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Complementary skill in know-nothing novice
Hi. I'm looking into training in massage therapy, however I have a bit of a weird situation.
I use a method of provoking my body to give me movement indications and instructions as to what it would prefer I do with it. This works wonders for diet, as well as in several other areas. I also use it when I massage. I am terrible at massage, unless I pay attention to those movement indications. That changes everything, for the better.
I asked someone to compare my massages with this to one they just received from a 20 year professional. The comparison was that I was just as good, however for entirely different reasons. The pro had skill and technique, as well as strength and stamina, but remained in areas a little too long, applied wrong amounts of pressure at times, and followed their routine. All I have going for me is I always know exactly what area to move to and how much pressure to apply. I'm frequently told I suddenly changed areas to where the subject wants me to go just before they were about to say something, which is pretty cool I suppose. I have no technique, skill or stamina. I know where to go and how much pressure to apply, but the rest I basically make up as I go along.
What I do also has limitations, I'm hoping mostly due to lack of practice. I can only get instructions in one hand at a time, so the other hand either mirrors on the other side, tries to assist the hand I'm using, or does nothing. A sort of mental stress builds up if I try to pay attention to both at the same time. Also, if the person tries directing me, that can also build up that same stress, as it feels like I'm getting two separate sets of directions. This tends to happen in the beginning a lot, as normally someone tells me to work on a particular area, but the instructions I'm getting want me to start a bit far from the area, and sort of end up drifting slowly towards it.
Another limitation is this method is linked to other social instincts, and I'm unsure if I could get it working with a general stranger. If that's the case, I'd need to sort of interview/get to know clients beforehand if I did become a professional. Either that, or have a massage routine I fall back on when I'm flying blind, so to speak.
So, my question is, with this strange skill, and the desire to incorporate it into training for an actual career, what would you recommend I do for training and dealing with the classroom setting? How would you recommend I incorporate it into a career? Since it's important in massage to listen to the client, and this basically requires ignoring the client's words and how the client's muscles feel, etc, can the two be combined at all? What would you do if you knew exactly where to go and what pressure to apply, but had these limitations too?
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Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Lee Edelberg on
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Develop your intuitive side. That sounds great. If you want to be a licensed or certified MT you should look into the requirements in your state. If I were you I wouldn't worry about how it will work in school. Just get the training you need and keep doing your thing. Check out some classes, like Gordon suggested. Maybe look for a school that values and encourages intuitive skills (Esalen for example, one of the places I have trained, is famous for that. There must be others). Or maybe a different style of bodywork than massage, like Breema . There's a lot of stuff out there!
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Permalink Reply by Sadan Yagci on
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Lee Edelberg said:
Develop your intuitive side. That sounds great. If you want to be a licensed or certified MT you should look into the requirements in your state. If I were you I wouldn't worry about how it will work in school. Just get the training you need and keep doing your thing. Check out some classes, like Gordon suggested. Maybe look for a school that values and encourages intuitive skills (Esalen for example, one of the places I have trained, is famous for that. There must be others). Or maybe a different style of bodywork than massage, like Breema . There's a lot of stuff out there!
Interesting. I never thought of going to a school that would be more open to this sort of thing. Thank you.
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Permalink Reply by Therese Schwartz on
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I"m not so sure this is a "strange" skill - I agree with Lee that you have a deep intuition about what people actually need. Lee is correct - there are schools and modalities that are well-suited for this type of "listening".
You have mentioned several times that you have "limitations". I would encourage you to go to massage school anyway - to be honest, each of us has limitations! All are different but I'm sure everyone who has gotten good at massage can tell you what they've had to overcome to get there. It's good for us to work past those barriers, and in my experience having limitations of any sort can help us be more empathetic with clients. In many ways what we perceive to be limitations can actually become assets!
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Permalink Reply by Gordon J. Wallis on
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There might be some videos of Esalen Massage on youtube. Its not exactly what you are discribing.. However, everyone that does Esalen Massage is not doing the same thing.. Its a flow and a rythem, sort of. There are DVDs on The Esalen approach. Might be worth checking out, and integrate what you do along with their approach?
Sadan Yagci said:Lee Edelberg said:
Develop your intuitive side. That sounds great. If you want to be a licensed or certified MT you should look into the requirements in your state. If I were you I wouldn't worry about how it will work in school. Just get the training you need and keep doing your thing. Check out some classes, like Gordon suggested. Maybe look for a school that values and encourages intuitive skills (Esalen for example, one of the places I have trained, is famous for that. There must be others). Or maybe a different style of bodywork than massage, like Breema . There's a lot of stuff out there!
Interesting. I never thought of going to a school that would be more open to this sort of thing. Thank you.
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Esalen Massage is not easy to describe and it is true that it is different things. For the record I wasn't stating that is was related to what Sadan was describing, but rather that it works with the intuitive in a nice way.
