What’s My Approach to Massage Therapy About?

While searching the market for a new massage therapist, I believe one of the important things we should consider is what that particular therapists overarching philosophy of massage is. What I mean by this is, what does the therapist hold as their primary view in regards to what they’re offering to the public? On the surface, we can easily say massage and list it’s benefits. Digging deeper though, we can see how that therapist views their role in the therapeutic process, and what the mechanisms of their treatments consist of. Due to the fairly lax licensure process (compared to other healthcare professionals), there can be a wide range of beliefs, trainings, and client-therapist relationships. This blog is an opportunity to share my modus operandi, or in other words, what I perceive my role is and what I find possible in my work with clients. This article is written for both potential clients as a means to get to know me, and for other therapists to begin a similar inquiry into their practice so they can refine their intention and be more clear with what they’re bringing the public.

I’m not a Mechanic
To begin this exploration, I want to share one of the fundamental views that colors how I perceive my role in the realm of healthcare. That is to say that I don’t think it’s the right place for a massage therapist to take on the role of ‘fixer’. I know this sounds paradoxical as many people end up in massage therapy because something is wrong and they’re looking for help to alleviate it. The thing is, most people who find themselves in my office are not what I would consider ‘broken’. Tension in the neck, low back pain, chronic migraines, and a whole slew of other common ailments are actually rarely the result of a real diagnosable pathology or injury. While this can certainly be the case in some situations, it’s far more common that what we’re dealing with is a combination of factors that draw from our emotional wellbeing, stress levels, lack of dynamic movement, or poor diet. This is due in part to the reality of pain being a ‘bio-psycho-social’ phenomenon, rather than simply dysfunctional anatomy.

The biopsychosocial nature of pain is well documented despite it’s slow integration into modern healthcare. What it means is that our experience of pain is only partly biological in that it relates to our neurology and biochemistry. It’s also partly psychological in that it’s colored immensely by the quality of our mental states. This is to say that excessive stress, depression, perfectionism, and anxiety play a large role into what we’re experiencing. Lastly, there’s a social element in that our beliefs, ideas, judgements and other enculturated values dictate how we interpret our experience - leading to either more or less pain.

So needless to say, any given experience of pain is going to be wildly unique depending on who’s experiencing it. I think it would be an overreach for someone with the length of training that I’ve received to tell you definitively what the cause of your pain is let alone that I’m confident I’d be able to fix it. Before you resign to forgoing massage therapy though, I will tell you confidently where I DO think that I can fit in with your treatment process.

The Role of Massage Therapy
Rather than seeing my role as a mechanic who is going to fix a broken piece in the machine that is your body - I feel that my role is to create an environment where you can recognize that you’re not fundamentally broken in the first place. This can be done by physically reminding the body of all of the places it tends to deemphasize when it’s fixating on a painful point. Through the structured practice of a massage session, we can guide the attention throughout the body - surveying it’s landscape for all of the sensationally forgotten hills and valleys. In doing so, I believe we can integrate our painful point into a wider space of whole body wellness.

This sensation of whole body wellness is a unique attribute of massage. It comes from a combination of deep relaxation, artful and well sequenced touch, and the proper initiation into a space of safety. Some of the markers of this state include hypnagogia (being half asleep and half awake), increased digestive function (which is a result of the nervous system downshifting into a parasympathetic state otherwise known as rest and digest), and a brief respite from the typical mental chatter we subject ourselves to. This is typically accompanied by a sense of greater ease, groundedness, and clarity of mind.

It’s from this place of whole body wellness that we can begin to address the point of pain itself. The goal here is not necessarily to beat it into submission but rather to provide an appropriate level of attention to match it’s intensity. We can provide this attention through novel sensory inputs such as static pressure, repeated strokes, percussion, heat, or whatever other massage technique feel good for the client. The key emphasis is that our intention is not coming from a place of trying to fix but rather one of communicating a sense of being met, of being witnessed, and ultimately that it’s a space of safety.

