How to Receive Bodywork

When I give or receive bodywork I want it to be as helpful and effective as possible. That’s because I really need it! When I can afford the time and money to receive a session I need it to be effective, so I want to lean in actively so that my therapist and I can achieve the most potent benefit possible. I presume that this is also true for my clients.

So how do we lean in and enhance the effectiveness of a bodywork session?

Well, first it’s helpful to remember that while the practitioner is the facilitator, the receiver is doing the actual work of relaxing and releasing. Limited results can be achieved while the receiver is simply passive, but they can be much more powerful when the receiver uses their own focus and imagination and breath to actively release tension. It feels paradoxical to think about active relaxation, but it actually works!

I like to encourage my clients to begin by focusing their awareness on the sound of their breath moving in and out like the tides of the ocean. This begins to put us into a meditative, almost hypnotic state. I often use the sound of my own breath as a guide. I encourage my clients to allow the massage table hold the full weight of their bodies. It is helpful to feel heavy and supported fully by the earth. 

Next, when we approach an area of the body that feels tight or stuck we can begin to more actively use the breath that we are cultivating. With the inhale, imagine your breath expanding that tight place and filling it with cleansing oxygen. With the exhale, imagine the stuck energy flowing away from your body as you sink even deeper into full relaxation. I like the imagine the stuck energy flowing down the hill behind my house and being carried away with the river as it flows downstream.

Sometimes these tight and stuck areas are holding a lot of intense sensation and pain. It is okay to feel those sensations as long as they are not overwhelming - in fact I think that we need to feel them and acknowledge them before they can be released. It is important that we find the right level of sensation, because too much pain causes the body to become more tense and then it’s harder to release. A comfortable level of discomfort is called the therapeutic edge of sensation. We should always be able to breath fully and feel as relaxed as possible while we experience the sensations created by the massage.

So as we work my first priority is achieving relaxation because we can’t effectively approach deeper, more intense work until we are very relaxed. Then I look for places in the soft tissues that feel hard, tight, tense or stuck. My second priority is softening these tissues to relieve pain and increase the flow of vital fluids and energies.

Now for the nerdy explanation of how massage therapy actually works physiologically. Our bodies contain vast networks of superhighways, basically tubes which carry blood, lymphatic fluid, nerve impulses, cerebrospinal fluid and more. Tension in the soft tissues compresses these tubes and stops allowing their contents to flow freely, like an accident on a highway stops traffic. This compression eventually leads to dysfunction and disease. When nerve impulses cannot flow freely we feel tinging and pain along the pathway of the compressed nerve, or the brain cannot effectively send signals back and forth. When blood vessels are compressed the body can’t deliver vital oxygen to an area, or effectively carry away waste.

Our bodies are designed to both create and release tension. Muscle fibers look almost like little bundles of spaghetti noodles, connected to one another by tiny protein arms. As rest these bundles are long and thin. When the brain sends a message asking a muscle to perform a task the tissue contracts, using the tiny protein arms to pull the muscle fibers closer together into a shorter, denser bundle. When the brain tells the muscle fibers to relax again some of the protein arms may not get the message (due to chronic tension or imbalance in the minerals that drive these chemical reactions) and parts of the fibers remain shorter and denser.

Luckily, there is cool little organ inside the muscle fibers that subverts this tendency to stay stuck in contraction. It’s called the Golgi Tendon Organ, and it’s job is to deliver another message to the protein arms asking them to let go when it feels the muscle fibers stretch. This is why yoga and other forms of stretching are effective, and is one reason why massage therapy is effective as well. Putting pressure on a tight, contracted area stimulates the stretch response, allowing the fiber bundles to return to their naturally long, spacious state of rest.

Breathing deeply while we stretch the muscle fibers helps in several different ways. Slow deep breaths activate the parasympathetic nervous system, which helps every part of the body relax enough to do the normal jobs that keep our organs systems up and running. Deep breaths also increase the amount of oxygen that’s available in the bloodstream, which means that more of the waste products that we squeeze out of compressed tissues during a massage can bind to oxygen molecules and be carried out of the area and eliminated from the body. Drinking water after a massage also helps move waste products out of the system.

In our busy, repetitive stress-filled lives we often run into circumstances in which muscle fiber bundles are unable to release for longer periods of time, forming painful unhappy areas of tissue that we call muscle knots. With patience, willingness to linger at a comfortable therapeutic edge, the magical power of the breath, together we are able to restore health, vital flow, and pain relief.