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Article: Movement - The Second Dimension of Touch
by David Lauterstein
Nature is the art of God.
Dante
"Literal Thorns in Literal Flesh" is a chapter in Ida Rolfıs book, Rolfing. In it she points out that the challenges of our personal history may result in fascial restrictions that causing our movements - spiritually and physically - to be hard in unnecessary ways. Freedom, it turns out, is not something that can be "guaranteed" by a constitution. I poignantly feel in my own life and in every client and student that the legacy of freedom provided by democracy means little without internal freedom. In recent centuries, calls to rise up and "lose our chains" have won us many precious external freedoms. But internal chains remain and are as tightly binding as ever. Enslavement to social roles, to family-transmitted neurotic patterns, to the limiting ideas and behaviors of profiteering and bureaucracy, to the unhealed wounds within each of our biographies, to denying responsibility for one's own life - many of these limitations are as epidemic as ever. They cause each of us and our world deep pain. The massage movement calls for people to unite and free themselves. It reminds us that we have nothing to lose but our chains. The actual chains, ones we can touch, the points of maximum existential leverage, are in our physical body. As Ida Rolf said, when asked why she worked with fascia, "Because thatıs what I can get my hands on."
*
As in a dance, in a massage, first we touch, then we move together. There is a magic, distinct and yet connected to these two ways of relating. When we clearly meet, an I-Thou relationship is established, one of mutual respect and trust. The therapist evokes the client's clear experience of contact, of illuminated one-dimensionality, by laying on of a hand - what I refer to as the resting stroke. This simple contact has an aura of the eternal and a majestic stillness. When we begin to move our hands, establishing a plane within the clientıs energy and structure, client and therapist begin to experience a heightened sense of two-dimensionality - the paths and the flows which constitute the self. With movement, we step out from the virtual into the actual world. As they say in the movies, "Action!" "God", Buckminster Fuller said, "is a verb." With movement, we begin to co-create a story together.
Anatomy and the Haptic Artist
To be moving intelligently within the body, we must know intimately the routes of being that nature has created within us. As a dancer knows the ways the body's parts coordinate, as the painter knows the pigments and virtues of each brush, the therapist must have a thorough intimacy with the medium of his/her work - the living matter of humanity. Of all the arts, ours is perhaps the only one in which the actual living substance of another's body, mind and spirit is our explicit medium. Other arts address us through the more distal senses of sight and hearing. Ours is a "haptic" art.
The haptic sense is the sense of touch reconsidered to include the entire body rather than merely the instruments of touch, such as the hands. To sense haptically is to experience objects in the environment by actually touching them (by climbing a mountain rather than staring at it). Treated as a perceptual system the haptic incorporates all those sensations (pressure, warmth, cold, pain and kinesthetics) which previously divided up the sense of touch, and thus it includes all those aspects of sensual detection which involve physical contact both inside and outside the body. For example, if you accidentally swallow a marble you may haptically sense it as it moves through your body, thus experiencing part of the environment within your body. Similarly, you may sense body motion haptically by detecting movement of joints and muscle through your entire bodyscape. No other sense deals as directly with the three-dimensional world or similarly carries with it the possibility of altering the environment in the process of perceiving it; that is to say, no other sense engages in feeling and doing simultaneously. This action/reaction characteristic of haptic perception separate it from all other forms of sensing which, in comparison, come to seem rather abstract.
...from Bloomer and Moore - Body, Memory and Architecture
As haptic artists, we must be thoroughly familiar with our medium. If our movements reveal a lack of knowledge of the bodyscape, mistrust will automatically ensue. With deep palpable knowledge, the clientıs energy meets that of the therapist. As we move together, we will be touching energy and structure simultaneously. In that clear moment, both therapist and client experience what Pehr Henrik Ling referred to when he said, "we ought to consider the organs of the body not as the lifeless forms of a mechanical mass, but as the living, active movements of the soul."
If human being is indeed created in the image of God, then learning and feeling anatomy is literally to learn how to dwell consciously in the detailed, reflected presence of the divine.
Movement Creates Meaning
How fitting that the movements we make should be called strokes, evoking the brush strokes of painters! With our movements we evoke the deepest experiences of meaning that all art forms treasure. With the sharp strokes of cross-fiber, long and broad effleurages, light strokes reminding us of wind, the fiery strokes of myofascial release, we help create one long in-the-flesh art experience. Like a great movie, with all its myriad distributions of light and darkness, our varied strokes eventually resolve into an hour-long clear and transformative experience. The composer, Roger Sessions, said that over a whole symphony one should be able to draw one long phrase marking from the first note to the last. So it is with a well performed massage - it is experience as one gesture, one long articulated purifying movement.