Feeling safe in our nervous system creates an opportunity for us to enter into a dialogue with our uncomfortable sensations. When we feel resourced, we’re more likely to allow the messages that pain carries with it to emerge to the surface. As we stated above, pain is multi-faceted and it’s often accompanied with stories that can date back as far as our childhood. By exploring these stories, we begin to address the root causes of our reoccurring pain. This is the bio-psycho-social response that massage can provide.

Myo-Swedish Perspective
So far, this article has explained the ‘why’ of how I practice, but now I’d like to shift to some of the ‘how’. The medium that I currently use to engage in this work is through the vehicle of what one of my teachers calls, ‘Myo-Swedish Massage’. This is a combination of Myofascial Release and a more traditional Swedish or relaxation massage. If you haven’t heard of Myofascial Release (MFR) then don’t worry, it’s a big topic that will be covered in a future article. All you need to know now is that it’s emphasis is placed on the soft connective tissue called fascia. This tissue runs throughout your entire body in a continuous web from the bottom of your feet to the top of your head. It’s what connects skin to muscle, muscle to bone, bone to joints, joints to tendons, and so on.

In traditional MFR, the goal of the therapy is to release ‘myofascial adhesions’, or places in the tissue that get bound up by lack of movement or through overuse. To do this, the therapist essentially creates traction on the client’s body, as if they’re stretching the tissue…and then just holds it for a greater length of time. Typically this results in some form of ‘release’ that the client and therapist both sense. The idea is that it stretches the fascia out permanently and enables a greater degree of fluidity between the layers. The thing is…it’s largely been debunked. Myofascial adhesions don’t exist, and if they did - the tissue would be so hard to deform permanently and cause so much pain that it wouldn’t be worth the effort.

This has been backed by some of the most influential fascial researchers in the world - and they’re the ones with the most to lose. Yet, this has taken a while to seep into the general zeitgeist. There are still plenty of practitioners out there who hold this as their proposed mechanism of change, both in the manual and physical therapy worlds. While it is a worthwhile endeavor to explore the findings that debunk this line of thinking, we simply don’t have the blog real estate to do that here. What I will say is that my goal in incorporating this style of therapy is not to illicit change in a clients tissues but to create a more unique sensory experience than what’s possible with a traditional Swedish massage. This is possible largely due to the fascia being a neurologically dense tissue. So when we apply techniques that are directed at it, we’re activating a lot more of the nervous system that’s innervated in that tissue.

What I’ve borrowed in particular from the world of MFR is that I move at a much slower pace and I use less oil - to create that deeper sense of traction that’s a hallmark of the technique.

Depth as Neurological Complexity…Not Just Pressure
This does a few things for my work. Namely, it creates an experience that feels a lot more intentional and nuanced. When we move slower, it allows the nervous system to fully receive the sensory information and process it for a longer period of time. If we were to move faster in our strokes, constantly picking up and putting down our hands, the brain tends to process the movements on a more superficial level - because there’s no time to maintain contact long enough to form a deeper relationship to it. It would be like having a conversation with someone who keeps walking out of the room and coming back in mid-sentence. We might be able to understand them but the effect of what their saying loses it’s potency because the contact keeps getting broken and reintroduced. When we allow there to be longer exposure, it creates that sense of connection and coherency that is more interesting and deeply felt.

This brings us to a point that I feel is important to explore: what is it that creates an experience of depth in a massage? For most people, the idea of depth is solely found in regards to the amount of pressure that can be applied to their tissues. While this is certainly one of the variables that can make a session feel clinically relevant, I would make the argument that it’s just one of the many tools that we have our disposal. What I’ve found to be just as effective for incorporating a quality of depth is to create an experience that has a wide degree of dynamism. The goal in this case is to feed the nervous system with a waterfall of unique sensations. This in turn gives it an opportunity to experience itself in new ways - which are distinctly different than the familiar pain patterns that it’s been replaying. To do this, I focus not only on pressure but also degrees of stretch, speed of strokes, where the strokes begin and end, heat/cold, vibration, and percussion (not to mention using scents, singing bowls, and music).

