Caught in the Cycle of Self Concern

Bob Thurman is a Buddhist scholar and teacher who holds an anonymously endowed chair at Columbia and does great work, IMO, from that seat.

He recently opened a talk at the TED conference with this quote from Albert Einstein:

"A human being is a part of the whole, called by us, universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness...
This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.
Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."

Bob's speech at TED calls us to remember what it is we know and do that is the antidote to the messes in this world caused by greed and self interest in pursuit of rampant desire. It's worth the 20 minutes it'll take to listen to its entirety.

Here's a piece of art that also speaks beautifully revealing the specific Net of Indra made of organizations worldwide working for peace, proper stewardship, social justice. Don't forget to zoom in when you get there.

Blind Men on the Elephant part 1

The discussion of psychologically oriented bodywork was brought up in fb again, this time on Michelle Doyle's wall.

Here's my comment on Michelle's wall:

I think it's brings up important ethical questions. It also begs the question, when, in the world of alternative therapy and self help gurus, is a person practicing/teaching therapy without a license? I don't really know the answer to how the practice of psychotherapy is defined. I suspect it is probably different from state to state.

Ever feel like one of those blind men on the elephant with regard to our own little views of what's actually going on in the mind/body/spirit realm of the bodywork we share with our clients?!

In my experience, an emotional, psychological release is not always necessary. Sometimes it is and the condition doesn't resolve until that, and it's coinciding energy pattern in the emotional body or meridian system or energy body or whatever your vernacular chooses to call it, is addressed. But sometimes, not really, it's just more simple than that.

I also get a lot of athletes in my studio who have recently over-trained some part or area in playing the edge in their sports. Some of them see me weekly as part of their active recovery paradigms. In those cases it is often quite nuts and bolts. The right combination of specific massage techniques, some ice, some rehab exercises in place of whatever was recently over-training the weak link and they're good to go....and no it doesn't usually come back unless it gets re-injured.

So my view of this is that sometimes dysfunction is sourced in purely exogenous factors and doesn't require psycho-emotional release, sometimes it is a somatic manifestation of an endogenously sourced configuration. Then it's a deeper healing that must occur.

Mark Lamm and I had a dialogue about this recently, over on his fb page including speculations as to where these emotional traumas might be stored. It was long enough and interesting enough to me that I then posted on my blog with his permission. It can be also accessed from my fb wall as 'No Harm No Foul' or networked blogs if anyone is interested in that discussion.

One of the points I attempted to make in that dialogue, which I think is important and which does not usually get addressed in those schools of bodywork that are psychologically oriented, is that abreaction alone, including energy balancing, is often not enough to help a person fully integrate a newly remembered trauma, especially from physical or sexual abuse and especially if the person was young (pre-verbal) when it happened. Communication skills with loved ones and re-balancing of family dynamics is part of the integration aspect of this type of healing.

Bodyworkers, [massage therapists, physical therapists, chiropractors, osteopaths] are not qualified to do this work. We haven't been trained as psychologists or psychiatrists. I think that if we are trained in a psychologically oriented school of body work not taught by someone who is, at least, a trained psychologist we can very easily tap into a reserve of disowned material not unlike what is happening in the gulf right now, with the ooze making a mess in an untamed way and subjecting the client to ongoing unnecessary psycho-emotional pain by remaining stuck in a not fully resolved upwelling of something that was being held in the unconscious mind in a dissociative state for a reason.

Lomi body work (not to be confused with Lomi Lomi) taught by Robert Hall, M.D. and Richard Heckler in No. Cal. is a psychologically aware system originally taught by a team, one of which is a black belt in Aikido and one of which was a psychiatrist. I think the work teaches adequate respect for the complexity of the process of integration as an aspect of emotional release.

There are several schools of bodywork, however, teaching massage therapists and physical therapists to go for the energy cysts or myofascial unwindings coincidental to unremembered traumas in droves. This kind of work is being taught by physical therapists or osteopaths who have no clue about what to do to help a client integrate this material and are hubristic enough to think that it's not even necessary.

Frankly I think that's irresponsible and unethical. Since these folks have not done any population studies using Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS) or another psych evaluation tool [*see below] to see if their clients are in fact better off a month, 6 months, a year after the work they will never have to know if a large percentage end up stuck in some PTSD state of perpetual victimhood.

I really have an ethical problem with their assumptions, and the hubris behind them.

*From Wiki: "Clinicians can use the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression, HRSD in place of, or in conjunction with, the Montgomery-Åsberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS), the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), the Zung Self-Rating Depression Scale, the Wechsler Depression Rating Scale, the Raskin Depression Rating Scale, the Inventory of Depressive Symptomatology (IDS), the Quick Inventory of Depressive Symptomatology (QIDS)"

Al Gore's "Massage"

Over in fb land there's a fan page somewhere that's recruiting massage therapists to write complaints to ABC for denigrating our profession on "The View" in a discussion of Al Gore's acquittal of 'alleged' sexual harassment of an Oregonian therapist recently.

