Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 3 Number 1, April 2002

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Grammars of Touch:

Physical, Spiritual, and Erotic Bodies in Massage Therapy

by

 

Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio

 

My experience in massage therapy helped me to put together a vision of discourse that negotiates between the holistic and the transpersonal.  In the 1960’s and 70’s, transpersonal psychology and psychotherapy became expressions of a popular and alternative movement in psychoanalysis whose philosophical perspective is similar to that of deep ecology.  Both holistic and transpersonal modes of discourse use relational styles that emphasize the sacred and the contemplative.  But, just like deep ecologists believe that life is one and that individual organisms are a manifestation of this oneness (Devall and Sessions, 1986; Nash 1967; Sessions 1994; Snyder 1990), so transpersonal psychologists believe in the kind of boundary crossing between selves that brings individuals closer together in an ideal oneness (Campbell 1999; Moss 1998).  Also a popular and unconventional style of cultural expression, the holistic-health movement came of age in the 1990’s.  Its alternative concept of health as inner harmony and wholesomeness harks back to pre-modern health philosophies and Far-Eastern philosophies that emphasize meditation and contemplation.  Among the practices promoted by the movement are numerous healing arts, such as hypnosis, acupuncture, and massage therapy, all of which contribute to establishing a new relationship between health and artistic expression.  Holistic-health practitioners believe that the individual being is an inviolable whole with its own unity and integrity.  Health is the art of maintaining its delicate ecology.  So while both holistic and transpersonal modes of discourse emphasize oneness, transpersonal psychologists and deep ecologists focus on its global aspects, holistic-health practitioners on its individual ones.  In a transpersonal, deep-ecology perspective, the community of the living is the privileged site of sacredness; in a holistic one, the individuals that make up that community are.  In my vision, the community of the living is one, but it is made of individuals who are neither separate nor separable, and yet must be revered and respected as interdependent entities.  As ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood suggests, in a non-dualistic economy of being “the other [is] neither alien to and discontinuous from the self nor assimilated to or an extension of self” (1993, 6).  Boundaries are to be crossed in a negotiated way, which allows the community, and each individual in it, to coexist in sustainable, mutually respectful ways.  In this context, the practice of massage therapy can be envisaged as a discursive process based on the language of touch, whose grammar gives body to the conversations necessary to actualize relational modes that are both holistic and transpersonal.   

I became a massage therapist in a period of transition during which my academic orientation was changing, from one focused on the study of modern drama as a traditional literary genre, to one focused on cultural expressions that manifest processes of transition and hybridization.  At a time when the holistic-health movement was taking sway, being a massage therapist in the holistic-health community of North County San Diego turned out to be an empowering experience, with many useful lessons.  I vowed to take these lessons back into academic discourse when I returned.  This article is a result of that commitment. 

Touch is the first sense a human being develops while still in the womb.  Massage is a tactile code of communication, a language whose ability to heal depends on the receiver’s chosen passivity.  Massage has the potential for creating communities based on love and respect because it enhances one’s awareness of one’s interrelatedness with others.  My article focuses on two areas:  the process by which a person decides to come to the massage table and become a receiver of massage therapy, thus contemplating touch as a healing energy; and what actually happens on the massage table, what kind of language is used in massage therapy, and what kind of transpersonal conversations this language enables. 

 

1.  Getting the Body on the Table

 

To articulate a concept of the self that could be suitable to my vision, I went back to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a French philosopher of the mid twentieth century whose thought is positioned in between phenomenology and existentialism.  As he focused on the relationship between phenomenology and epistemology, Merleau-Ponty proposed a theory of compenetration of self and other in which he claims that discursive exchanges of energy between individuals happen at various levels of intensity.  The mutual permeability implied in these relationships is temporary and does not involve a pathological fusion or a permanent absorption of one self into another one (1962, 346-368).  A similar discursive relationship can be established between the different selves in the life of one person.  For example, an artist who does body-work on the side to make ends meet might wonder how to integrate her conflicting personae.  She might experience the first persona as a supreme architect whose mission is the dissemination of her vision, the second as a mere attendant whose task is assisting in the well-being of another person.  Merleau-Ponty’s theory offers an ideological space where this binary logic can be unmade.  In the interstitial space between phenomenology and epistemology, art is a cognitive process with a primarily therapeutic purpose.  In this context, artistic creativity is thought of as a participatory activity in the public domain, rather than as a professional artist’s field of specialization.  Its purpose is using people’s creative intelligence to generate self-knowledge in a playful way.  This knowledge is conducive of harmony and centeredness in a learning community.

