Articles: Contact--The First Dimension of Touch

It is not the educational intention but it is the meeting which is educationally fruitful. --- Martin Buber

Introduction - The Spell of Modalities

There is a spell about the land of bodywork. The spell is that modalities are powerful and vast and that practitioners should be consumers of these modalities if they want to be powerful, successful therapists. In the market culture the product or service to be consumed is given more importance than the individual person who is consuming it. This turns the truth on its head. In bodywork the people - therapist and client - are the source of healing. The modality is of secondary importance. Nonetheless, most massage/bodywork training is modality training. Let us wake up from the spell of believing that modalities heal people - that cranial work is powerful, Reiki sublime, NMT great, Rolfing fantastic. Not true. Modalities have zero power. The healing power in bodywork is who is giving it and who is receiving it. You who are a bodyworker and your client are the source of healing. Modalities are tools at best, brainwashing at worst. Andrew Taylor Still stated "the body contains all the healing substances it needs." Each therapist with a good basic education and the simplest desire to help others by touching them, has all the healing energy - ideas, feelings, movements - he or she needs to help. A truly caring individual has more power than all the modalities combined. If I have the choice of an advanced practitioner who is full of himself vs. a basic practitioner who genuinely cares, I will go for the care. Because, if love is present, we open up and, if it's not, we don't. Perhaps love is that which opens. I may not be able to teach a student to love. I can't require it for their grades. But that doesn't make it any the less primary. It is harder to educate the character, the person of the therapist,who to be in the therapeutic relationship, than to just tell them what to do. Nonetheless, caring deeply remains our first concern and chief resource, technique a distant second. How can we rigorously develop theskill to love? How can we be rigorous in the study of this incredible primary content of our work? This on-going column is an attempt to help us answer these questions. First, we must all wake up from this spell and declaim loudly the primary role of deep care in massage. It is the reason why people are so attracted to this profession. Tragically, some schools and workshop marketeers are consistently selling off this precious birthright for the false idol of modality instruction. On the contrary, our source and destination continues to be the ever mysterious and wondrous LIFE and LOVE itself. To break the spell of modality worship the best tool I have come up with is to better understand the seven dimensions inherent in touch.

The Seven Dimensions of Touch

For years I've been receiving work from students and colleagues. And from this receiving it seems to me that, regardless of modality, there are seven specific dimensions of touch which create structurally and energetically effective work. The literally multi-dimensional experience of touch is the foundation which existentially precedes and underlies all bodywork techniques and modalities. For each upcoming column we will explore in detail one of each of these seven dimensions.

Contact - The First Dimension of Touch

The first element or dimension of touch occurs when we lay our hands upon someone. Just laying down a hand establishes a point or area of contact. Remember from geometry, a point has one dimension. So in this rigorous, geometric sense, the first level of touch is one dimensional, the laying on of a hand. But how powerful this is! In the one dimension of basic contact is summed up everything so eloquently depicted in Michelangelo's famous painting in which God and Adam are about to touch. The power of this picture is that it depicts with incredible power the creation of life. When we touch, in this first dimension, life itself is created. Because in the moment and in the space when and where two people touch, a new thing is created. This is the relationship. Two people share their lives by touching. And a third thing is created. How can we honor and further empower this incredible opportunity? First of all, we must believe it's real. Structurally, when two beings touch, it is an interesting physical occurrence. Energetically, however, it is a miracle. When two conscious beings touch, the combined vibration of these two beings, what Martin Buber called the I-Thou relationship, begins. This is the incredible power inherent in the first dimension of touch. There are two aspects to this dimension. The first has to do with location. Where do we decide to initiate contact? Where do we decide to first lay our hand down and why? If where we first make contact becomes habitual and not the result of a sacred decision, then we've lost an incredible opportunity. To make this decision we need knowledge of anatomy, especially musculoskeletal. Often we can tell if a therapist is competent simply by where they first place their hand. If it's, for instance, halfway down the back, this may give us the sense that they are beginning in the middle, not knowing or valuing the beginnings and endings of things, in this case the spine and muscles associated with it. Knowledge of appropriate boundaries and the individualness of this is also necessary. In one person the face might be the best place to start, in another the last. Refine your intuitive knowledge of the individual in terms of where might be the most lovely entry way to the massage for this person on this day.

The energetic aspect of the first dimension of touch has to do with conscious and intuitive decisions regarding how we touch the person. Do we use a lot of pressure or none at all? Do we bring a lot of energy into our hands or a modest amount? Do we touch with firmness, love, consolation, curiosity, etc.? The vastness of meaning conveyed by touch is daunting. Let us inhabit this vastness, enjoy the majestic and mysterious aspect of keeping the question open - how shall we meet?