A lively dialogue ensued on Erik Dalton's Myofascial Therapy page, to which I made this contribution. It was a long enough and covered enough massage related territory that I thought it worth preserving here, so here's my 2 cents worth:

...I did hit the link someone posted who was trying to recruit fellow complainers to join the campaign. Actually, although I agree with Angela that these 'ladies' (on the View) have probably never had a good massage from a well trained therapist. A genuine massage professional on the show who could give great hands on demo with instructive monologue would do more to redeem our profession than a bunch of whiney complaints, IMO. Maybe those letter writers among you should suggest they invite Erik(Dalton) on to do just that.

Certainly Lizzie Huffnpuff needs a good rub out. I've seen short excerpts from the show over on Crooks and Liars when the political 'discussions' run afoul, often it's this brain dead conservative spokesperson saying something mean spirited with her foot firmly stuck in her uninformed mouth...yet again.

If you looked at the clip, she's the one who bought a massage for her hubbie as a present. When a "hot chick" with massage table and nice music in hand arrived, she freaked out. She admittedly sat in the other room wondering if he was gonna stray, probably with her ear to the other side of the door listening for the first inkling of moans or pleasure sighs wherein she would burst thru the door and save him from his 10 minutes of pure bliss. Just not having to listen to that nasal voice for a hour would be relaxing enough, IMO.

They questioned whether the therapist was legit because they heard that the rub was a 3 hour one. I, of course, tend to believe the therapist's version, but hey, I'm clearly biased in her favor. They do have state licensing in Orgegon requiring 500 hours training from a legit school and I'm guessing the hotels want to see the license before letting the table go up the elevator, unless, of course they condone hoes disguised as therapists and pay the regular fines for that or make exceptions for the likes of Al Gore, which ain't unlikely.

Gotta admit tho, a 3 hour out call in a hotel, if that really was the case, is a bit iffy on a zoftig non athlete like Gore, no matter how tall he is. So right there the therapist made mistake #1.
If she saw him more than once after he made inappropriate suggestions to her as, I think someone suggested was the case, mistake #2. If she saw him a second time after inappropriate dialogue without her tape recorder going to substantiate her version of the he said she said, mistake #3, and a doozy, 'cause the powers that be are always gonna side with the powerful man in a he said she said. Not knowing that and thinking she could report this and be believed, mistake #4.

If you guys don't think massage is still a fringe profession in a variety of circles then you need to get out more. Pick up a copy of the LA Weekly and look at all the call girls (and boys) advertising 'outcall massage' in there. Remember the guy who brought down Ted Haggert, a gay 'massage therapist'....who sold dope, with tape recordings to back up his version of the story, which is probably the only reason he was believed.

Right here in river city, at Golds Gym, the 'Mecca of Bodybuilding' there's a whole underground of bodybuilders who 'train', 'stretch' and offer who knows what other services to the known schmoes, yep, that's what they call em. Schmoes are underdeveloped lawyers and businessmen who also train at Golds and who like to be handled and squeezed, probably often with happy endings included, by the muscular strong bodybuilders and are willing to pay $450+/hr for the treat. Hey, ya gotta finance that growth hormone somehow!*&?? You don't even want to know how I learned about the schmoes, but suffice it to say, it was the hard way, no pun intended.

Ethics in our field is important. Great demonstrations of legitimate work go a long way to counter all this mishigosh which, unfortunately, yes is still being done in the name of massage.
You can't entirely fault those girls on the view for not knowing the difference. They probably haven't experienced the difference. If dibs go out for demonstrations though, I'll take Joy Behar or Whoopi. They're so baudy, funny and bold. Love those two. Someone else can educate Barbara or attempt such with fluffhead huffnpuff, if that's even possible. Maybe if it was a handsome guy like Erik or Tom Myers, she'd finish her legit massage experience cooing just like her hubbie probably did. Maybe she might even experience, in presence of the subtle silence of an aware presence, the opening to finally take ownership of some of the disowned unconscious agendas in her psyche's shadow so she could stop projecting them all over her hubbie and the rest of us.

My bottom line on all this is sorta beside the point, but here it is anyway, I HATE out calls. The balance of power, professionally, is stacked in the wrong direction, right from the get go.

No Harm, No Foul

This is from of a fb dialogue with Mark Lamm on the possible emotional storage/release mechanisms implicated in massage therapy practice, when folks remember past trauma in the massage studio.


"I agree, Mark, our views of how the body saves the stories/emotional content of our encounters with life's traumas and is stimulated to facilitate the remembering and reorganizing of them might be a bit different from each other. Reading the article I sent you, and others, like the one you sent me, is part of my effort to refine my view of the experiences I have with folks in the massage studio.

You said two things about your view of this process that interest me and seem to be different ways of looking at it.

"My understanding is that the brain receives a holographic imprint of a trauma event as can be evidenced by tomography or neuro-scanning. I believe that the recording of the event is stored in the body's tissue and when there is a stimulus that replicates any part of the original trauma event, the brain, functioning as a processor, activates the response mechanism."