A wonderful session resolves into a meaningfulness which, like a painting or a symphony, goes far deeper than words. Our in-the - flesh art form results in an actual change of being. It is said that "philosophers have merely interpreted the world, the task however is to change it." With our strokes in actual being, we actually change the world. We move and are moved beyond words. This is the thrill and responsibility inherent in haptic art.
"The breaking wave
And the muscle as it contracts
Obey the same law."
--- Dag Hammarskjold
Our Medium is Water
As we move through someone's being, the depths and pace varying from the rapids of sports massage to the calms of Reiki, the other meaning of strokes comes to the surface. We are 60% water, therefore all the movements we make are basically in a liquid medium. Not only is the client mostly water, but the therapist as well - so our movements are water touching water. It is simply good anatomy to say we are swimming when we touch. All of what makes swimming graceful and efficient and interesting is called for in our bodywork. Coordinating breath and stroke, extending our body's full length, feeling and watching for the full variety of life as we move along - the rocky places, the tangled places, the living creatures of the deep (each muscle is an undersea organ) the hot springs and the cool, the stagnant waters, the warm jets of vitality, the sea's overall disposition - choppy, rolling, tidal, lapping. Any time we visualize an adhesion or fibrosity as solid, we are in trouble. We have locked our movements and proprioceptive expectation into a position of therapeutic standoff. Because, if tissue is met as a solid which needs to be broken down, it will defend itself by hardening. On the contrary, when we move with the awareness that everything we touch is liquid (and the empty space pervading it), that it is all more or less dense water that we are swimming in together, the body will yield.
Let the calm, calm blue waters through
Wash your soul
Passing right through you
Like the smallest rose out of the hardest ground Like a tiny hand
Reaching up for the sun
--- Los Lobos
The Path of Healing is Not Straight
Years ago some anthropologists went to Africa to do a study. They had found a tribe that had had almost no contact with "civilization". These people had never seen photographs or movies. The content of the study was to find out the impact on the natives of seeing photographs for the first time. The anthropologists were fascinated to learn what would be the most astonishing thing the people would remark upon. The anthropologists took photos of everything - the mountains, the tribe members, their dwelling places, utensils, animals, etc. And then they showed these to the chief. He was shocked. Through the interpreter the anthropologists asked - of all the astonishments what was most remarkable? After an animated conversation with the chief, the interpreter announced that the chief was fascinated but not by any of things pictured in the photographs. All these things he had seen many times before - his house, his friends, the landscape and so on. But what dumbfounded the chief was how the anthropologists had created such straight lines around the images. He was looking at the borders around the pictures! Living in nature, he had never seen straight lines before. Because in nature there are no straight lines, only curves. Since we are working in nature and, particularly, mostly in water, when we move in straight lines we are moving unnaturally. Yet so often technique is taught linearly. Massaging straight up the leg or pressing directly into a pressure point we will be addressing the structure in general, but certainly not in its specificity. Any actual living structure, carefully explored, reveals itself to be curved and spontaneous in its actions. As a matter of fact, to the felt body, a straight line is experienced as an abstraction and as predictable - since it exists only in the heads of humans! To the felt body, a curved line speaks in the spontaneous language of nature. In a massage, where our straight lines begin to curve, that is where freedom begins.
The Anatomy of Liberation
Fascia is thixotrophic. A thixotrophic substance such as mustard will be more or less fluid as it is stirred or not stirred, heated or cooled. It is a substance the fluidity of which depends on the forces acting within and around it. And, in so far as our fascia contains cells of varying natures - neurons, muscle cells, white blood cells, etc. - it is alive. These cells in turn are connected and coordinated through the circulating liquid and electrical intelligence of the endocrine and nervous systems. The fascia is changeable, alive and intelligent. Then what are we feeling when we encounter tension? Not dumb adhesions, we are feeling the articulate tensing of an intelligent organism, ("the living active instrument of the soul"). When we begin doing bodywork, we are usually taught that we relax muscles. Not so! Tensing is not done by muscles, neither is relaxation. Fundamentally, relaxation is a function of the nervous system. Muscles only relax if the nerves stop stimulating them. If we want a person to let go of tension, we must find a way to touch the nervous system. How can we do this? The nervous system, particularly the autonomic, responds on the basis of memory and associations. To help someone become free of tension, we must evoke appropriate associations in the limbic system, which will trigger the "relaxation response." This will differ from person to person on the basis of their constitution and history. And it will differ from moment to moment and place to place within the living waters of their body. But it is vastly important to realize that, due to the organism-wide effect of the autonomic nervous system, when we evoke this response, it is never local, it is always global. We can't just relax a leg. This is why we don't need to touch every part of the body for every part to relax. We may massage locally, but our freeing effect is, delightfully, global.