In an acquisitive epistemological framework, the creative and the healing arts are regarded as different in both means and purpose.  In the creative arts, one’s originality is highly valued because it is assumed that a work of art’s purpose is the creation of a new vision.  Conversely, in the healing arts, the ability to replicate procedures known to work is valued, for it is assumed that their purpose is making people feel better.  However, to many starving artists in the postmodern world, artistic production is primarily a means to make a name for themselves, and hence open up career paths for future endeavors.  In this context, the therapeutic purpose of the creative process is lost, and the price of that loss is that the art produced in this kind of process is bereft of healing energy.  On the other hand, many healing-arts practitioners see their work as a series of performances designed to contribute to the wider process of global ecological regeneration.  While they might view the fine arts as a futile quest for fame, they see the healing arts in the much broader context of generating a vision for the future of the globe.  From their viewpoint, practicing the healing arts is an unfamiliar--perhaps a “queer”--way to use the kinds of skills and knowledge that one can learn in a fine or in a performing arts program.  This explains why many fine-arts students who migrate to the healing-arts professions find their perceptiveness and responsiveness to be especially useful.  Indeed, perhaps it isn’t too far fetched to claim that the healing arts simply apply fine-arts skills to a different kind of performative project, one in which the therapeutic intent comes first.  Even amongst the avant-garde, I am sure that advocates of the intrinsic superiority of the fine arts are in droves.  But, I must wonder, why would anyone want to become famous for some art that does not make the world a better place?  In this context, the healing arts can be regarded as just a different kind of performance, and healing through the arts as the process of bringing together the distant lips of a wound by allowing the interstitial flesh to grow, individually, societally, and globally.

          Indeed, like a forbidden erotic pleasure, massage is a performance in which the themes of presence, body, reality, and mimesis are central.  In this performance, the body becomes the word and vice versa.  The flesh becomes thought, since the receiver’s body on the table bespeaks its emotional, psychological, and physical wounds to the giver, its reader and/or massage therapist.  In a way, the practice of massage confirms the idea that sexual violence is largely a result of repression.  The body’s self-knowledge is nondescript, it is like the anxiety of my dog when he sees me pack for a trip where I will not take him.  He vomits for he does not have the words to express his anxiety in a more articulate way.  So the massage therapist may not be privy to the stories that obsess her clients’ souls, but their bodies tell her about those torments in a very tangible way.  Also in human beings, knowledge from the body can cause violence if not processed through the brain, for, as we Westerners need to remind ourselves of, the brain is also made of  body. 

Massage, like incest when perpetrated, is touch.  And like most cognitive processes that involve physical contact, massage is placed at the bottom of the Western epistemological order--it is considered an unreliable mode of knowledge.  As a bicultural person, I entered the profession of massage therapy with an awareness of the arbitrariness of this order.  In Italy the spoken word is very widely used and valued, sometimes more highly than the written word.  When I moved to the United States I found this order to be reversed, because in this new culture the written word was considered primary.  Nonetheless, before the holistic-health movement made an impact on health culture and education, in Italy, as well as in the United States, the work of massage therapists was almost as disrespected as the work of prostitutes.  To me this was a clear indication that, regardless of small differences between the various orders, in Western epistemologies touch is always lower, even though, ironically, as a sense touch is ontologically primary.  Touch is not even a language in use in our system of learning!  To measure the impact of this loss on the cognitive process, one simply has to imagine a culture in which visual learning is banned.  That image just barely measures the amount of repressed learning energy, and the amount of societal violence attached to that repression, that the taboo of touch generates.

