loose fruit

It's like a pile of ideas but if I had my druthers I'd flesh them out into bigger things. But for now, here they are.

It occurred to me recently on the table the parallel between massage and social change. In the following ways.

1. If you identify where the problem is, how can you ignore it?

As massage students, we’re given a protocol of how things are supposed to go with a client on the table. This is generally just used as a place to start and then as we learn more and more techniques we’re encouraged to make up our own sequence. However, it’s really easy to get stuck in a repetitive routine because it becomes habit and muscle memory. But trigger points and tension can’t be missed. They interrupt the flow and demand your attention. Maybe you give them a little extra attention, but often the therapist just does a little bit of work on them an then goes back to the sequence.

I didn’t become a therapist to avoid problems, I did it to help solve them. Read the body, find the issue, put your focus there.

2. You have to have a complete picture before you can figure out the proper treatment

It’s not just the interview, the intake form, your medical history, SOAP notes and reading a body. It’s understanding their state of mind, their eating and exercising habits. If they want sustainable solutions, it’s not enough to apply pressure to the problem area, you have to help them in a way that they’ll be able to understand why the problem happened and how to avoid or minimize it in the future. Also it’s why eastern massage appeals to me, because sometimes just your hands aren’t the solution.

3. You need lubrication but not too much.

With no lube, no one is happy. The body resists what you have to offer, the therapist can’t do their job and everyone comes away grumpy. Too much lube, the client can’t feel anything and the therapist feels like they’ve done something without actually having done anything.

If you enter any situation too aggressively you aren’t going to accomplish anything. If you enter it in a way that is too perky or too optimistic that doesn’t see things for what they really are, you’re only paying lip service to making a change and the thing you’re trying to help won’t feel any effect from your efforts. Also they’ll hate you.

4. Make sure you cover the sensitive areas.

Stay focused on the task at hand, not everything needs to be exposed in order to get the job done. This might seem to contradict number 2, but there’s a difference between being informed and making someone feel unsafe. Part of the work goes into figuring out what counts as what.

I was watching a TED talk about the brain and how it's built to make connections. It made me think about the internet and how any one thing leads to so many others, either getting you thinking about other stuff or being full of links and ads to take you directly to other stuff. I'd love to do a thing ("performance") in that vein. I saw a show once that said it was based on that idea, but I didn't see that in what they presented. Mostly I saw my friend as Jane Fonda.

Also this