How to most easily evoke this global liberation of the self? If we move into the body carefully, we notice a place where the body first resists. This is the nervous system's way of responding to the difference between someone's touch on the body vs. someone touching in the body. The stretch reflex is a macro-immune response designed to harden the surface of the body and to repel any force which threatens to affect the body too hard or too fast. However, as we gently enter (with a curve), and if we respectfully pause at the first sign of resistance, relaxing ourselves so our input is felt as non-threatening, the stretch reflex will ease up. Then with only the slightest increase of pressure on our part, the body will let us in. At each level of entry, the nervous system reconsiders whether to interpret the movement as unsafe in which case it will resist, or as trustworthy in which case a nourishing unity of two people is more and more deeply experienced.
I would recommend not working through more than one or two layers of this yielding at a time. Once structure and energy are both engaged, once the client is experiencing unity through movement with another, the healing process has engaged and it important for the therapist just to let that follow its course. As Fritz Smith says, "Raise a flag and see who salutes."
***
People often ask about the effects of bodywork, "How long will this last?" Our work lasts when our movements together result in learning. Learning is permanent, manipulation is temporary. Goethe said that art is long, life is short. In the haptic art of massage similarly manipulation is short, but education is long. As we learn more and more about how to create this abiding sense of meaning and inner freedom through movement, massage will be taught increasingly to inhabit its unique leverage point in history. With an enlightened appreciation of liberation through movement, we all can embody the freedom so critical to our continuance and progress as individuals and as a species. Through our movements we can embody the words of Walt Whitman:
Your very flesh shall be a great poem,
And have the richest fluency,
Not only in its words,
But in the silent lines of its lips and face,
And between the lashes of your eyes,
And in every motion and joint of your body.
|
|
Article: Movement - The Second Dimension of Touch
by David Lauterstein
Nature is the art of God.
Dante
"Literal Thorns in Literal Flesh" is a chapter in Ida Rolfıs book, Rolfing. In it she points out that the challenges of our personal history may result in fascial restrictions that causing our movements - spiritually and physically - to be hard in unnecessary ways. Freedom, it turns out, is not something that can be "guaranteed" by a constitution. I poignantly feel in my own life and in every client and student that the legacy of freedom provided by democracy means little without internal freedom. In recent centuries, calls to rise up and "lose our chains" have won us many precious external freedoms. But internal chains remain and are as tightly binding as ever. Enslavement to social roles, to family-transmitted neurotic patterns, to the limiting ideas and behaviors of profiteering and bureaucracy, to the unhealed wounds within each of our biographies, to denying responsibility for one's own life - many of these limitations are as epidemic as ever. They cause each of us and our world deep pain. The massage movement calls for people to unite and free themselves. It reminds us that we have nothing to lose but our chains. The actual chains, ones we can touch, the points of maximum existential leverage, are in our physical body. As Ida Rolf said, when asked why she worked with fascia, "Because thatıs what I can get my hands on."
*
As in a dance, in a massage, first we touch, then we move together. There is a magic, distinct and yet connected to these two ways of relating. When we clearly meet, an I-Thou relationship is established, one of mutual respect and trust. The therapist evokes the client's clear experience of contact, of illuminated one-dimensionality, by laying on of a hand - what I refer to as the resting stroke. This simple contact has an aura of the eternal and a majestic stillness. When we begin to move our hands, establishing a plane within the clientıs energy and structure, client and therapist begin to experience a heightened sense of two-dimensionality - the paths and the flows which constitute the self. With movement, we step out from the virtual into the actual world. As they say in the movies, "Action!" "God", Buckminster Fuller said, "is a verb." With movement, we begin to co-create a story together.
Anatomy and the Haptic Artist
To be moving intelligently within the body, we must know intimately the routes of being that nature has created within us. As a dancer knows the ways the body's parts coordinate, as the painter knows the pigments and virtues of each brush, the therapist must have a thorough intimacy with the medium of his/her work - the living matter of humanity. Of all the arts, ours is perhaps the only one in which the actual living substance of another's body, mind and spirit is our explicit medium. Other arts address us through the more distal senses of sight and hearing. Ours is a "haptic" art.