 

2.  Speaking the Language of Touch

 

From a physical viewpoint, touch is one of the five senses: sight, hearing, taste, olfaction, and touch.  In empirical science, a sense is considered one of the five ways in which humans perceive and know the world.  Touch is thus a mode of knowledge, just like sight or hearing.  But Western philosophy and culture underestimates touch as a mode of knowledge.  “Don’t touch!!!” says the sign, the regulation, the supervisor.  And every time that order is enforced, it is in response to an attempt to exercise touch as a mode of knowledge, an attempt that was evidently frustrated.  If in education touch is very seldom used beyond the lower grades, in the realm of entertainment touch is also used less and less.  With the development of the media, television, radio, film, and video have replaced the theater and other forms of family and community entertainment that require participants’ physical presence.  Touch and smell have been replaced by sight and hearing once again. 

I claim that this state of being touch deprived is a loss to the community of the living because touch is a primary sense ontogenetically, it is a sense human beings develop first, largely while still in a mother’s belly.  This primary ontogenetic status is probably related to the higher healing potential that, when expertly used, touch has with respect to the other senses.  By and large, in a community of the living deprived of healing touch violence can only be more common.  Accepting a healing touch is a gesture towards one’s imagined regression to the complete protection of the womb in one’s pre-natal state.  Upsurges of violence can be seen in this context are terrorism and the current alarming returns to global military operations that ensue from it; the ongoing horizontal hostilities and ethnic conflicts that explode even between those positioned as natural allies; the numerous public-health crises that affect human communities on a local and global scale; and the general state of environmental deterioration bordering on catastrophe, complete with global threats such as global warming and shrinking genetic pools.  While I certainly do not claim that being touch-deprived is the direct cause of all of these problems, I do propose that we imagine a world in which consensual acts of human touch are lavishly abundant.  I have no doubts that in such a world the undesirable effects of modernity would gradually taper away. 

As a holistic-health practitioner, I shared a massage table in the collectively-operated Healing Arts Center of North County San Diego.  Our group claimed that there was more to our job than just being successful as a financial operation.  Our mission, the Center’s logo said, was not “just to make a living” but also “to make a difference.”  As a massage therapist, I worked with repeat and new clients over a period of two years, with much joy.  I saw clients make progress and come a long way in healing from trauma, neurosis, and depression.  I became convinced that massage is not only a great way of conversing with the body and feel well, but also a major contribution to the collective process of healing from modernity and its diseases. 

I see this healing as a process of regeneration that starts from within.  Making a commitment to either giving or receiving a massage is making a commitment to one’s own well-being, and to being-in-the-world a space from where that well-being can spring for others as well.  If the analogy between massage and language I outlined is carried just one step further, it can be used to suggest that touch is to massage what the Saussurian langue was to his parole (Saussurre 1980).  For the Swiss linguist, langue was a repertoire of structures and lexical elements speakers were free to recombine in creative and innovative ways, while parole was precisely any such act of individual expression.  In a similar way, for a massage therapist touch is a langue made of strokes, sequences of strokes, and other touch elements, while each massage session is the site of a healing performance that uses this repertoire on the receiver’s body.  Just like Saussure’s parole has an effect on langue and bears the power to change it, so the receiver’s body speaks of its needs to the giver, who responds accordingly by recombining elements from the repertoire of touch elements in dialogic, creative ways.  As a practitioner of holistic massage, the repertoire I employed was a langue made of Western and Eastern expressive modes, including the techniques of Swedish massage, a system designed to focus on the muscular system; those of Reiki, designed to focus on the body’s aura, or the body of erotic energy that surrounds the physical body; and those of Shiatsu, designed to focus on the body’s meridians that control correspondences between its organs.  The setting is crucial to the success of a massage session.  The space must exude a sense of serenity conducive to relaxation.  Key elements are new-age type of music in which wide rhythms and liquid sounds prevail, a room with soft decorations, air purification through incense or sage, and a moderate use of hypnosis to initiate the process.  A massage session involves a complete treatment of the physical and aural body, including hands, feet, face and hair, and excluding private parts.  The cooperation of the receiver is essential and the initial visualization helps this party in the process to relax and focus on her or his inner world.  At the end of the session, a drink of pure water helps to flush out unwanted residues.  

