by David Lauterstein
For all of human history, until this century, medicine has had an essential connection with spirituality. Until the twentieth century, virtually all hospitals in the world were affiliated with a church, temple, or religious order. During this century medicine and spirituality have stood somewhat farther apart. Though many medical practitioners are attracted to the "care" in healthcare, the technological emphasis of 20th century medicine has overshadowed other bases for healing.
I believe that the separation of spirituality and medicine is a temporary aberration. We will hopefully look back in 20 years and wonder how we could have ever lost so much the sight of truth, just as we now shake our heads in amazement at how many doctors, until recently, allied with baby formulas and boldly dismissed breast feeding. The profit motive, the manufacture, and marketing of pills and machines still dominates medicine. The unpatentable nature of the human spirit makes it of little interest to drug and insurance companies. Even in the massage therapy realm we have seen this temptation to taut the medical powers of our work while paying less attention to the spiritual. There has accordingly been an over-emphasis on the medicalization of massage in the last 10 years.
Let us never forget our precious birthright. With touch unavoidably we bring in the spiritual component of human contact, as well as medical efficacy. This is the strongest evolutionary leverage we have. We touch, we connect, so that the human spirit can rise up, hold its head high, and identify its health with our abilities to be kind to each other and to take our evolution back into our own hands. Let us joyfully take medicine out of being defined by the insurance companies and drug manufacturers, and form a much wider partnership based on a fuller understanding of the human body, mind and spirit.
If we could boast even more spiritual development by the end of the 21st century than the technological progress of the 20th, what a world that would be!
The Sixth Dimension of Touch
This is the sixth* in a series of columns on the art and science of massage (I use the terms massage, touch therapy and bodywork synonymously). Often we hear that massage is an art as well as a science. Yet one rarely encounters rigorous attempts to discuss how exactly is this an art! My experience teaching and practicing has taught me that the art form of touch therapy relies essentially on seven distinct dimensions.
When we touch someone, we certainly touch a three dimensional, physical object. And when the therapist breathes freely and touches with just the right contact and movement, the client feels a heightened sense of his/her three dimensionality -- the vastness, the aliveness of their own wide open spaces. Beyond this three dimensional opening, when the therapist is physically graceful, feeling connected to both heaven and earth, the client feels in turn a heightened energy flow through their whole body. And, with the therapist's conscious mobilizing of care, the client feels a heightened sense of care, a loving presence, within themselves.
Beyond these five dimensions of touch, there is a sixth. This dimension essentially involves mind. Often we hear of bodymind work. But how exactly is this mindwork as well as bodywork? For, after all, I have never met a "bodyworker" who actually wants to work only on the body. Every single therapist I have met is, at least originally, inspired, thrilled to touch someone in a profound, not just physical way. Yet we don't often hear anything precisely about the role of mind in bodywork.
Nick Lowe expressed the search for profound significance in the song, "What's so funny about peace, love and understanding?" And whereas love comes from the heart and peace from a grace that seems to descend upon us from above, understanding is properly the province of mind.
So let us ask what is the role of understanding in bodywork? How do we come to truly understand ourselves and someone else? Isn't this a tender question? The tenderness of this question comes from the possibility that we can never totally understand ourselves or anyone else. There are clearly limits to our understanding. Think about how often your life seems an unfathomable mystery to you. Think about walking down the street and looking into someone eyes and feeling the nearly total mystery that they are to you. I wonder as a teacher and therapist of over twenty years at how little I seem to know. Thank God that nonetheless my students and clients get something out of my work. I take this partly to indicate that indeed the previous five dimensions of touch afford us the leeway that, even with our imperfect understanding, we can have a wonderfully positive impact.
So understanding brings with it necessarily a humbleness. The limits and the gifts of being able to know include the gift of knowing how much we do not know. Just as life is bounded by death, so understanding is surrounded, like an island in the ocean, or a person walking down a lonely street, by the vast unknown.
Let us not fall into despair at the limits of understanding. Like a flower of evolution, the very ability to consciously think, strategize, and choose is a nearly miraculous empowerment. To paraphrase Feldenkrais, the human nervous system is so unique as to qualify it as a new living function. The courageous effort to try to understand, to find the truth, is an opportunity and the commitment of a good therapist.
To continue then with our original question -- how do we understand -- let us say from the outset - understanding takes time. Of the dimensions of touch, the dimension of working with understanding is the first in which Time is truly of the essence. Please note as you work with your clients, how your understanding develops over time. This ability to understand things over time, to search for the truth, necessarily involves humility, patience, and courage.
Taking a History
Understanding, of course, requires that we take a history. Notice the unusual choice of words. We may give a massage. But we take, that is, we receive a history. How we can explain that? One of the greatest gifts we can give is our attention. In some respects, since humans have developed the conscious attentive nervous system into an essentially new living function, what humans have uniquely to give is attention. And when we truly attend, when we truly receive a history, we commit to truly understanding someone else. This understanding is not mental only. Truly understanding always involves more than the mind. For analytical attention alone is clinical. It maintains the illusion of objectivity. We do need whatever relevant analytical knowledge we have concerning body, mind and spirit. But to truly understand someone else we work with new gut impressions, associations, hunches and bodily felt senses of how it is to be them. We need to open into a space much larger than ourselves to really take in a history. So when we say "mind" or "understanding," here we mean an open awareness with the whole self, what the Zen tradition calls "Big Mind."