There's alot there to chew on. Haven't read about any brain scientists talkin about the holographic imprint idea. If you're referring back to Dr. Hamer's ideas, those are pretty controversial, a bit iffy IMO, and generally the rings he's giving great importance to are viewed as artifacts on inferior quality MRI equipment and not of any real diagnostic significance. Perhaps there's other brain research you've found that I have not read about yet that supports your holographic view. Sounds like an interesting idea.

The second part of that paragraph coincides more with a view I'm currently embracing as well. I think the upwelling of a memory complex when we touch an injured or traumatically charged area is a form of PTSD, it is an associative phenom, but the actual memory and emotional charge are stored in the brain as processor, as you so aptly put it.

This is a quite different view than the idea of actual memory/emotion stored locally in the tissue, which you seemed to also espouse in the sentence:"it is not the animal's brain but the tissue memory". What's the memory mechanism in muscle or fascial cells capable of that kind of complexity, somewhere in the mitochondria? a change in the way the RNA duplicates, or pacinian corpuscles, meissner's corpuscles those adaptive receptors responsive to light touch, maybe the merkel cells, or somewhere more mysteriously diffused in the somatosensory system in the tissues rather than in the homunculus back in the ole brain processor, perhaps it's in controllers of protein translation or synaptic plasticity. Maybe those young scientists in the Molecular and Cellular Cognition Society will actually figure it out someday soon.

There are a number of working models of how this 'tissue memory' occurs taught by several schools of bodywork as though they are facts. That bothers me, since none of them has a scientifically sound explanation for what they're teaching and some of them just don't make good physiological sense and so fall into the category of pseudo-science. Especially problematic when they get mixed together with ideas like having a dialogue with or channeling the client's 'inner physician', or asking the dolphins to inform us where the problem is by going in the tank with them to do the work and watching were they touch their noses, gadzooks!. We hear about energy cysts, tissue memory, cellular memory, myofascial unwinding as an instrument of releasing a locally stored emotional pattern in the fascia.....with the assumption that a simple abreaction alone is enough to release and integrate the stored memories.

It's that assumption regarding these ideas that I fear is ripe with possibly harmful potential, not the rash spreading of simplistic assumptions as fact, per se.

Most massage therapists, including myself, who encounter these emotional releases in their clients have little or no actual academically sourced psychological training. Therein lies the bug. Abreaction alone is not enough to release and integrate the psycho-emotional complex that fixates around a childhood abuse for example, especially if it happened early. Yet massage therapists in droves are out there pulling on legs and thinking that the ideomotor response of spontaneous movements arising are actually healing the emotional/psychological traumas embedded with this event(s). Some of these methods might address the somatic kinks in the tissues better than others. Which ones? We have no answers because the studies have not been done yet comparing them for somatic effectiveness. Yet many folks are making big bucks teaching that their methods are intrinsically effective and complete healing paradigms.

IMO, teaching that that is the case is naive, shows an incomplete understanding of healing (and ideomotor responses) and can cause those therapists who believe they have the answer to how to effectively work with these conditions to be inadvertently potentially harmful to their clients.

Attempting to understand these phenoms intellectually to refine the view of what's going on is interesting valuable and important, IMO, but in the meantime, when doing the work, if I find someone flinches when I address the inner thigh, for example, I'm going to find out if they're in psychotherapy already or find a skillful way to suggest it before I go right to the possible negative sexual encounter that might be underlying that flinch.

If abuse occurs, especially early in a person's life, it takes a lot more than remembering it to help integrate that memory into the psyche without that person malingering in a state of traumatic victimhood. It can effect their current relationships with husbands, wives, parents, children. Not all psychologists are effective at helping someone balance that information and emotional upheaval either but at least they're trained to understand that integration of the trauma of an event is something that takes time and work and is not an automatic result of simply remembering it in an altered state in the presence of an empathic observor/facilitator. Many schools of massage assume and teach that abreaction fully releases the trauma from the tissues, therefore person, and that is enough for a complete healing to occur. That assumption is what I consider irresponsible and potentially harmful to the client.

It's my hope that if we're willing to examine our currently held beliefs about the work and dialogue intelligently about it, that we can help each other to refine the view and improve our abilities to be of benefit to the beings with whom we are privileged to interact.

I think ole Hippocrates got the oath right and that we, too, should attempt to do no harm, even though we do not practice medicine. 'Course his requirement that a new physician swear to the healing gods that he/she will uphold the ethical standards, might not appeal to the Christians in the crowd, but vowing to uphold the standards as a solemn oath knowing the importance of ethics when working with other beings is the part of that act we will do well to also espouse.

I do love all the funny and thoughtful quotes you regularly bring to us and your willingness to devote some of your time to engage in this dialogue. In that spirit I'll toss you this one that gets thrown around a bit, so you've probably read it more than once, but Yogi Berra had a funny way of saying the obvious that I personally love:

"In theory there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice there is."

"