Massage then is like a conversation about the body in which both giver and receiver engage.  For the receiver, the massage accomplishes a new aural wholesomeness and a new sense of connectedness with each and every part of the physical body.  As I used to explain my clients, “all these different parts of you will become one with you again.”  For the giver, the massage provides a sense of joy in getting to know the body and responding to its needs with the appropriate language. 

Because most of us live touch-deprived lives, when one comes to massage one can be afraid of losing control over one’s sexual impulses under the touch a massage therapist.  Indeed, massage is erotic in the same way that each pleasurable, empowering experience involving reciprocity is erotic.  Massage is life-giving, but its erotic power is not necessarily sexual.  In a society where most occasions for consensual, nonviolent touch except sexual ones are eliminated, a person can confuse sexual desire with a desire for the kind of touch that is simply healing and life-giving.  Part of the education about massage that practitioners offer, is their guidance in learning this distinction again.  While massage is a poor substitute for sex, even as it can satisfy one’s desire for that which is not sexual, it is also much more than sex, and it transforms the body in many other ways. 

Massage transforms us at many levels, mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual.

As a practice of mental transformation, massage helps the receiver enter a deep meditative state during which his/her mind is free to reconnect with its most intimate thoughts and dreams.  In one’s mental state of being massage can make the difference between a reactive and a proactive phase.  The reactive phase is characterized by behavior focused on fears, worries, and concerns, while typically proactive-phase behavior involves activation of the subconscious and acting on one’s inner being’s most intimate desires and dreams.  It means pursuing them, making things happen. 

As a practice of emotional transformation, massage empowers one with a mode of surrender and trust.  As we learn adult behavior, we learn to constantly be in active pursuit of what we want.  We are sometimes reduced to passivity, simply because we cannot get what we want, we cannot do any better.  Passivity is thus reduced to a prison, a non-choice.  By choosing to receive a massage, on the contrary, we embrace passivity as a self-conscious, self-determined choice.  When we receive a massage we often lie naked on our belly with a stranger looking at our back.  Just merely to get there we must have persuaded ourselves that the world is a wonderful place, that we have created a space around ourselves so replete with positive energy that we can now completely surrender our control and trust the other person.  This surrender to and trust of another begins the regeneration process.  In this new emotional state, passivity is a choice.  It is a privilege and a gift to ourselves, as well as to those we love.  An emotional passivity that is elective can be conducive of peace and serenity, which can be further enhanced by relaxation and visualization techniques. 

Massage is also a very effective practice of physical transformation.  The receiver’s body is affected in several ways.  The muscular system, the ligaments, and the tendons are all revitalized by the giver’s strokes.  I like to compare each stroke to a syllable, each sequence of strokes to a word, and each sequence of words to a sentence, and the whole massage to a conversation.  The receiver is like an open book, which is read by the giver, whose strokes are a manner of interpreting what the body has to say.  The body is thus like a text, and the therapist a mere interpreter of its communicative and expressive needs, its desire to feel at one with itself.  On a merely physical level, the strokes generate a new fluid balance in the body’s circulatory and lymphatic system.  The sequence of strokes that most therapists use on the body’s different areas is the Swedish sequence, which is made of three different phases.  The first phase, effleurage, is designed to gradually make contact and enter the muscular system.  The second phase, petrissage, is designed to impact its fibers and cells in a slightly more invasive way.  The third phase, raking and feathering, is designed to gradually relax the receiver’s flesh, as the body comes back to its own center (Lidell 1984, 30-36).  The complete sequence moves each single fiber with respect to its neighbors, thus allowing stored toxins between fibers to get loose and be ready to be carried away by the clean bloodstream that eventually arrives through the vessels.  The receiver’s breathing can contribute to this process as well, by loading the bloodstream with oxygen.

