‘Mobilisation’ has taken on an onerous meaning in recent weeks, so I am inclined to write about this word in a positive sense. What mobilisation means in the sense of our bodies and how massage therapy promotes this integral function for human health and wellbeing.
Recently, I attended my second course with Sally Morris and Craig Foden’s On the Spot Training School for Massage & Bodywork. The two-day course focused on those areas of our bodies that (literally) bare the weight of our daily grind: the Neck & Shoulders and the Lower Back & Hips. My last course with this pair, Fabulous Fascia: an introduction to myofascial release, had a transformative effect on my approach to my work as a massage therapist, noted by regular clients. For a second time, I walked away from their course with a spring in my step (again, very literally) and newfound enthusiasm for working with the body in all its marvels and mysteries.
As with any topic taught at On The Spot, the emphasis of this course was on slowing down in our practice. Too often, massage therapy is funnelled into our busy lives as something to be ‘completed’ in one hour. We approach the treatment of our bodies as we do a task list – five minutes on the shoulders, eight minutes on the back, ignoring the months, years and entire lives it has taken us to accumulate those niggling aches, pains and stiffness we aim to relieve with a massage. To slow down is to acknowledge all that time, all that life lived, and to begin to read the body and respond to what those aches and pains are actually trying to tell us about ourselves. When we slow down, we are able to read between the muscles, between the fibres, fascial network and fluids, and discover the blockages in these that are the sources of our tension, our immobilisation. Then, we slowly begin to unravel them.
During our training, Craig and Sally shed light on the importance of soft tissue mobilisation. This means the ‘freeing up’ of fascial areas that are no longer the soft, spongy, fluid-filled tissues they want to be. Think of a traffic jam. When road blockages occur, vehicles build up, the surrounding air becomes congested and toxic, and the people in the cars become agitated because they can’t get to where they need to be. It is the same in our bodies. When fibres and fascia experience a blockage, whether through injury, surgery or general wear and tear, the surrounding area becomes congested, toxins build up and the nervous system becomes agitated. This reverberates beyond the blockage, causing discomfort in seemingly unrelated areas (think of all the ramifications a traffic jam has: the pain in your neck may be the flashing red ‘20 mph’ sign several miles down on the motorway!).
When we ‘mobilise’ the tissue, we allow spaces to re-open in our body’s tissues and fluids to move freely again. Massage therapy involves two people working with the body to achieve this (you and the massage therapist) through a combination of stretch, motion and pressure techniques, thereby increasing your range of motion, relieving pain, heightening proprioception (your sense of where your body is in space) and most importantly, activating the parasympathetic nervous system for a deepened sense of relaxation.
Of course, massage therapy achieves the above as part of an integrated self-care system. This is what we mean when we talk about ‘holistic’ therapies; they require input from you! Soft tissue mobilisation in self-care can be achieved through light exercise, yoga, positional adjustments and even dietary adjustments. Ultimately, the meaning of ‘mobilisation’ becomes the same in (self)-love and war: more power to you.
I wrote the original of this for Second Step, the mental health charity I work for in Bristol, as part of Stress Awareness Month 2021.
April is Stress Awareness month. It has been since 1992 to “increase public awareness about both the causes and cures for our modern stress epidemic.” (stress.org.uk). In 1992, there was barely an internet, barely mobile phones. Most of us still had to be at home or in the workplace to make or take a call. News was disseminated via column inches in newspapers, so there was limited space and time for it. No one ever had to think about newsfeeds, status updates, comments, likes and internet trolling. When you were out, you were out. When unavailable, unreachable. Yet still, we were stressed and nearly 30 years on, we are even more so.
Why so stressed?
It begs the questions: what is it that we were and still are so stressed about? And why? Obviously, we all have our own reasons, but it is worth zooming out to take a look at the bigger social picture: society is brutally competitive. It starts with academic banding in primary school and intensifies year on year with exams, CVs, higher education, the job market, the housing market. All the while having to juggle these with our changing social landscapes of family to friends, partners and beyond. Overall, I would say that in our society, Stress is the accepted baseline on which individuals are expected to build their lives despite clinical evidence directly linking Stress to anxiety, depression, heart disease, insomnia, digestive problems and weakened immune system. But, says stress.org.uk, “it is still not being taken as seriously as physical health concerns.”