Psycho - mechanics and the Organization of Awareness

Since energy follows awareness, the refining of the energetic aspect of basic contact involves the organization of awareness. For the first dimension, then, the question is not just where and how do you place your hand, but equally where do you place your consciousness? The Einstein of modern bodywork, Ida Rolf, spoke of many bodies as being "randomly" organized. Pointing out that children, for example, learn to walk by hook or crook, stumbling awkwardly across a room in search of the nearest grabable structure, she underscored the almost totally unmet need for movement education in our society. In massage school we attempt to address this need through the teaching of biomechanics, in which efficiency of posture and breath are emphasized. Accompanying biomechanics training, of course, is also the specific choreography of hand and body movements constituting the modality which the student is learning. (How beautiful a choreography it can be!) In our society and in our massage schools there is a yet deeper choreography that we can bring our attention to. This is the equally important choreography of awareness. In our regular schooling we are not taught directly how to think, nor how to access with alertness and curiosity the awareness of our own thoughts, movements, or feelings. People are left, as with the mostly non-existent movement education, to structure their awareness of themselves and the world around them with no systematic guidance. As a result, most of us grow up not just with "random" bodies, but also with "random" minds. Particularly under stress, people are often just reactive, on automatic, displaying about the level of psychic organization of your average pin ball machine. What are the steps then toward an appropriate choreography of awareness, a psycho-mechanics of massage? First of all we must literally and figuratively pay attention to the "matter at hand". This focused state may be described as "interface" (this terminology, by the way, is drawn from Zero Balancing). Working at interface involves the energy and structure of the therapist meeting with the energy and structure of the client. Generally, this meeting takes place where our hands, elbow or other part we are contacting with touches the body of the client. It may also be, as in the case of a stretch, where our force has the most impact. For instance, in a hamstring stretch, we are not usually touching the hamstrings directly but our structural and energetic impact will be experienced there. Interface is a more direct way of focusing during a massage than intention - since intention implies a cerebral directive. With interface, your attention is literally centered on the place and the moment where the two of you, client and therapist, bodily and consciously actually are meeting. The act of centering on interface itself is a radical organizing of consciousness. For, until we've centered on something, there is no point of reference around which our consciousness is organized. Without centering, we are like a body without gravity - floating with no reference point for up, down, forward, back. With a center, a home for our awareness, we can become aware of when we are focused and when we're not. As in meditation, then, where the awareness may be centered on one's breath at the tip of the nose, or on the hara just below the navel, healthy psychomechanics in bodywork involve working at the interface where our structures and energies meet. But, as in meditation, it is not the goal, nor is it truly possible, to remain unalterably centered at interface. As in meditation, your awareness may wander - at times to your movements, at others to your emotions, your thoughts or sensations. And, as in meditation, your job as a therapist is basically to bring your awareness back "home", to center. The role of home is not that we always stay there, but that it is a place to which we return. So frequently, during a session, we bring our wandering awareness back again and again to interface and so, bit by bit, our clients experience our commitment to be truly present with them, not just in body but in spirit as well. The psychomechanics of bodywork differ from meditation in this one very important respect - part of therapy involves conscious problem-solving. Therefore, the wandering of our awareness is more relevant and, at times, necessary. We need to be ready to access all of ourselves in order to be fully present. In the words of the French essayist, Jacques Riviere, "(the sincere man) stops at each level of himself and chooses what he needs to form his truth." For instance, I may be doing shoulder work and staying mostly at interface when I have the insight that the client's pain they described in their history may be more appropriately relieved through specific work on the supraspinatus than the general trapezius work I had planned. I then access my anatomical "data banks" visualizing the precise origin, route and insertion of supraspinatus. Then I bring myself from my mind, as quickly as gracefully as possible, back to interface and work there with heightened clarity and relevance, having accessed my knowledge. Similarly, I may bring my awareness to my emotions, when during a session I might feel, for example, anger. Is this my anger at a event earlier in the day, or am I "picking up" on the held-in anger of my client? If so, what might be the appropriate feeling content of my touch? Once I've sorted that out, I come back to interface and to a hopefully deepened, clearer emotional communication between myself and the client. During a session, I may also notice unnecessary tension creeping into my body or my breathing. People pick up not just on what we preach with our hands, but, perhaps more so, on what we practice with our whole bodies. It is vastly important to set a psychophysical example for one's client. Trying, for instance, to relieve shoulder pain without freedom in my own shoulders is therapeutically hypocritical. So I bring my awareness to my tension, let go, breathing, moving back now a freer person and returning gracefully to interface. There is such elegant integrity in modeling in our bodies/beings what we hope for our clients. That way as they get healthier, so do we. Finally during a session I may fall into the mistaken frame of reference that I am doing therapy to the passive client, that it's all up to me. In this case, we've created what Buber would call an I-it relationship. In order to restore the I-Thou, I access my spiritual sense, the knowledge that we are in a deep way connected in this world. Then I bring this acknowledged kinship- with-all-life feeling back to our interface. The delicate ballet of awareness in which we inhabit mostly interface, while circulating in appropriate ways through our mind, emotions, body, and spirit - this is the dance of therapy, the psychomechanics of bodywork.

Conclusion

In summary, we can look at therapy as beginning with this first dimension, basic contact. In this contact where we touch, how we touch, and how we organize our awareness is most of what creates the therapeutic effect. The belief that modalities are the source of our power as in "I hear that NMT is really good" or "What does Trager work do" is a widespread fallacy. In our market economy, many people try to sell you their product and try to convince you that you need it. The underlying social belief is - only what you don't yet have is worth having. The truth is the opposite. We already have everything we need. To paraphrase osteopathy's great founder, Andrew Taylor Still, you the therapist contain all the healing power you need. When one caring person touches another, healing (the experience of a new wholeness) takes place. Healing is in the nature of people getting together. We don't need modalities, we need each other. The power is in each one of us. Let us organize our awareness and touch and enjoy this incredible capacity to really meet one another. To paraphrase Martin Buber, "It is not the therapeutic intention but it is the meeting which is therapeutically fruitful." Touching with an appropriately organized body, mind, emotions and spirit is fruitful. It is creative and it is an honor to be in a profession where truly meeting is the point.