Here is a video, by instructor Perry Holloman, doing a demo at a class. He specializes in blending Esalen massage with deep body work. The calm, slo-mo feel of the video is an Esalen characteristic.....it really is the pace of the session. You can see the deeper work happening starting around 2:20. Anytime he is using elbow/forearm he is working deep though it might not appear that way from his posture. Also around 1:12 he is using a lot of bodyweight, a move which feels really great to receive. I have taken a couple classes with him and his wife Johanna, and they were marvels.
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Thank you. In a way I suppose it's intuition. It fits the definition, though I don't particularly like the term because that tends to put it on par with something unreliable like an inkling, which is what this bypasses to get answers to queries. Inklings, feelings and cravings are unreliable. This bypasses them. So far in experimenting on it I haven't found this unreliable. I test it every day, using it pretty much all day. I teach others and if they get it working (10 successes out of 13 so far), it works as soon as the sensation is noticed, and responses and functionality all line up after that. I specifically don't tell people what responses I've gotten before, or I try to trick them into thinking the responses were the opposite of what they actually were, to help eliminate bias. Results so far are that people disagree with each other on a lot, but apparently bodies don't tend to, except about immediate needs. For example, no matter a person's opinion of coffee, addict, lover, hater, or indifferent, not a single person's body has given a positive response for it. Again and again, bodies agree, people don't.
The reverse, however, that's different. If people disagree with their bodies, their bodies, when queried, frequently employ methods to make the person agree with it. There are very few ways a person can influence their body's responses, such as if the body wants a food item and the person thinks something is wrong with that food somehow (contamination, immoral killing, doesn't matter what), the body will then change its response to reject the food. However, the other way around there are plenty of ways for the body to change the person's mind. It can eliminate all desire, it can make you feel pulled towards it, it can set up cravings or aversions, it can make desire, it can make food taste better or worse, and in one case it created extreme nauseous pain. The behavior modification aspects, I'd say, have the most potential.
Some of the limits appear to be soft-limits, improvable with practice. The focusing on one body part thing I'm working on pushing past by considering both hands, arms, and the area of the torso that connects them as a single body part for my attention to focus on. As long as the attention isn't split, the strain doesn't build up. It's just difficult paying attention to such a large area. Other limits appear to be hard-limits on how it functions. It not working with strangers isn't a personal limitation thing. It's a hard limit, and so far my attempts to find a way around it have had side effects I really don't want to repeat. Weird thing is, I don't know what defines someone I know, in this regard. The thing doesn't work, and then suddenly it does. Once it starts working, it doesn't stop working at any point for that person. It always starts working at some point in spending time with them, but just a conversation doesn't always do it. It seems to have something to do with the social relationship or trust involved perhaps. I haven't come up with a good experiment for determining what's going on in that area yet.
Are there any schools in Florida you'd recommend for this type of training?
Therese Schwartz said:
I"m not so sure this is a "strange" skill - I agree with Lee that you have a deep intuition about what people actually need. Lee is correct - there are schools and modalities that are well-suited for this type of "listening".
You have mentioned several times that you have "limitations". I would encourage you to go to massage school anyway - to be honest, each of us has limitations! All are different but I'm sure everyone who has gotten good at massage can tell you what they've had to overcome to get there. It's good for us to work past those barriers, and in my experience having limitations of any sort can help us be more empathetic with clients. In many ways what we perceive to be limitations can actually become assets!
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The motions and methods in that video would be very useful for me to learn. That's one problem with my method. I have to think of something for my body to be able to respond about it. It can give general movement instructions, as well as positive and negative indications, but the actual details of how to work an area, if I don't think of them it can't indicate yay or nay.
Where does intuition come in with Esalen? I didn't hear him mention it.
Lee Edelberg said:Esalen Massage is not easy to describe and it is true that it is different things. For the record I wasn't stating that is was related to what Sadan was describing, but rather that it works with the intuitive in a nice way.
Here is a video, by instructor Perry Holloman, doing a demo at a class. He specializes in blending Esalen massage with deep body work. You can see the deeper work happening starting around 2:20. Anytime he is using elbow/forearm he is working deep though it might not appear that way from his posture. Also around 1:12 he is using a lot of bodyweight, a move which feels really great to receive. I have taken a couple classes with him and his wife Johanna, and they were marvels.
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Sadan, lots of people think of intuition as a "bad" thing but they are confused about what it is. Think of it as non-conscious pattern recognition. It's our non-conscious mind processing information and knowing the answer far faster than our conscious mind can do so. That's all - no inklings, no mumbo-jumbo. Just information processing. Hope that helps!