The haptic sense is the sense of touch reconsidered to include the entire body rather than merely the instruments of touch, such as the hands. To sense haptically is to experience objects in the environment by actually touching them (by climbing a mountain rather than staring at it). Treated as a perceptual system the haptic incorporates all those sensations (pressure, warmth, cold, pain and kinesthetics) which previously divided up the sense of touch, and thus it includes all those aspects of sensual detection which involve physical contact both inside and outside the body. For example, if you accidentally swallow a marble you may haptically sense it as it moves through your body, thus experiencing part of the environment within your body. Similarly, you may sense body motion haptically by detecting movement of joints and muscle through your entire bodyscape. No other sense deals as directly with the three-dimensional world or similarly carries with it the possibility of altering the environment in the process of perceiving it; that is to say, no other sense engages in feeling and doing simultaneously. This action/reaction characteristic of haptic perception separate it from all other forms of sensing which, in comparison, come to seem rather abstract.
...from Bloomer and Moore - Body, Memory and Architecture
As haptic artists, we must be thoroughly familiar with our medium. If our movements reveal a lack of knowledge of the bodyscape, mistrust will automatically ensue. With deep palpable knowledge, the clientıs energy meets that of the therapist. As we move together, we will be touching energy and structure simultaneously. In that clear moment, both therapist and client experience what Pehr Henrik Ling referred to when he said, "we ought to consider the organs of the body not as the lifeless forms of a mechanical mass, but as the living, active movements of the soul."
If human being is indeed created in the image of God, then learning and feeling anatomy is literally to learn how to dwell consciously in the detailed, reflected presence of the divine.
Movement Creates Meaning
How fitting that the movements we make should be called strokes, evoking the brush strokes of painters! With our movements we evoke the deepest experiences of meaning that all art forms treasure. With the sharp strokes of cross-fiber, long and broad effleurages, light strokes reminding us of wind, the fiery strokes of myofascial release, we help create one long in-the-flesh art experience. Like a great movie, with all its myriad distributions of light and darkness, our varied strokes eventually resolve into an hour-long clear and transformative experience. The composer, Roger Sessions, said that over a whole symphony one should be able to draw one long phrase marking from the first note to the last. So it is with a well performed massage - it is experience as one gesture, one long articulated purifying movement.
A wonderful session resolves into a meaningfulness which, like a painting or a symphony, goes far deeper than words. Our in-the - flesh art form results in an actual change of being. It is said that "philosophers have merely interpreted the world, the task however is to change it." With our strokes in actual being, we actually change the world. We move and are moved beyond words. This is the thrill and responsibility inherent in haptic art.
"The breaking wave
And the muscle as it contracts
Obey the same law."
--- Dag Hammarskjold
Our Medium is Water
As we move through someone's being, the depths and pace varying from the rapids of sports massage to the calms of Reiki, the other meaning of strokes comes to the surface. We are 60% water, therefore all the movements we make are basically in a liquid medium. Not only is the client mostly water, but the therapist as well - so our movements are water touching water. It is simply good anatomy to say we are swimming when we touch. All of what makes swimming graceful and efficient and interesting is called for in our bodywork. Coordinating breath and stroke, extending our body's full length, feeling and watching for the full variety of life as we move along - the rocky places, the tangled places, the living creatures of the deep (each muscle is an undersea organ) the hot springs and the cool, the stagnant waters, the warm jets of vitality, the sea's overall disposition - choppy, rolling, tidal, lapping. Any time we visualize an adhesion or fibrosity as solid, we are in trouble. We have locked our movements and proprioceptive expectation into a position of therapeutic standoff. Because, if tissue is met as a solid which needs to be broken down, it will defend itself by hardening. On the contrary, when we move with the awareness that everything we touch is liquid (and the empty space pervading it), that it is all more or less dense water that we are swimming in together, the body will yield.
