Table Talk: Hold the Line

Starburst (mixed media) by Phillip Hoyle

Some images are just dazzlers getting your attention immediately. That's how I felt when I first saw this design carved in a rock near the top of the north escarpment of Shavano Valley. I worked with it a couple of times but my best try was this one in which I added color, the color I saw in this explosion. Some people have affected me in the same way.



     The expression “hold the line” is not always an allusion to war or football. Sometimes it serves as a child-rearing image: the parent draws a line at certain behaviors and holds the child to it. Many children stand right at or even on the line in a posture that may be taken as either a show of defiance or a need for the security that comes from knowing the parent will hold the line fast. These parent/child images have proved helpful to me in massage.

     Jeremy wanted to cross a line I was trying to draw. The line related to our signed agreements: no sexual advances or language are to be tolerated in massages at the clinic. But while I massaged his shoulders, he reached over and placed his hand on my calf. I moved out of range. He touched me again when I was working at his side. I took his hand off my leg and, patting it, told him he had to keep his hand and arm relaxed or the massage wouldn’t work. We made it through the massage just fine. The next month, in our second massage, I had to repeat the same line drawing. When the massage was completed, we talked. I reminded Jeremy we had both agreed “not to be bad.” He took well the mild discipline, which combined my accepting attitude toward him with my patient insistence that the line hold.

     The conflict had started right at the outset. That first day, as I opened the therapy room door to say good-bye to one client and to greet the next, there stood Jeremy. He was dressed in what Denverites sometimes refer to as the Boulder look. He sported a red tank top, lime green cutoff sweats, and brown Birkenstock sandals with wheat-colored socks. Tall, with wavy red hair and body-builder muscles, Jeremy introduced himself and said in a caricatured sexy voice that he had come for a “butch” massage. I was amused. While I’m not feminine in appearance or manner, I certainly am not butch! Perhaps the seeming absurdity of his request signaled play acting and cast me in a parental role. I listened to him with interest and carefully kept my laughter aimed at what he said, not at him. I read Jeremy as both sexually promiscuous and humorous. He appeared to have ill-defined personal boundaries. What a challenge.

     I would give him a massage to remember, butch or not. Images of strength, aggression, and even pain flitted through my imagination. I thought, “Too bad I don’t have on my hiking boots. He might like that.” I chose to supplement my regular Swedish massage technique with some dramatic stretches and deep glides I had learned in a sports massage workshop. At one point, I clambered up onto the table with Jeremy and planted my knees in his buttocks. I pushed my fists into the muscles alongside his spine and glided from his lower back to his shoulders. He loved it, and his muscles started to relax. I repeated the glide, this time with my elbows one at a time, and the muscles softened even more. While I felt tiny atop this tall, muscle-bound man, I knew I could deliver a helpful and memorable massage.

     Ethics, goals, and personal strength come into play in every massage. My training established standards and offered methods for dealing with difficult clients and tricky situations. It emphasized that I know what I am trying to achieve in massage and that I avoid situations that will detract from that goal. I was instructed, if I should not have enough strength to control a situation, to announce I was ending the session and walk away. One cannot always anticipate the needs and desires of a new client or even of a therapist’s own developing interests. I learned to recognize behaviors, phrases, and non-verbal clues in both the client and myself, and I was encouraged to be alert to their potential for small or large disasters.

     Superficially, there are similarities between massage and sex. Two people are alone together. One gets naked; the other rubs his or her hands all over the first one’s body. But the point is not to move the feelings engendered toward orgasmic relief, to communicate love through sexual contact, or to enjoy the other person’s body. Rather, the massage employs skilled touch to invite muscles into relaxation, the mind into rest, and the person into a caring relationship that will result in self-care. While there is physical intimacy and often a loving climate in both massage and sex, the outcomes sought in massage contrast clearly with those of sex.

     Jeremy was a strong, insistent person who seemed to want to have sex and to be worshipped. Perhaps I could note and praise some aspects of his body while I massaged his muscles, but I would keep to the conventions of common modesty and professional ethics. He didn’t need sex with me; he needed my skill to bring relief to his body. He needed massage to provide him new experiences of his body, not to repeat old ones.

     I believe I was prepared for this interaction with Jeremy years earlier by watching my wife Myrna, when she successfully took on the task of youth work in a congregation. She confided in me that her training and experience in preschool education prepared her to work well with teens. She was gentle, playful, accepting, and at the same time, firm. Her instructions were clearly enunciated, her expectations lovingly presented, and her acceptance of failure graciously offered. The teens responded to her with enthusiasm and trust. Under her direction, they achieved peer leadership and group success. She was especially helpful to kids who were the most wild. She gave them her unconditional love, encouraged their participation in socially constructive projects, and showed her genuine interest in their whole lives. I took my cue from her experience.

