What is Massage Anyway?

It was one of my success stories: a client with whom I work regularly but not frequently came to me a couple of months after her previous massage.

“I don’t know what you did in that last massage, but it was a miracle!”, she reported as I began my intake interview. For one thing, I never see what I do as miraculous, and for another, my memory is so bad that I had to ask what it was we were working on last time. She reminded me that when she came in previously, she had recently started running again as part of her exercise regimen and had developed a pain in the posterior of her knee that was becoming persistent and worse--so much so that she requested an MRI, which showed nothing.

“That night after you worked on me, the pain became incredibly worse and I thought : this is ridiculous--I have to get to the doctor.” By now, I was beginning to break out into a sweat.

“By the next morning, it felt a little better and within three days, the pain was completely gone and hasn’t returned!”

It felt so good to hear this client recount her experience and it is the kind of experience that anyone in any healing profession thrives on; not that every ache, pain, or issue for every client gets “fixed” in the same way. With this particular client, moreover, I can honestly say that along with my gratitude on her behalf, I was also a little befuddled trying to recall exactly what it was that I did to effect said “miracle”. I know that I asked her all the usual diagnostic sorts of questions: Is it a sharp pain or a dull ache? Did it come on suddenly or over time? Do you remember anything you did to cause the pain? Is there any particular movement that causes you to feel the pain. Does it hurt or is it sore here? Here? Here? And so on. I also am certain that there are certain techniques and approaches I used to address the pain during the massage: work the muscles above and below the area of pain, calf and shins, hamstrings and quads; any soreness at muscle tendons in the area and transverse friction is in order; look for trigger points in the area and zap them with ischemic compression; and finally, having addressed constrictions in the muscles, I remember doing some facilitated stretches for the calves and perhaps peroneal muscles. But was the client’s positive experience just the sum total of technique and expertise? Or was there something else going on?

All massage therapists practice out of their own explicit or implicit definition of what massage is. Over my five years in the massage therapy field, I have personally defined massage as “the science and art of extravagant touch.” This definition works for me because it requires me to acknowledge both the need to be knowledgeable in my field but to hold that in balance with the need to be intuitive and artful in the way I apply the knowledge--and to do it all with a certain extravagance of touch: a touch that has depth, perception, and reassurance above and beyond the purely pragmatic.

I’m not talking “spa science” here. I get a kick out of this term of disparagement for any claim of health and well being based on highly dubious or non-rigorous research--in spite of the fact that I do most of my work in a spa setting. Sometimes when a client presents a physical problem they are having, I know exactly what is going on, mechanically. Sometimes I am wrong, yet I may do great work with the client regardless. Sometimes I have no idea what might be going on mechanically yet all the client needs is to feel reassured. It is interesting to me that my client whom I mentioned at the beginning of this article recalled that since her husband died just over a year ago, she has had a very clear sense of how the grieving process has deeply affected her body and manifested itself in various pains and issues. Was that part of her knee pain? I don’t know. Did I have to take that as a serious possibility? Absolutely! Did I need to use all the “tools” of massage I have learned and placed in my “tool box” to address the physical issues involved with her knee as I understood them? No doubt about it. Which was the most important part of the process? I don’t know and I probably don’t have to.

So, in short, throw in some nuts and bolts, some intuition into what the client’s body is telling me, and do it with some grace and generosity, and voila! You’ve got a massage.

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Jay is a licensed massage therapist that treats out of our Glover Park location. You can contact this location to learn more about scheduling appointments and his specialities at 202-965-2121. We also provide massage services at our Balance Gym Thomas Circle location.