Taking a history is receiving someone else into one's mind, body and spirit. I may feel their sadness with my heart and think about it carefully. I notice my spirit ascend as they express their hopes. I think about the clues of their past injuries, diet, medication, books read, travels, and exercises what may be the therapeutic combination that will help unlock their own hidden potentialities. Out of one's sensations, emotions, and thoughts one continually composes whom they need to be in order to truly receive someone else.
Sometimes people forget that psychotherapy was originally called "the listening cure." Freud sat in a chair, out of view of the supine client, and said virtually nothing while the client freely associated. This curative power of listening is what we evoke when we open with our whole selves to someone's history.
The Massage of Time
Just as your body can palpate space and is a sense organ designed to interact with space, so your mind is a sense organ designed to sense time. Without mind, there is no perception of time. When we receive a history and use it in the continuous process of illumination in our work, we receive time. Time is the greatest gift. "I need time," we say. But perhaps we have enough time, it's just too often time a little emptied of spirit.
When we receive the life and times of the client, we palpate not just the tense spaces in the person's body. We actually palpate TIME in the body. For time flows through us constantly as a nourishing river of in-fluences, that is in-flowings, from everywhere. From the evolutionary struggles, failures and successes embodied in our genes, to the influences of our culture, the damning up and releasing influences of our family history, and not least, to the influence of the past decisions we have made in response to the influences that have formed us. Those past tense times, the unresolved crises we embody, the unresolved time right now - when we touch someone, we are touching these tense moments. And we free them up! Into the "temporal energy flow", we help free the person to receive more deeply their own richness, the vast worlds of influence that course through their being.
Bodyworks such as Rolfing help integrate the body's structure. The alignment of each of our major segments, our spaces, is a great gift of myofascial work. We can equally imagine that bodywork with deep understanding creates a healthier alignment of aligns the times within the person's life. Massaging the person's lifetime as well lifespace helps liberate no longer needed residues of difficult times and greatly amplifies the healthy influences from our past. With time thus freed, our work helps redeem the dreams of our ancestors. For in our cells and in our dreams live the unredeemed struggles of humankind for meaning. "Temporal Integration" is a gift of massage with deep understanding.
The Gospel Form of Massage
Beyond taking a history and touching the client's space and time, how do we understand? In the session, precisely how does understanding come about?
When I touch someone, I sense with my whole self their response: the nods, the groans, the frozen eyes of the steadfastly unrelaxed, the melting away in the facial expression of years. Think of the infinite forms of response you've witnessed! The talkers, the complainers, the snorers, the seductors and seductees, the oaken rigid guys, the friendly well. The unique grimaces of lip and cheek, the bowel rumblings, the actions at a distance reported or sensed by you, the serene atmosphere you both wish would never end, the transcendental shudder as the person experiences a breathing-taking moment, the tears of internal thaw, the smile from ear to ear that suddenly appears on both your faces.
There is an infinite litany of response that informs us. But what is usually taught to therapists? Techniques as motor skills. Doing to. The other half of the world of therapy -- not our techniques but their world, the vast world of the client's response -- is our frontier.
As surely as we "call" with our skilled touch, the client "calls" back and is responding at every moment in a completely unique way. Massage is like a chant, its essential form being call-and- response. It is out of the mysterious dialogue of this mostly non-verbal call-and-response that understanding arises. Understanding is always newly born out of the dialogue of bodies and souls.
Therefore, the actual practice of therapy has much more to do with the graceful back and forth swing of call-and-response than it does with the unidirectional approach of diagnosis and treatment. People have studied films of Trager and Feldenkrais to determine what they were doing that made them such great therapists. The conclusion was that with their techniques they were doing nothing out of the ordinary. However, an enormous difference was noticed. They were observed to "track" the client moment to moment in a much deeper and thorough way. The difference was in the listening. For the call issues not primarily from us, but from the deepest dreams and hopes of the client. And when we truly listen and respond with understanding, their dreams will more likely come true.
The Harmonious Timing of Bodywork
So we know more how we understand: through taking in history; through consciously touching time as well as space; through a call-and-response that builds healing interaction.
But we need to know how to literally touch with understanding? How does the client feel that the understanding is literally in his or her in the body? How do they feel touched empathetically by mind, not just by a body? For to feel truly healthy, to be truly at ease, people need to experience life with clarity inside, the sense of understanding life deeper than just with words. This comes about through therapy in which there is literally a meeting of minds.
As we work with aligning both space and time, let us recall that Ida Rolf spoke of average bodies as being too randomly organized. Is it not even more the case that minds often seem too randomly organized? Confusion seems sometimes epidemic in our world. The healthy organization and life-enhancing function of the mind is as essential to health as bodily function.
