Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 3 Number 1, April 2002
_______________________________________________________________
Grammars
of Touch:
Physical,
Spiritual, and Erotic Bodies in Massage Therapy
by
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.
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
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.
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.