Conscious Therapeutic Bodywork (Part 2)
In my previous post I talked a bit about what Conscious Therapeutic Bodywork means to me. Basically, that the therapeutic benefit of massage is more than just physical – it also benefits your awareness of your body. Learning and becoming more aware can be therapeutic!
In this post I want to describe something about what the second part of the phrase means to me: Integrating movement with a passion for anatomy. There is a wide background of science and research that point to the benefit of movement during massage and I’d like to discuss one aspect.
One of the most fascinating innovations in my understanding of the body has been the 3-dimensional aspect. Often we think of the body like this – a muscle is connected on one end to a bone, and at the other end the same, connected to another bone (via tendons). Starting with this very simple picture we can expand it in this way: The muscle is not just a line connected at two points, it is more like a small strand within a spider web. Or as I’ve heard Tom Myers say, a thread in a t-shirt, impossible to grasp and pull without elastically warping the rest of the web (or shirt).
If we picture a muscle in this way we can see that any time a muscle is contracting and generating activity, it creates a warp in all the immediately surrounding tissues: adjacent muscles, fascial layers, associated ligaments and even joint capsules.
Asking for a person to create movement in the midst of a massage can then be seen to have a significant impact. Alongside the therapists hands creating a movement in the tissue from the outside, whatever pressure, stretch, pull or other force is created by the therapist’s hands gets amplified by the recipient’s movement, extending the impact more deeply into all the related structures.
Working in this way creates greater impact, longer lasting improvements, and greater self-awareness. I invite you to try adding movement into your next massage. See where it takes you!