Let the calm, calm blue waters through
Wash your soul
Passing right through you
Like the smallest rose out of the hardest ground Like a tiny hand
Reaching up for the sun
--- Los Lobos
The Path of Healing is Not Straight
Years ago some anthropologists went to Africa to do a study. They had found a tribe that had had almost no contact with "civilization". These people had never seen photographs or movies. The content of the study was to find out the impact on the natives of seeing photographs for the first time. The anthropologists were fascinated to learn what would be the most astonishing thing the people would remark upon. The anthropologists took photos of everything - the mountains, the tribe members, their dwelling places, utensils, animals, etc. And then they showed these to the chief. He was shocked. Through the interpreter the anthropologists asked - of all the astonishments what was most remarkable? After an animated conversation with the chief, the interpreter announced that the chief was fascinated but not by any of things pictured in the photographs. All these things he had seen many times before - his house, his friends, the landscape and so on. But what dumbfounded the chief was how the anthropologists had created such straight lines around the images. He was looking at the borders around the pictures! Living in nature, he had never seen straight lines before. Because in nature there are no straight lines, only curves. Since we are working in nature and, particularly, mostly in water, when we move in straight lines we are moving unnaturally. Yet so often technique is taught linearly. Massaging straight up the leg or pressing directly into a pressure point we will be addressing the structure in general, but certainly not in its specificity. Any actual living structure, carefully explored, reveals itself to be curved and spontaneous in its actions. As a matter of fact, to the felt body, a straight line is experienced as an abstraction and as predictable - since it exists only in the heads of humans! To the felt body, a curved line speaks in the spontaneous language of nature. In a massage, where our straight lines begin to curve, that is where freedom begins.
The Anatomy of Liberation
Fascia is thixotrophic. A thixotrophic substance such as mustard will be more or less fluid as it is stirred or not stirred, heated or cooled. It is a substance the fluidity of which depends on the forces acting within and around it. And, in so far as our fascia contains cells of varying natures - neurons, muscle cells, white blood cells, etc. - it is alive. These cells in turn are connected and coordinated through the circulating liquid and electrical intelligence of the endocrine and nervous systems. The fascia is changeable, alive and intelligent. Then what are we feeling when we encounter tension? Not dumb adhesions, we are feeling the articulate tensing of an intelligent organism, ("the living active instrument of the soul"). When we begin doing bodywork, we are usually taught that we relax muscles. Not so! Tensing is not done by muscles, neither is relaxation. Fundamentally, relaxation is a function of the nervous system. Muscles only relax if the nerves stop stimulating them. If we want a person to let go of tension, we must find a way to touch the nervous system. How can we do this? The nervous system, particularly the autonomic, responds on the basis of memory and associations. To help someone become free of tension, we must evoke appropriate associations in the limbic system, which will trigger the "relaxation response." This will differ from person to person on the basis of their constitution and history. And it will differ from moment to moment and place to place within the living waters of their body. But it is vastly important to realize that, due to the organism-wide effect of the autonomic nervous system, when we evoke this response, it is never local, it is always global. We can't just relax a leg. This is why we don't need to touch every part of the body for every part to relax. We may massage locally, but our freeing effect is, delightfully, global.
How to most easily evoke this global liberation of the self? If we move into the body carefully, we notice a place where the body first resists. This is the nervous system's way of responding to the difference between someone's touch on the body vs. someone touching in the body. The stretch reflex is a macro-immune response designed to harden the surface of the body and to repel any force which threatens to affect the body too hard or too fast. However, as we gently enter (with a curve), and if we respectfully pause at the first sign of resistance, relaxing ourselves so our input is felt as non-threatening, the stretch reflex will ease up. Then with only the slightest increase of pressure on our part, the body will let us in. At each level of entry, the nervous system reconsiders whether to interpret the movement as unsafe in which case it will resist, or as trustworthy in which case a nourishing unity of two people is more and more deeply experienced.
I would recommend not working through more than one or two layers of this yielding at a time. Once structure and energy are both engaged, once the client is experiencing unity through movement with another, the healing process has engaged and it important for the therapist just to let that follow its course. As Fritz Smith says, "Raise a flag and see who salutes."
***
People often ask about the effects of bodywork, "How long will this last?" Our work lasts when our movements together result in learning. Learning is permanent, manipulation is temporary. Goethe said that art is long, life is short. In the haptic art of massage similarly manipulation is short, but education is long. As we learn more and more about how to create this abiding sense of meaning and inner freedom through movement, massage will be taught increasingly to inhabit its unique leverage point in history. With an enlightened appreciation of liberation through movement, we all can embody the freedom so critical to our continuance and progress as individuals and as a species. Through our movements we can embody the words of Walt Whitman:
Your very flesh shall be a great poem,
And have the richest fluency,
Not only in its words,
But in the silent lines of its lips and face,
And between the lashes of your eyes,
And in every motion and joint of your body.
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