The alteration of all of these variables provide a rich experience that increases the sensory diet for the nervous system. This is helpful in part because we often live very routine and sensationally limited lives. When we don’t have a lot of new information coming into our nervous systems, then there’s a contraction in it’s ability to express different states (ease, contentment, openness). This is because our nervous system is predictive in nature, it prepares for the future based on what we condition into it today. So when we repeat the same movements, move through the same emotional landscapes, and don’t stray from our entrenched routines - the nervous system will organize itself through those dimensions. In other words, it will create states that anticipate only the motions we do consistently and the mental states we inhabit regularly, which for most modern people, is limited on both fronts. The thing is, our bodies were never meant to live such stationary and routine lives - it’s evolved over millions of years to be running, ducking, swimming, dancing, lifting, and climbing - there was a lot of dynamism.

So when we lack that, any sudden motions (either physical or emotional) outside of our familiar confines have an opportunity to trigger the bodies danger signals - which is pain. It does this as a means to motivate a change in your behavior so that you avoid doing something that’s potentially dangerous. That is literally why our bodies create the sensations of pain, to prevent or notify us of potential injury. The keyword being emphasized here is potential, which again is a highlight of the predictive nature of our nervous system. So it’s wholly possible to experience pain without any real physical cause - depending on how the nervous system interprets the new information coming in.

Through massage, we can introduce novel sensations that are not only interesting for the nervous system but are also calming, curious, and receptive. This in turn, makes the nervous system more robust in it’s expressions and less likely to trigger those warning signals when we do something out of the limited band of movements (or emotions) we’re used to. So in this case, depth is going to be the quality of experiencing something that is radically different than what we’re used to. This will hopefully in turn make it easier to access states of ease from the ground up, rather than from the top down.

It’s just like learning to play an instrument, when you only know a few chords, your ability to express yourself is going to be greatly limited. Yet when you have more information and practice available to you, there’s a wider repertoire of music available. In the case of those struggling with pain, the only song they know is the ‘pain song’; by providing them with new experiences, they have an opportunity to play something different, maybe something less intense. In this metaphor, the learning of new chords is experiencing different sensations.

Education is Important
Beyond the time that we spend together in my office though, I am also a staunch believer in the power of education in the therapeutic process. This rings doubly true in cases where somebody comes to me while navigating the complexities of chronic pain or anxiety. Not only does it help contextualize how massage works, it’s actually been shown to reduce the sensations of pain. When we understand that our sensations are not 1:1 representations of what’s happening in our tissues, we can become more curious toward our experience and not immediately jump to catastrophizing. This reduction of stress gives us a little more space to relate to our pain in a more full and complete way. This has the potential of opening up our ability to settle into the massage space more easily and begin to tap into it’s full potential as a meditative and potentially insight generating experience. Reframing massage in this way helps us become more sensitive to ourselves and ultimately, more informed on what it is that’s causing us to hurt.


Last Words
Ultimately, I think engaging with massage therapy is a beautiful process of self-discovery, it’s an opportunity for us to turn toward the things that are troubling us - whether they are manifesting physically or emotionally. It’s a space in which we utilize the inevitable pains of being a vulnerable human being to create a deeper sense of connection to ourselves and others. With the right attitude and perspective, we can transform the experience of being in pain into an opportunity to commit more fully to ourselves and the emotions or stories that we’re repressing in our tissues. Truthfully, it will be whatever you’re willing to bring to it. For those who want to go deep and explore these themes as a part of their therapeutic process, I’m very open and qualified to share my life experiences of a decade plus of this nature of work. For those who are looking simply to relax, we can keep the talk short and focus on providing you an excellent moment of respite. Whatever it is that brings you to the table, I’m confident we can come together and cocreate a memorable and meaningful experience.