My experience
I experienced my first anxiety attack at 17, though I didn’t recognise it as anxiety. There wasn’t really a name for it. All I knew was that I had a crippling tension in my chest that did not dissipate overnight. My breathing was irregular, as was my heartbeat. At the time, my family situation was tense, but by anyone’s guess, including my own, I was coping well. The anxiety would come and go throughout my early and mid-twenties as I completed A-levels, took an undergraduate course, travelled about, looked for a job. In my mid-twenties, unable to earn gainful employment, I experienced a painful and debilitating bout of constipation that went on for many months. The doctor waved a hand, declared “probably stress” and gave me some laxatives. This would remain another regular feature in my life.
Insomnia
In my late twenties came the insomnia and sleep deprivation. I was juggling several jobs while trying to manage personal projects and maintain a social life. To my mind, I was a calm, collected, resilient person and also a high achiever. To my body, I was a fallible human being and I learnt that you can’t be any of the above if you haven’t slept for three nights running. At that point, several people in my life suggested I might need to learn to relax.
Physical side effects
Still, the call to action – to be doing things – was more compelling than not and I continued filling every waking hour with errands, events, work, people, projects, parties, social groups, tasks, chores and if for one hour none of that was happening, exercise. Life was exciting and the goal was to keep it that way. Over three years, I lost a lot of weight, but that was OK because I ate what I wanted and burnt it off. For three years, I hadn’t menstruated, but that was OK because it was convenient. I never had to plan anything around mood swings and cramps. I could just crack on. But something deep down niggled. I ignored it but the more I ignored it the stronger the niggling became. When I took a moment to study it, I read it as the painful notion of having lost my femininity. I wondered if I could ever have children. I didn’t like it, so I put it away and carried on.
Psychosexual counselling
Fast forward to 2019. Having spent the best part of a year in and out of Bristol Unity Sexual Health Clinic for unexplained uteral pains, the doctor eventually referred me to psychosexual counselling. I arrived sceptical, uncertain what psychosexual counselling entailed. Sitting amidst the books on the female orgasm and marital relations, I was surprised when the counsellor did not once direct the conversation towards my sex life. In fact, across the six months I attended, sex was barely touched upon where every other element of my life came up for scrutiny. About half way through that time, the counsellor placed her hands calmly on her lap and said, “It all sounds very stressful.” I burst into tears.
It took another three months for her to help me come to the realisation I was allowed to be stressed. I saw (and still see) my place in society as privileged. Therefore, I had no right to be stressed, let alone acknowledge stress and what it was doing to my body. My body had shut down what it deemed to be non-essential, preserving energy for my lifestyle.
Positive signs
Fast forward another year. April 2020 and one month into a national lockdown. My lifestyle now reduced to three days of working from home and a walk in the evenings before or after cooking and eating. There are no parties to attend. My fledgling business has been put on hold. There is nowhere to travel to and the pressure to do any of it has been erased. The days pass by one just like the other until one evening, I recognise a surging cramping sensation. My period. In the quietude of modern life put on hold, my body is recalling its most primordial rhythms. In tears and embracing every sharp, shifting sandbag sensation in my womb, I finally admit that I was really quite stressed.
We are all aware when we feel stressed but generally, we are conditioned to believe we should and can plough through it. As a result, we are not able or not willing to recognise the long-term damage this is doing to our bodies and minds. Perhaps we don’t care enough about ourselves just as ourselves without the accolades of achievement. We place too much value on productivity.
Health is wealth
Stress Awareness Month should not simply advocate awareness of stress but a new paradigm of success and achievement. As we re-emerge into our former busier, more competitive reality we would do well to remember that old adage, “health is wealth”. Earning health I have learnt, is much harder than earning money or reputation and much more important. It takes a sustained awareness of oneself, being in touch with your body’s rhythms, time spent on personal reflection, the strength to say “no” and the ability to admit you have limits.
Fast forward another year. April 2021 and I’m now six months pregnant, thanks to the fact that lockdown forced me into readdressing my lifestyle. I have honed an awareness of my stress levels and am becoming better at recognising the early symptoms and when I’m taking on too much, though doing something about it still remains difficult. In fact, I’m still more inclined towards punishing myself with more work, more distractions. The difference now is that I know someone else is relying on my health and that has become the impetus.
Earning health should be something we place value on for ourselves and others, meaning we might have to start respecting the art of kicking back and doing nothing. And even if we can’t do it for ourselves, we can rest assured that we are much more helpful and enjoyable for others when taking time to revel in a life less stressed.