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Therese, I agree with you somewhat. That is the primary way the mind works. However, frequently I'll find myself starting to pay attention to that form of intuition, and then I'll catch myself and query. The query, if it disagrees, will change the intuition to match it. Intuition, as you're describing, is frequently wrong and requires correction. It's like the information gets messed up somewhere between the subconscious and conscious mind. Also, frequently, the body will want something and it will grab on to the first generally similar thing that enters conscious attention, even if that thing is completely wrong when queried about. Queries bypass the error-prone medium. The physical responses to needs are a lot more reliable than the mental responses to needs. I think that has something to do with instincts having much less control of the body and brain than the conscious mind does. It only has full control in areas the person has little, if any, control. Which is why in those areas autonomic movement is triggered, and in consciously controlled areas only movement indication sensations are triggered. In the conscious mind, the conscious mind and its attention have the most control, allowing it very little, making it unreliable.
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You might find the work of Moishe Feldenkrais to be interesting and more up your alley. A book by Dean Juhan called "Job's Body" discusses some of these things though mostly from the point of view of body/mind responses to receiving bodywork. "In an Unspoken Voice:How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness" by Peter Levine is a great read about the workings of the brain and nervous system and body/mind responses. Realize that massage schools are essentially vocational and won't spend a lot of time on these topics other than to touch on them.
Sadan Yagci said:Therese, I agree with you somewhat. That is the primary way the mind works. However, frequently I'll find myself starting to pay attention to that form of intuition, and then I'll catch myself and query. The query, if it disagrees, will change the intuition to match it. Intuition, as you're describing, is frequently wrong and requires correction. It's like the information gets messed up somewhere between the subconscious and conscious mind. Also, frequently, the body will want something and it will grab on to the first generally similar thing that enters conscious attention, even if that thing is completely wrong when queried about. Queries bypass the error-prone medium. The physical responses to needs are a lot more reliable than the mental responses to needs. I think that has something to do with instincts having much less control of the body and brain than the conscious mind does. It only has full control in areas the person has little, if any, control. Which is why in those areas autonomic movement is triggered, and in consciously controlled areas only movement indication sensations are triggered. In the conscious mind, the conscious mind and its attention have the most control, allowing it very little, making it unreliable.
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Permalink Reply by Gary W Addis, LMT on
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Gary W Addis, LMT said:Intuition is a necessary component in a great massage. Successful MDs rely on it, too. However, intuition doesn't negate the need for education and experience. For instance, an MD might intuit that the bump he encounter's in a client's body is a cancer, but if he lacks the specialized knowledge and experience and equipment, he'll refer the patient to someone who does.
Experience in a massage therapist builds muscle memory-- proprioception. Proprioception enables wide receivers to leap at the precise moment and close the hands at the one precise moment when the long ball arrives. Therese said it well. Intuition AKA proprioception isn't magic, it is the CNS processing information from the five senses-- on the ball field, it relies chiefly on eyesight and knowledge of ball aerodynamics; proprioception in a massage therapist relies almost exclusively on our sense of touch.
The more bodies, the more living tissue you touch, the stronger your intuitive AKA proprioceptive sense of what is going on in a specific muscle on a specific day will become. A demo given in most massage schools teaches students to "intuit" (feel) a BB or smaller object hidden beneath pages in a stack of papers. Gifted therapists can feel a grain of sand 50 pages deep in a book.
We humans are not created equal. Some have eagle eyes, some the hearing of a cat, the sense of smell of a bloodhound. My 18 month old great-grandson, I suspect, was gifted at birth with exception proprioception-- toss him a ball, if it's within reach, he'll stretch out and catch it. That ability at such a tender age, obviously, isn't learned behavior.
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This is confusing knowledge and experience and what it contributes to intuition, with what I'm referring to. Knowledge and experience don't contribute to the system I'm referring to much, and they can easily make you think the body wants one thing when it really wants another, confusing rather than helping. Granted, they all work together, but where as knowledge and experience require training, this form of intuition does not. I, at one point, thought of it as pre-programming added to what ever information the body has about itself. That was until I found it getting the same information from other people that those people got from themselves. I've since started thinking of it as operating on a network of sorts, though I have no idea how. It's not magic, I agree. I haven't proven it wrong yet though. That's why I'm so interested in getting other people to test it. I would really like to know what's going on, or find out that if the subconscious is playing assumption tricks, how it's done it so accurately so far.
Your description of intuiting an object like that sounds a lot less like intuition and a lot more like increased sensitivity to sensory information, which does happen with training. That has nothing to do with this though. I almost ignore such sensory information. Also, this requires pretty much no training and little practice beyond the point where the directing sensations are noticed, making it function in a very different way from such extended practice.
This was one of my concerns. Massage therapists rely on touch. I rely on ignoring touch, focusing on adjusting to constantly changing instructions. I'm unsure of how the two could be combined.
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