We are used to conveying understanding through words. But in bodywork, since touch is our primary medium, we mostly don't use words. So how does touch itself convey understanding without words?
When we touch, we are moving within the person's structural body and energy field. Our movements, as we understand the client better and better, become more and more appropriate responses. When we understand each other, we say we feel "in synch". A session is going well, when I sense almost effortlessly the rhythm to move in. When the client¹s breath tells me to work in unison with them or just now and for how long to take my hands off to give them a moment alone to savor or process their experience. The passive client may call for a stimulating tempo distinctly not in time with their lethargy. I intuitively give them a different experience than what they're used to. In that sense, we share in refreshing and temporarily chaotic moments that present new possibilities for the nervous system.
Often the sessions of greatest understanding are when we work in syncopation. Syncopation is when both people share a sense of underlying rhythm. And indeed we as humans share rhythms of heart, breath, lymph, cerebrospinal fluid, thought, etc. -- we have a lot in common. And, in spite of some allopathic pretense regarding logical treatment protocols, all forms of bodywork are still essentially improvisational. When two musicians improvise in syncopation, the underlying rhythm is respected, while both are free to depart from it as far as they care to go as long as the sense of coherence is not lost. And so it goes in our syncopated sessions that we sense, through call-and-response, whether we're on track, and, as long as we are, both people are free to be just who they are. At this point, as a result of working together, we, like musicians, are also playing together. It is a result of this nexus of play and work that health arises.
In this bodily felt sense of harmonious rhythm, dis-ease is replaced by a sense of ease and knowing in an unconfused way who one is. Self-knowing is what is left when our confusion has been released. So understanding is expressed and created in bodywork by rhythmic movement. Meaning arises from rhythmically significant meeting. Thus we see perhaps the deepest reason for the power of Duke Ellington's phrase -- "It Don't Mean A Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing."
Of course, not merely is it our body that is swinging. In harmonious therapeutic moments, our mind is gracefully swinging. While we're doing a session we can notice our awareness swinging rhythmically from our own awareness of our body, to a key fact we remember from their history, to a relevant emotion we feel, to our palpatory sensing, to a remembered favorite technique for the supraspinatus, to a prayer we make to help us all get well. The infinite swings of mind inform each body movement. And so too, the being of the client swings in turn gracefully through his or her myriad places and times. In so doing, we greatly expand not just physical range of motion -- but also the range and movement of the soul.
"Between the conscious and the unconscious," says the poet, Kabir, "the mind has put up a swing: all earth creatures, even the supernovas, sway between these two trees, and it never winds down. Angels, animals, humans, insects by the million, also the wheeling sun and moon; ages go by and it goes on. Everything is swinging: heaven, earth, water, fire, and the secret one slowly growing a body. Kabir saw that for fifteen seconds, and it made him a servant for life."
Kabir saw that for fifteen seconds. We therapists, working with our minds, hearts, bodies, and spirits, see it every single day. In mindwork as well as bodywork, the secret one, the consciously evolving cosmos, in which we are a wild swinging element, is growing.
In the Beginning
In Genesis it says that Adam "knew" Eve. This is usually taken to mean "made love with." But I wonder if this divine and generative knowing, is not the same as the knowing in our work. When the therapist works with real understanding, the client feels the therapist "knows" exactly what to do. I am not just cared for well, I am known. I am called by my true name. And when we are known in this sense, creation happens. When there is a true meeting of two spirits, minds, hearts and bodies, the creation of a new reality occurs.
I for one am not a subscriber to so-called theory of the "Big Bang." Creation happened a long time ago? I don't think so! The big bang portrays the rest of the history of the universe as a kind of anti-climactic winding down. I think rather that creation is happening at every moment. At every moment the past disappears and the present is created afresh. There are new openings and always fresh possibilities for everyone. Every moment is an opening for creation.
The Bible says that "in the beginning was the Word." Related to this is Michalangelo's painting of God touching Adam and so beginning humanity. Was God's creation through a word, an actual sound, or is it rather communicated through this life-giving touch? The hand of God conveys his life-giving word, inspiring each breathing being.
Our touch speaks to the client with our whole being. The promise of touch is to facilitate for everyone the creation of a new level of health. With our hands we give our word.
And in the beginning is the word.
*See the following issues of MTJ: Summer, Œ96, Fall, Œ96, Winter, Œ97, Spring/Summer Œ97, Winter, Œ98.
**Kabir , quoted in S. Mitchell, The Enlightened Heart ( New York: Harper & Row, 1989), pp.70.
David Lauterstein is Co-Director of The Lauterstein-Conway Massage School in Austin and an international teacher of Deep Massage and Zero Balancing. He writes "I'd like to thank the Brenneke School of Massage, my dear wife, Julie and dynamic son, Jake, for the gift of time, my five day "sabbatical," in which I was able to put the finishing touches on this article."
He can be reached at TLC, 4701-B Burnet Road, Austin, TX 78756 or 1 (800) 474-0852.