PUTTING MORE ART IN YOUR MASSAGE

Tips for Therapists

  • Get Feedback – unlike paints and notes, our medium is intelligent and can tell us if our work is inspiring them! Brilliantly eliciting and responding to feedback can almost guarantee that you can optimize the experience in every single session. Every session is a collaborative artwork.
  • Listen – with your hands. What is the body is telling you? What accumulated past tensions call for your attention? Make sure you palpate each place with care before choosing and applying techniques.
  • Call and Respond. Like a jazz duet/improvisation, two players make the session together. Find important places to pause, giving the client crucial time to do their inner work undisturbed. Don’t call without allowing time for the response!
  • Accuracy – Enjoy regularly refreshing and refining your knowledge and visualization of anatomy and physiology. The foundation for this art is a deep and thorough understanding of the muscles, fascia, bones, joints and nervous system.
  • Find just the right pressures at just the right moments. Take out the looseness – pause – press into the tension – pause – sink in – hold – monitor for response – clearly disengage.“Time is what we are made of” – Ben Franklin
  • Be creative in your choice of duration and rhythm of strokes.

Slowing down and letting a stroke seem to last forever can give your client a window into eternity. Take them out of the experience of “chronos”, chronological clock-time, into sacred time – known as “kairos” in Greek.

Then, going more quickly through non-problematic areas will communicate a sense of lightness and celebrate the fact that the person is not a problem to be solved, but is fundamentally a healthy being with tensions here or there.

— from “The Art of Massage”