What Happens When We Receive A Massage?

A description of the possible benefits of receiving massage can be found in any good book on the subject. This would probably mention benefits to the lymphatic system and the circulation of blood, improved digestion and elimination, hormone secretion and joint function. You may also find references to feelings of wellbeing, self-esteem and an ability to cope with stress more efficiently and to experience it less often. All of these are natural and secondary.

In the 13 years that I have been providing massage I have observed another benefit, the one that I consider to be the most important. I like to describe it as a process of integration.

Many of us come to the Holistic Health Practitioner or to the massage table with varying degrees of a lack of this process of integration. Many of us are actually living a daily process of dissociation and disintegration where we learn to “grin and bear it” and that “no pain, no gain”.

Sometimes we need help and we quickly find tools to help us. We learn how nice and easy it is to grin after a drink or two, or after indulging in other guilty pleasures. When it is not alcohol, it is our prescription meds for this and that, or we might self-medicate with dessert, or a good run or a nice smoke, or maybe even sex or aspirin. Anything that will help us to connect with something other than what we are trying to grin and bear at.

We learn how to stay medicated so efficiently that we cannot only ‘grin’ at, we can also ‘bear’ our lives. We have learned to keep our emotions in check, keep our opinions to ourselves, learned to do it and like it, and keep it all inside: if it doesn’t kill us, it will make us stronger. Right? The more we keep inside, the heavier the load we have to bear, and the more tired we become, and the more we hurt from the weight, and the more tings we have to grin and bear at, and the more meds we need and the more side effects.

By the time we come to massage table we don’t even know what hurts. It is common at the beginning of the Client Therapist relationship for many clients to indicate that they have no pain before their first massage. After that first massage that same client will proceed to tell the therapist about all the areas that don’t hurt now or that hurt less. Remember that they had no pain to begin with, so how can there be less pain now? Another common scenario is for the client not to be able to describe their discomfort or pain. When asked if what they feel is a burning, stabbing or numbing sensation they cannot tell. It can also be challenging to tell if the discomfort is in the lower, upper, front or back of the body, and whether it is felt at certain times of the day and not others, or if and when the sensation changes.

One of the many things that I love about doing massage is to see how these same clients change after several sessions. Clients develop the ability to tell us more as they integrate more.

There are parts of our bodies that we will never be able to see in three dimensions. We will never be able to see our face in three dimensions. Nor will we ever be able to see, in a three dimensional context, our back, the back of our head, our ears, or our eyes. These parts of our bodies may become disconnected and dissociated. This may lead to a belief that what happens in one part of our bodies has nothing to do with what happens in another since the parts are not connected.

Since I cannot connect these seemingly different parts to each other, I also cannot connect seemingly different parts of my life to each other. I may not be able to connect the burning in my stomach to the cup of coffee I have had EVERY morning on an EMPTY stomach instead of breakfast for the past several years.

Although I may connect the cup of coffee to what I believe to be regular bowel movements, I may not connect my need for the cup of coffee to keep me regular, with my habit of eating on the run, not chewing my food efficiently, pushing my food down with a gulp of ice water and the burning sensation behind my shoulder.

Massage has the potential to lessen the discomfort on the shoulder, however, as long as I continue to eat on the run I will also continue to swallow my food without chewing, I will be constipated, I will need the cup of coffee to keep me regular, the burning in my stomach will keep getting worse and the burning at the back of my shoulder will come back.