human.

Massage therapists/bodyworkers represent an advocacy group precisely for the social necessity of slowing down, contemplating our situation, our habitual responses and then making deliberative, balanced responses.

A whole hour spent not moving but yet not asleep is the sacred hour spent in a bodywork session. It may be said to be a whole hour filled with contemplation. How many of us spend a whole hour outside of the rush the everyday? It is a unique and relatively enormous change of life quality. The joyful experience of being out of the of the normal experience of time and mind and body is an evolutionary lever of tremendous power.

For we and our clients need to expand not merely our physical range of motion, but our psychic range of motion as well. Most people spend their time in a rush of activity or fast asleep. What if we could explore the fertile mid-ground between sleeping and waking? Edison, it is said, used to lie down on a couch and extend his arm with a rock in his hand. When he would fall asleep, the rock would fall down on the floor and wake him up. Gradually he got to where he could be almost asleep but not drop the rock. Why? It was out of this vast but rarely explored realm between sleep and wake that he came up with all his inventions! Between the strictures of the conscious mind and the dream-saturated realm of sleep, he cultivated the state in which the fertile meeting ground of conscious and unconscious could yield its fruits.

Because of the deep social and personal crisis/epidemic of HST, the ability to be not in hurry and to be at peace with our decisions appears to be the prerequisite for the further evolution of human kind. For automatic, autonomic reactions only recreate the problems we have and our dysfunctional habitual responses to them.

We hope, in this new century and beyond, that we can not just repeat our ancestors. We can indeed have a spiritual progress in the next century to rival the technological progress in the one passing. For this, the capacity to slow down is paramount.

Stopping the World

Not only with slow and deliberate motions of our hands do we slow down the client's world and so empower inner deliberation, but we even help stop the world altogether. Don Juan in Castenada's books spoke of the necessity of "stopping the world". We need not just to slow our world but from time to time to stop it all together and start completely anew.

Every time we stop moving our hands during a massage or take our hands off and allow for a time of absolute rest within the overall flow of the session, we facilitate the creation of a new world. For in our relaxed sustained gestures or resting places that seem to last an eternity, we come to magical "clearings," openings of the field of energy and structure within us. Just as in music, moments of silence, long tones and held gestures allow us to glimpse a world of infinite possibility. Those times of complete rest within the massage are times in which the infinite hope and possibility residing within the experience of sacred time flow into us. As author Walter Benjamin said, "(Each moment is) the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter."1

The power of some bodywork forms in which the contradictory experience of nothing actually happening are key to the further social and evolutionary power of bodywork. In Zero Balancing, for example, a number of specific vectors of force are sustained but with no movement. When the practitioner holds a movement, like eternity in the palm of your hand, the world stops. Cranial work in which the therapist doesn't move, but is rather moved by the client recalls Muddy Waters' transcendent singing on love, "She moves me man, but I don't see how it's done." Or take Reiki in which the therapist is in some sense motionless, just faithfully letting the healing energy from within and without do the work. These and every resting moment in any mindful bodywork use inspiringly the archetypal power of stopping to help us change. For we must stop what we are doing in order to change what we are doing.

What stops us - right in our tracks - forms the basis for memorable new experience. That in turn forms the basis for taking a new track, for exciting journeys on roads not yet traveled.

Divine Relaxation

In the Bible it says, "And by the seventh day God completed His work which he had done ... Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all his work." This was the beginning and perhaps the highest point of our education in rest. Indeed it is sometimes a forgotten member of the Ten Commandments, "Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy."

And what did God do on the seventh day? Being God he must be fantastic at resting! He didn't need television! Perhaps the biggest hint regarding the divine form of rest is the statements ending each day of the creation, "and God saw that it was good." This contemplative seeing that it is good seems to be a key to the direction we must move in to truly rest. If we can notice that with our best efforts and the health strivings of our clients, it is truly, beautifully, and ethically good, then we can come to a necessary peacefulness in our work. After a session, we can see that it is good. We can completely forgive ourselves for imperfections while striving nonetheless to grow in every way we can. Jung said that if we do not celebrate our successes, we become sick. Obviously the corollary is - if we celebrate our successes and truly see that it is good, we, and our clients, become increasingly healthy.

In the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey, a modern deity of organization, says everything is created twice. The implication of course is firstly, we plan something, secondly, we take the actual steps to accomplish it. But note, after all, that everything is really created three times. There is the thought, then the accomplishment, and then, if it is truly to live in the world, there is the letting go of the accomplishment. For nothing can truly be given, be truly alive unless it is let go of. Care giving is doing the best we can and then letting go of it completely. Then we truly rest. Then we share perhaps the greatest gift of all -- the gift of peace.

How long did the days of Creation last? God after all is not on eastern or central standard time. He's on God's standard time - GST! And the creation of our world took place over eons, which evidently are God's seconds. In this sense then how long was the seventh day? Perhaps the seventh day is much like the ideal spirit with which we let go in our work.

God did all this and then he rested and he made the day holy. Perhaps, and it does appear this way, the entire rest of time has been taking place within this seventh day. Thus the Holi-day, the Healing Day, is the one in which all our time is lived. For it doesn't make sense that, if God is in every time and space, what space, what time, what day, is not sanctified. And so we can see a real, spiritual, and evolved reason why we can aspire to resting in every moment, since every moment lived is in this holy day.

The Bodily Experience of Divinity

And our clients say it again and again - on the table they sometimes feel touched not just by a person, but as if an angel had reached down into them and touched them. And this is, I believe, a far more common experience than people give voice to. The bodily felt experience of divine touch is a natural, though not consciously willable, concomitant of mindful bodywork. And divine touch is by definition life-giving and alchemical. The root word for "divine" means "shining".

Into the peaceful places and times within us, grace descends, illuminates, and then lifts us up to new heights. Within this special time and space we pass beyond the realms of understanding and of learning. Thomas Moore says the soul doesn't learn, it metamorphoses. The metamorphosis of soul that accompanies enlightened touch is nothing we can exactly learn how to achieve. Our deepest gifts rise from pools we can not fathom. But come they do and this alchemy, this giving peace a chance, is what gives this profession its greatest power.

Deliberation leads to joy and joy to liberation. This is not a gift we get to keep. It is the great gift that we get to pass on through the whole of creation by simply letting go.

1 Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1968