Index Previous Next VIII. Making It All Work Unconsciously
There is a basic strategy in working with someone in a specific discipline. The first step is to recognize what is, and then to see what is missing, what is out of balance. Then one must interrupt the old pattern. This evokes a startle response, which in turn creates an opening and excitement to work with. Then the person is given new forms and exercises to practice and use in the newly opened space. — Richard Strozzi Heckler, The Anatomy of Change
As we come to the end of this journey, having moved through several diverse yet related realms of knowledge, let me share with you some of the ways I personally integrate concepts I have discussed into my teaching. I generally open a new class with a series kinesthetic partner exercise, such as several variants of Tai Chi “push hands”. This accomplishes several goals for me. It immediately gets students in a new class interacting with each other on a comfortable level. Xerox Corporation trainer of trainers Robert Jolles (1993) considers such ice-breaker activities as one of the most important means of transforming a room full of individual trainees into a cohesive team that is eager to learn. My experience fully supports this conclusion. Even with technically oriented massage classes with substantial didactic material, there are great benefits to the early introduction of kinesthetic participation and palpation exercises. Beyond the classroom, actively working together transforms students from strangers sharing a room into co-participants enjoying each other's company in a manner that listening to lectures can never accomplish.
As my students work with different partners, they are learning to sense each partner in a manner that teaches them to simultaneously both pace and lead. They are also starting to move from our visual-verbal culture into greater nonverbal awareness of their own and each other's bodies. This includes balance, tempo, and breathing. Finally, they are already getting practice at the "moving with your whole body" mechanics I will be stressing for the rest of the class.
I also add in other exercises in kinesthetic and interpersonal awareness. These might include having your partner guide you nonverbally around the room with his hand while your eyes are closed. It might be lying on the floor or table, being aware of breathing into an area of your chest or abdomen on which you have placed one of your hands and on top of which your partner is actively pacing your breathing with her hand. In both the exercises there are the dual elements of practicing awareness of multiple nonverbal events and of becoming aware of the magnitude of trust asked of our clients. In both of the exercise, to use Clyde Ford's terminology of Guide and Traveler, while the Traveler is gaining experience of themselves, it is the Guide's responsibility to remain aware and present in multiple sensory modes.
On the more technique oriented level, I start from the onset having students practice isometric resistance exercises that let them palpate and discover kinesthetically the association between the contraction of a particular muscle with the resisted motion. While this obviously lays the groundwork for discussing functional assessment, that is not the immediate goal. The motivation for the early appearance of this exercise is that it sets the context of the transition from the more general Swedish massage they have previously been doing to the much more anatomically specific goals I have for them. It immediately starts them thinking about joints and movement and direction and muscle effort—not as some symbolic left-brained set of memorizations, but as something palpable beneath their finger tips.
The exercises begin to motivate and make meaningful the names and locations of different muscles and layers that I'm starting to toss out at them as I demonstrate. They begin to be able to verify that their fingers are touching a subscapularis, or a psoas, or an infraspinatus by feeling the muscle suddenly activate and take shape in response to a partner's almost imperceptible resistance against a gentle isometric pressure. They begin to be able to trace the rectus femoris to its attachment on the AIIS (anterior inferior iliac spine) simply by having their partner activate their quadriceps against a gentle resistance. Anatomy becomes not something to be memorized but something to feel beneath their fingers. Never mind that I like to see the looks of astonishment and then glee upon their faces as the potential uses of this knowledge begins to sink in.
As we work together, I press the students on their biomechanics. Reminding them of the feeling of the Tai Chi push hands exercise. Reminding them that even small movements originate from the legs with their pelvis aligned with the direction of the movement. Keeping the lines of ki open and flowing as once I also learned to do in martial arts.
I remind them to be conscious of leverage and work to be able to continually adapt the techniques we share to their own and to their clients' bodies. As they practice, I saturate them with techniques and kinesthetic awareness; intentionally overloading their abilities to neatly compartmentalize what they are learning in their conscious mind so that the spillover finds its place in their unconscious body knowledge. Even what was formerly well-known and comfortable, feels strangely awkward and uncoordinated as their bodies begin to reintegrate new motor skills.
What I am initiating in my students is a series of stages of learning discussed by Jolles (1993) but also appearing in the NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) literature. The stages are: unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, and finally unconscious competence. The key to maintaining the final stage is continued practice and learning and the avoidance of complacency. I remind my students to be gentle with each other and with themselves during the classes and afterwards. Everyone needs to both grant and receive the permission needed to learn, to explore, and to make mistakes. “Someday”, I remind them, “you will look down at your hands doing work that has grown out of what you have done here today, and realize that it has become a comfortable part of you”.
I remind my students that their clients are not pancakes; objects to be worked on one side until they are done (are the bubbles lasting yet?) and then flipped. Instead they are living, breathing people who can be positioned and mobilized in three dimensions and can participate actively in their own care.
In my own application of massage, I often unabashedly use quite up-tempo music. Not all music of the same pace is suitable, however. In selecting music I'm looking for a coherency of feeling that lets the listeners relax and flow into the music, whatever the tempo. The music should have simple patterns that add organization to our nervous system, rather than echo and reinforce the discordance of life. It should be "body music" rather than music too lost in detailed cerebral machinations. This is also the music that I find to be restoring when I've "burnt the candle at both ends" into a bare nubbin of consciousness.
In teaching, I begin to work my students on developing options in tempo. Using music and good-natured coercion to urge them from the safety and comfort of Swedish massage to a faster tempo for Sports Massage. Using different music and equal coercion to slow them down to glacial awareness in Deep Tissue massage. Teaching them to do technical massage as if it were the dance that in my heart and with my background I feel it is and must be. Making the point constantly, that I do this not because any particular tempo is always right, but because I want them to have a range of comfortable choices. Perhaps such choice is the real secret of mastery and our ultimate desire for our clients, our students, and ourselves. In its practiced, unconscious manifestations, sometimes we call it intuition.
© Keith Eric Grant — The RamblemuseSM, November 1999. All rights reserved.
Index Previous Next