My relationship with massage begins as far back as I remember taking baths, after which my mother would massage my sister’s and my backs and legs with Nivea cream or olive oil. The favour always had to be returned: at weekends after my mother’s bath, she would lie prone on the bed, and I remember trying my best to imitate the kneading and stroking to her shoulders that she had so lovingly applied to mine.
From there, I carried the notion that massage was a natural and integral part of care to others and to the self. In my adolescence, I whiled away classes padding my fingers along the ridges of my shoulders and up my neck, the teacher impervious to the fizzy shivers down my spine that had nothing to do with Jane Eyre. As a young adult in conversations across tables or in bars, I would absent-mindedly pad small circles around my pectoral muscles and biceps, seeking out the sensitive spots around the tendons. One or two people took me up on it, and I was always astounded to discover that it seemed weird to them, that no one else did this to themselves ever, not even at home. I could not understand this because it just felt so good. Didn’t they even massage their friends or partners? No, they said, and if so, rarely and it was never that good.
The physical intimacy and pleasure of massage makes it taboo. In Anglo-Saxon cultures, the word is synonymous with eroticism, red-lit windows and pink neon signs. It is not surprising that when a man walks into my massage studio having never received a massage before (apart from once in Turkey, by a massive bloke who slapped me with flannels ‘till my skin stung), he looks sheepish, as if he is guilty of a crime he has not yet committed. For many, taking their clothes off before a woman where there is no allusion to sex feels disempowering, especially if she is not even dressed in scrubs.
There is also the element of bodily shame. Across the board, people apologise for their hairy backs/legs, the state of their feet, or their sweaty hands. These are things consumer culture has taught us are shameful and, in the softly lit confines of a massage therapy room, we not only expose them to another’s eye but to their touch, too. It is no wonder that massage in the therapeutic sense is relegated, for the most part, to the commercial realm of “luxury”, dominated by spa retreats and slender white poster-women adorned with flowers and pebbles. A private therapist one sees regularly is considered something of an accessory to a privileged lifestyle and when it costs on average fifty pounds per hour (more in the capital), it has no choice but to be that. But this is not why most massage therapists do what they do.
I decided to take up massage therapy as a career when I was twenty-seven. Prior to this, I was a teacher and occasional writer. It was during a stint volunteering in a hospice of medically unattended dying people in Myanmar that it dawned on me how little I knew about the body. It was not that I required deep medical knowledge, but my lack of basic understanding on the anatomy and how it worked rendered me clumsy at best and useless at worst in my attendance of them. More than this, I walked about in a body just like theirs, depended on it for my survival and yet I knew near nothing about what was actually going on beneath my skin. A massage course, it seemed, would cater to this gaping hole in my knowledge as well to my tactile nature.
Two-and-half years on, I have a diploma in Holistic Therapy and Anatomy and Physiology, and my own practice. In the year that I have been practising, I have found nothing more gratifying than putting people at ease in their own bodies, even the sheepish first-timers. Most people walk out of a massage with the remark, “I never knew that about myself,” and even though I must charge the average price to afford my bread and butter, I increasingly see why massage therapy should be an accessible and integral part of our health culture. It generates bodily and emotional self-awareness, personal connection, breathing awareness, and helps alleviate the myriad physical and psychological conditions caused by stress and anxiety.
It was not until the Covid-19 outbreak and the impossibility of performing massage in person that the idea came to me as to how I could make my work available and more universally accessible. Thinking back to my childhood bath times, the conversations I had had about massage over the years, I thought wouldn’t it be nice if more people could offer those they lived with an effective and safe massage? I began offering online massage tutorials for isolation buddies. With no need to hire a room or use multiple towels, I could make also these affordable. So far, the response has been overwhelmingly positive and, more surprisingly, from the person giving the massage, who say they get just as much out of it as the recipient. Why is this? Because giving a massage generates the same benefits as receiving: emotional and physical self-awareness, breathing awareness, personal connection and relaxation.
I hope that one day massage therapy will evolve in our culture beyond the limited reach of the massage therapist, and our cultural associations with it beyond the red-light district. In many cultures from Russia, to Thailand, India, Turkey and Mexico, massage is an intrinsic part of looking after yourself: it can also become an intrinsic part of looking after one another without the mediation of money. Am I writing myself out of the equation? Possibly, but if that’s the price of contributing to a healthier, more relaxed and happier society, I consider it worth every penny.
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