Finally, massage is a tool of spiritual transformation.  Through the choice of trust and surrender, the receiver attains peace and serenity because s/he becomes passive in a very active way.  During the massage process, most receivers and givers’ breathing rhythms connect, and a synchronicity of this function in both bodies is thus generated.  Breathing is one of the body functions that can be done either consciously or unconsciously.  When we are asleep, breathing is an automatic response based in the spine.  When we are awake, we can control it through the brain.  Thus breathing connects two important parts of our human ecology: our mental activity and our sympathetic system.  Breathing is an automatic function that does not need the control of the brain because it is the movement that connects us to the world as living creatures.  It makes an individual aware of the community around him or herself.  Indeed, this connection is written in the etymology of romance languages, in which the words for breathing and spirituality or spirit have the same stem, respirar, respirer, respirare; espiritu, esprit, spirito.  But this spiritual connection is material as well: the same air that I breathe this second enters my body and then leaves to enter the body of another person, so the molecules of air that are part of my body for a split second become part of another’s body next.  Breathing teaches us that we are neither alone, nor separate, nor separable from the community of the living.  We are part of what the Chinese call the chi, or universal energy, whose matter is the air we breathe as members of a larger ecosystem that sustains our bodies and allows our lives to prosper.  Communities in which massage is frequented tend to resolve conflicts by negotiation, because individuals are more in touch with themselves and capable of empathy.  This enables sustainable solutions that accommodate everyone’s unique preferences and conserve competitive energies.

 

Conclusion

 

Massage is a dialogic performance that employs the language of touch to contribute to the spiritual and physical regeneration of a community’s and its individuals.  Massage strokes are the grammar of this language, a repertoire of tactile expressions analogous to Saussurre’s langue.  A successful massage is a specific act of performative expression in which giver and receiver connect.  Massage therapy is the art of using this performative mode to generate channels of healing energy.  Touch is the main vehicle of this exchange, which brings the connection to a deeper level, for ontogenetically touch is the first of the five human senses. 

Massage therapy is a sustainable health practice that implies a holistic philosophy and involves artistic expression.  The access to touch as a language this practice provides could be used a lot more and a lot better.  Touch is a sign of peace and surrender that invites others to contribute to us in positive ways, and generates trust, love, healing, commitment, and community.  Not surprisingly, massage has been found to assuage stress and anxiety, thus helping to prevent and control heart conditions, cancer, and other diseases typical of modern lifestyles.  Massage creates more happiness in our lives, and this radiance can then spill over to the lives of those around us.  This low-technology craft is environmentally safe and helps people get along.  In the long term, the frequentation of massage practices can help us prevent health crises, and the painful and expensive surgical procedures that accompany them.  As an act of presence and human contact, as a healing ritual and ceremony, massage can improve our physical, spiritual and erotic health, and can save billions of dollars in medical procedures.


Works Cited

 

Campbell, Ronald.  Transpersonal Psychology: An Integral Encounter with Self-Awareness.  New York: Xlibris, 1999.

De Saussurre, Ferdinand.  Course in General Linguistics.  Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 1990.  (Cours de linguistique générale.  Paris: Payot, 1980.)

Devall, Bill and George Sessions.  Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered.  Layton, Utah: Gibbs Smith, 1986. 

Lidell, Lucinda.  The Book of Massage; The Complete Step-by-Step Guide to Eastern and Western Techniques.  New York: Fireside, 19984.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice.  Phenomenology of Perception.  London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962.

Moss, Donald, ed.  Humanistic and Transpersonal Psychology.  New York: Greenwood, 1998.

Nash, Roderick.  Wilderness and the American Mind.  Yale University Press, 1982.

Plumwood, Val.   .  London: Routledge, 1993.  Sessions, George.  Deep Ecology for the Twenty-First Century.  Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1994. 

Snyder, Gary.  The Practice of the Wild.  San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990.