     Jeremy seemed to me like one of those wilder kids who would respond best to acceptance with a clearly marked line lovingly, humorously, and consistently enforced. I knew I wasn’t going to cross over the line with Jeremy. I was his massage therapist, not a buddy or a mate. When he persisted in touching me, I figured it was compulsive behavior on his part and so treated the behaviors in relationship to how they helped or detracted from the massage. For a year and a half of massages, Jeremy persisted in pushing at the line. He quit touching me but from time to time crossed the line verbally. He got great massages and, perhaps, some parent-like security from knowing that I would hold fast. He wanted the massage enough to keep his appointments, and while he may have lacked one kind of respect, he did praise me to myself and others as a massage therapist and a healer. Jeremy never did learn to keep consistently on his side of the line. Perhaps more time would have helped him grow into this, but his life ended before that happened. In response to his consistent pushing, I learned to hold dependably, with loving candor, laughter, and firmness. Now anytime someone pushes too much, I think of Jeremy and remember both the need to let massage be what it can be and how to hold the line for myself and my client.

Table Talk: Trust

     Parker smiled when I lowered him from a modified bridge pose stretch in Thai massage. He smiled when he realized the top of his head was pushed right up against my genitals. I went on with my work, moving him into a seated position in which I fitted my body behind his and, reaching around his chest and over his folded arms, pulled him back onto my body in another stretch. Time and time again in the massage our bodies were in strange and intimate connection. At the end of the massage, which is done fully clothed and on a mat on the floor, Parker said, “I must really trust you.” I asked if that was because of the intimacy of the massage or the stretches that occasionally feel like they are going to disconnect some limb from the rest of your body. He said, “Both, I guess.” Also, Parker told me, he let me rub and work his abdomen, a part of his body he has rarely allowed anyone to touch.

     I had given Parker conventional, western massage several times prior to our switch to the Thai style. During what turned out to be our last Swedish massage, he asked if energy enters the body through the feet. I told him about Thai massage in which such a belief is expressed through a technique that opens channels on the soles of the feet and asked him if he would like to try it. I was looking for more people to receive this kind of work. After experiencing it once, Parker decided he never wanted to go back to the Swedish-based work with which he was familiar.

     Parker’s comment about trust came after we had been doing Thai massage on a monthly basis for nearly a year. It is intimate. I commented on this to my teacher when I was studying her advanced course. To me, Thai massage felt much more intimate than Swedish, in which clients remove their clothes and the therapist rubs oil all over their bodies. The practitioner’s hands, and occasionally an arm or elbow, touch the client. But in Thai massage, Yoga-based poses bring the client’s body into contact with the therapist’s body in often unfamiliar, intimate relationship. The poses are held from five seconds to several minutes while the client relaxes into them to receive the greatest benefit from the stretch. Often the therapist adds compressions or traction to the Yoga poses to provide more stretch and stimulate the movement of energy in the area.

     It seems to me that intimacy in massage is based not only on its physicality and the proximity of the partners, but even more, on the fact that two people are working together with great intensity to stretch the body, to increase circulation and energy, and to bring muscular and psychic relief. This is basic to all massage and contrasts vividly with the ways in which good usually is imparted in our society. Typically, we receive discipline, badgering, power plays, bitter medicine, stress, sermons, assignments, observation, criticism, and finally the message, “You’re on your own, and it’s a game of the survival of the fittest.” By contrast, massage makes a community of two persons intent on change with necessary, loving, and continuing support. Thai massage goes further by fostering a community of paired meditation that benefits the practitioner as well as the client. Trust and compassion are at its root.

     The meditation goes far beyond saying a prayer or mantra as is the common practice when beginning Thai massage. It involves more than the shared greeting of the divine in the bodies of receiver and practitioner at the end of the work. It is characterized by a growing awareness of the increase and movement of energy as the therapist stimulates energy channels over the surface of the client’s body and by a commitment to healing that is expected to result from the free flow of life energy. The meditation focuses on the connection of the whole body to the abdomen. It concentrates on the ability of joints to move, muscles to empower, and breath to cleanse.

     Parker trusts me. He trusts me not to move my work from an act of massage into an act of sex. He trusts me not to take advantage of his feelings. He also must trust himself to feel whatever he is experiencing. He has to let me touch him in a way that may seem implicitly, though not explicitly, sexual. He has to trust in order to experience his and another person’s bodies working together in loving, therapeutic, and meditative interactions characterized, not by sex, but rather, by mutual compassion. Surely that’s enough to make anyone smile. 

