More Vitality For Us By Listening to Our Muscles: What Benefits We Can Get From Bodywork

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There is a school of therapy called ‘bodywork’.  This sits in the area between massage and talking.  It is focused on our ability to feel and express our vitality and to remove the blocks that get in the way of us doing this.  It mostly deals with our muscles and emotions (every emotion is a motion.  From the change of anger, to the freezing or energising of fear to the apathy of depression, each emotion is a way of moving or being still.  This is true even of stillness: the quality of tranquility is quite different to the lack of movement of depression.)

The incident that convinced me there was some truth in bodywork happened when I was sharing a house.  I was talking about the bodywork books I was reading and a girl I was sharing with expressed scepticism.  (At this stage I wasn’t entirely convinced myself.)  So we decided on an experiment.  She sat in front of me on the floor while I gave her shoulders some massage.  After a little while doing this (her shoulders felt like concrete and had barely softened at all) she surprised both me and herself by saying, “I really hate my father”.  After this her shoulders softened a little more.  Since then I have seen many similar things happen.  This sticks in my mind because it was what convinced that there was some truth in bodywork.

There are Oriental schools of bodywork that have been around for millenia – yoga and tai chi are probably the best known.  The western schools have only been around for about a hundred years and mostly take their origin from Wilhelm Reich.  (Reich was a follower of Freud.  Reich tooks Freud notion that we sometimes stopped ourselves doing things (called repression) and asked where this stopped energy went.  Reich’s answer was that it went into the muscles.  He came up with different pictures of people depending on which impulses they stopped.)  The western systems are more focused on the expression of emotion than either yoga or tai chi. 

At the massage end of the spectrum are schools of bodywork like Rolfing.  This was invented by Ida Rolf.  She used strong pressure to break up the shapes that muscles had been shaped into.  (The muscles get stuck in particular shapes because the fascia around them ’sets’.  Fascia is what makes groups of muscles into bundles.  As this fascia is broken up the muscles return to a more natural organisation.  This can be quite painful and is usually accompanied by the expression of strong emotion.  (Usually the emotional expression is dealt with by ensuring that the person keeps breathing: in this way it is expressed and doesn’t get locked in the muscles again.)  It usually takes a day or more to adjust to a rolfing session.  There are usually ten sessions in a Rolfing course of treatment.  A friend of mine did the ten sessions in a two week period.  They did little else but stay in bed.  After Rolfing you will feel much lighter and free-er in your movements.  And you will feel that you have released past pains.  There are now much gentler methods that have developed from Rolfing such as Hellerwork.  A Rolfing session is done in almost complete silence, apart from telling the person to keep breathing when emotion is being released.

There are other methods which mix touch and talk.  Ilana Rubenfeld has developed a beautiful form of therapy where there is talk while the therapist’s hand is always on the client, providing support where it is needed.  A session with a Rubenfeld practitioner can be a time of profoundness.  The experience of this depth of support can lead to deep changes.  She has a book about her therapy called The Listening Hand.

At the other end of the spectrum are those therapies which are mostly talk but which pay attention to movement when required.  This can be as simple as noticing the moistness in someone’s eyes and asking them to pay attention to it instead of wiping their tears away.  Words as simple as this can have great impact.  With these therapies you should end up with a greater sense of clarity of what you want to do and of how your emotions help you get there.

Bodywork brings us a sense of our own vitality and delight in its expression.  Should you try bodywork?  If you feel drawn to it, then it is worth knowing the reason.  As always, when choosing therapy, it is the relationship that heals.  It is usually better to choose a therapist than a therapeutic school.

What can we learn from bodywork that can help us in our day to day live.  Simply put: listen to our muscles.

Here are some simple ways to do this.  They are arranged from the most passive to the most active.

Whenever working with your emotions, it is very important to remember, to do nothing you are uncomfortable with or scared of.  And once you have done it you should feel better for it.  The purpose of listening to our muscles is to enjoy our lives more, not live up to some therapist’s ideal of who we should be.  If you don’t feel comfortable doing anything like this, then don’t.  You may want to find some friends or a group that will support you as you begin to listen to your muscles.

• Sit in a relaxed and upright posture.  Your spine will be straight and your weight will fail onto your pelvis.  Find somewhere that is tense.  Imagine as you breathe in that you are directing your breath into this tense area.  You will usually find that the area relaxes a little.  You may also have memories or emotions that come to you.
• Lie down on the floor (a pillow under your knees is usually a good idea) and locate an area of tension.  Feel the floor beneath this area.  Feel how it presses against you and supports you.  You may then find this area relaxes.  And you may find that a memory or emotions comes to you.
• In a comfortable position find a tight muscle.  Gently, only fractionally, increase the tension; then release it.  You will probably find that you are a little more relaxed than when you started.  You can continue to tighten and loosen a number of times.
• Locate a tight muscle and imagine that this tightness is taking over your body.  Allow the tightness to shape you.  Then give a name to this experience.  You will usually find that there is a strong emotion locked in the muscle.  If you can imagine living in a way where this muscle functions smoothly, it will usually mean that this emotion is integrated into your experience.
• Find a tight muscle and see what it wants to do.  Allow it to move in the way that it wants to.  You will usually end up making a movement that is quite large and full of feeling.  You may also find that there are memories that come to you.

Once again I want to emphasise that you should not do anything that you feel reluctant to do.  If something surprising is felt or remembered (and this can happen) then make a point of stopping and deciding whether you want to continue.  Don’t just keep going because you feel you should.  You can always come back to it later.

Through doing exercises such as these we gradually get a greater sense of our vitality and our emotions.  We begin to live with vibrancy and express ourselves more fully and easily.  And we find it easier, as time goes by, to know what our muscles are telling us.  These exercises can be a gateway to a whole new dimension of experience.

Let me know, in the comments, how much you feel in touch with your muscles.  Have you had times when your muscles have told you something that your mind wasn’t aware of?  Do you feel that you do listen to what your muscles have to say; or, that they don’t have anything much to say to you?  Have you ever experienced a bodywork session?  If so, how did you find it?  I’d like to hear your experience, whatever it is.

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