     I feel like I ought to pray something to the smiling Buddha or to his physician Father Doctor Shivago. I’ll settle to say, 

“Divine love, teach us compassion and the trust that can arise from it as together we meditate through massage. 

Amen.”

Mantra, mixed media by Phillip Hoyle

In learning Traditional Thai Massage I was introduced to Father, Doctor Shivago, the Budda's physician. I was taught to chant a rather long mantra as part of the preparation for this meditative work. Body work in Traditional Thai medicine comes from the part of the practice that emphasizes meditation and magic. I seemed a strange candidate for such work. My teacher taught us Yoga that we needed to practice daily in order to understand the poses be able to sustain them in the work. She also encouraged us that if we don't feel the energy, we trust the practice. So I practiced Thai massage until all my clients who wanted it left town. Also I stopped at one point because my old knees began to ache too much! Guess then I needed a healer to work on me. The memory of the ancient healer helps prepare the practitioner for the work which is always a holy interaction.

Table Talk: Self Care

Shamanic Healer  Painting by Phillip Hoyle

     I wonder why I have so much trouble providing myself massage. Why do I put off going to others for massages I surely need or even doing the work myself? Why is setting aside time seemingly such a problem, dedicating energy so difficult, and appropriating money such a block?

     My lower back hurt. I awoke with the pain on the morning after Halloween. Dressing for a dinner party the previous evening, I had hurriedly selected a pair of slacks that were too tight. I tucked in my shirt to look nice, and I looked good. But I realized when I sat in Frank’s car on the way to the party, I could hardly breathe. Since the hostess was wearing her 40th Anniversary Barbie Doll dress and her husband a tux, since people who didn’t know me were in attendance, I didn’t feel free to get comfortable. Usually I would simply pull out my shirttails and unfasten my pants. But that night I sat in uncomfortable, rented chairs for way too many hours, and I paid for it when I tried to get up the next morning.

     Somehow, I don’t find the above explanation quite convincing to account for the amount and persistence of my pain. It reminds me of a client who suggested his awful shoulder pain was due to sleeping on a new pillow. I do like the humor of the scene--barely being able to breathe and enduring the too-tight pants for the sake of a public image--but I suspect there was more at play. Probably the constriction of the pants and belt activated a latent, painful spot or two that had bothered me some months back. I had suffered similar back pains from giving too many hours of massage, and years ago I had hurt my back in a snowmobile accident. Whatever the cause, I did hurt.

     That morning I could hardly move, but I had to get going since I was scheduled to give an early massage. A hot shower and all the movement of the massage left my back less painful and freer, but that afternoon, while drinking coffee with a friend, I felt a deep soreness settling in. The friend, a massage therapist, volunteered to work on me. His fifteen-minute massage helped, but it didn’t get rid of the pain. I asked another guy to work on it a couple of days later. The pain persisted. A third therapist worked on me two days later. He made other, related muscles hurt from his very deep work, but the back pain did not go away.

     A week later I awoke thinking, “I need to work my abdomen,” but I couldn’t make myself do the work. Many arguments and several hours later, I finally lay down on the floor and worked my abdomen. I approached the area using traditional Thai massage techniques. During this self-treatment, I further realized that to get rid of my week-old pain I would need to do more work on deeper muscles that pass through the pelvic girdle. Several hours later I also talked myself into doing that work.

     The massage that resulted in the release I needed so badly did not take much time, but apparently it did require a commitment to myself I haven’t yet found. I want to change myself in ways that encourage sufficient and regular self-caring. I wish I’d quit putting off work I can either do on myself or ask someone else to do for me. I would like to find the freedom to spend money and time for work that will give me pain relief and muscle releases. I want to feel vigorously healthy in my work and pain-free in my play. How else will I stay fit for the years to come? How else will I be able to encourage others to spend their time and money on massage?

I desire to find ways in which I can best live as an artist and a massage therapist: unleashing my creativity, caring for myself, loving myself in practical yet occasionally extravagant ways. In order to do so, I suspect I will need to overcome accusations of selfishness I sometimes aim at myself. I have work to do, growth to realize, and self-love to develop.

     My family was not very physical. Dad played tennis but didn’t encourage us children to do the same. We played neighborhood games, but none of us became sports players or even fans. We weren’t touched much. We watched Mom and Dad touch and kiss, but we were rarely folded close into our parents’ bodies, at least not to my recollection. I watched my sisters run from my father when he threatened to kiss them and scratch them with his whiskers, but I was never touched by either him or my mother. We rarely went to the doctor. Fortunately, I was healthy and seldom ill, but these things together--our family’s reluctance to touch, independence from health care, and general good health--may have become part of my distancing from myself, my own body, my own self-care. They may hold some key to my figuring out how to give better care to myself.

     My wife observed during the nearly thirty years of our marriage that I had become increasingly physical in my relations with people. I gave and sought more touch, a phenomenon that has contributed to my becoming a massage therapist. Still, I did not seek this touch from health care professionals or even hair stylists. I hated to spend money on such things. I did not provide for myself what I was happy to provide others. Luckily, I have been healthy; unfortunately, I have not learned to seek help for myself when I need it. I need it now.

     As I was writing this piece, I cut my finger with a knife intended to cut an onion. I evaluated the damage. If I were not trying to make a living doing massage, I’d probably put an adhesive bandage on the place, but I really did need stitches. Here was a blatant opportunity to provide self-care. I called my friend Tony for personal support and for a ride to a family practice clinic where the wound was properly stitched. I can consider this as being practice for further dimensions of self-caring. I am thankful for my friend who drove me to the clinic. Still, I need more assistance. To whom can I pray for help in making these changes? What holy figure showed such self-care? Jesus? Mary Magdalene? Another saint? I don’t know, but I suspect I will have to pray to myself. I will have to ask my own self-neglecting hermit saint to open himself to the divine communication that will take place only when I love myself and care for myself. Amen.

Table Talk: Witness

     A few observations and a short conversation often disclose a lot about a person. Since most of our guests at the spa are women, and many of the men who schedule ask for a woman therapist, I was pleased to find a male client on my schedule a few Saturdays ago. I met the man who looked to be about thirty-five, healthy, and friendly. Watching a brief interaction between him and his wife, I judged his manner rather fawning but not insincere. As a couple they seemed too emotionally connected, like a pair with no offspring, who treat one another as if each were the child of the union.

     Our conversation during the massage revealed my client to be a salesman by occupation. He must have been successful, as he was able to afford monthly trips with his spouse to expensive hotels and fancy spas. He had played football in high school and was still in good shape due to working out regularly at a gym. As a young adult, he had studied art, hoping for a career as an artist, but had not pursued his dreams for some undisclosed reason. I listened and looked. Details of his Colorado Springs origin and abode, his clean cut good looks, his too-precious manner with his wife seemed to speak clearly to me. “Help,” I thought. “I have an evangelical on my table, and I’m about to be witnessed to.”

     My assumption seemed accurate. His approach was subtle as he sought to make an opening in the conversation for his testimony. The first assay related to his assertion that one has to experience inner change in order to change one’s body, its health and muscles. I didn’t take the bait. The other was his statement that God surely made the body amazing. I simply agreed but didn’t encourage a conversation. For a salesman, he seemed a bit unsure in his witness, or perhaps he was the consummate salesman who knows whether he really has any chance of closing a deal.

     I had successfully deflected his attempt to lasso me. In so doing, I may have missed having a significant conversation about the body, but I didn’t want to hear about the personal change that comes when one takes the five steps to salvation, inviting Jesus into one’s heart. While I am Christian, I really have tired of the earnest witnessing I have often been subjected to over the years. I didn’t want to explain my complicated theology to someone who seemed content with his own formulaic certainty. I just was not ready to be assaulted by a true believer, not even by a nice one.

     To give my client a break, he seemed to be a decent guy and has a beautiful body that he continues to keep fit. I suspect an important inner change did alter his life, and that the divine may have rescued him from some destructive future. These would be fine things to share, but I didn’t invite him to do so.

     Instead, I insisted on sharing my own witness, a silent testimony I proclaim through massage. In making it, I am not trying to convince people to accept a particular belief. Rather, I exalt the body as it is--regenerated or not, appealing or repulsive, healthy or ill, thriving or dying. While I am not a creationist and some days barely a theist, I still marvel at the truth of the divine communication in human form. Divinity loves through persons, presents itself in community, and encourages creative living. These divine touches are the most meaningful aspects of my witness.

     This is my witness: to my clients, to the beauty of their bodies, to what and to all that they are. I testify silently with hands, body weight, sweat, and the techniques of massage. My message avoids words; massage speaks its own language. The divine is not separate from the body but, rather, is a continuous revelation of love in any particular body. It seems ironic to me, but I have become a massage evangelical, making my silent witness to everyone who comes to my table.

God, help me keep my witness silent and subtle. Amen.

Peace Rose from the Garden  Photo by Phillip Hoyle

Same rose as above from a different angle