"He Fixes [Bodies] By Thinking!"
If I were to try to summarize my general purpose in the world, the way in which I approach things most often, I'd say I'm a problem solver.
It's what I do as a software developer. It's the approach I take when teaching martial arts. (“What's going on with your front kick (or mine)? How can we make it better?”) For better or worse, it's my default mode when I have to act as a manager. (“What are our problems with our systems and methods? How do we make them better?”) It's my approach as an essayist — to “essay” is to try, to attempt, and what I'm trying is usually an exploration of some problem that’s on my mind. (In this case, the problem of the state of the massage therapy profession.)
And it's the way I approach bodywork. “What is going on in this body-mind-person to produce the issue that has prompted this person to come to me today, and what do I have in my toolbox that can help?”
I think there are a distressing number of massage therapists who don’t quite get this. Massage and bodywork education is often centered around “protocols”: “here is a series of steps on how you do ‘Swedish’ massage.” That's not, in itself, a bad thing - it's much like the use of kata, forms, in the teaching of martial arts. Students need to learn to connect individual techniques, and need some structure they can practice on their own. When I was a student I certainly practiced set protocols, and used them as a framework when I started my practice. When I teach shiatsu at PMTI I use that format: I show the students a step-by-step series of actions, then have them practice that same series of actions on each other.
But some students don’t understand that these protocols are just a pedagogical tool. They carry them deep into their careers, and think that when a client comes for massage therapy, they should repeat one of the same protocols they learned in school, just adapting it to the extent of spending more time on the client’s reported problem areas.
My shiatsu teaching is (so far, at least) a very basic introduction for students who are mostly working in a Western massage framework. But I try to introduce them to the “Four Examinations” or “Four Pillars” of TCM: looking, hearing, asking, and touching. Look at how a person moves! (Walk behind a client as you go from the waiting room to the treatment room and you can learn a lot.) Hear the tone of their voice, the quality and rate of their breathing. Don’t be afraid to spend time asking questions. And pay attention to what your hands tell you when you get hands-on.
The point of making observations and asking questions isn’t just to write them down in SOAP notes and to find out if there are any contraindications; it’s to find out what the client actually needs. Five minutes of observation and questioning and five minutes of treatment that actually hits the root of the problem, can be more useful than an hour of protocol massage.
Richard Feynman was one of the greatest minds of the 20th century, a Nobel Prize winning physicist, and a bit of a raconteur. In popular culture he’s known for the anecdotes in the books Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think?
In the former, he tells the story of how when we was a boy, he was hired to fix someone’s radio. (This was during the Depression, so people were willing to hire a kid rather than an actual repair man, and radios were big vacuum tube things with fairly simple circuitry.)
The thing began to roar and wobble-WUH BUH BUH BUH BUH-A tremendous amount of noise. Then it quieted down and played correctly. So I started to think: "How can that happen?" I start walking back and forth, thinking, and I realize that one way it can happen is that the tubes are heating up in the wrong order — that is, the amplifier's all hot, the tubes are ready to go, and there's nothing feeding in, or there's some back circuit feeding in, or something wrong in the beginning part…
So the guy says, "What are you doing? You come to fix the radio, but you're only walking back and forth!"
I say, "I'm thinking!" Then I said to myself, "All right, take the tubes out, and reverse the order completely in the set." (Many radio sets in those days used the same tubes in different places….) So I changed the tubes around, stepped to the front of the radio, turned the thing on, and it's as quiet as a lamb: it waits until it heats up, and then plays perfectly-no noise.
...He got me other jobs, and kept telling everybody what a tremendous genius I was, saying, "He fixes radios by thinking!" The whole idea of thinking, to fix a radio
— a little boy stops and thinks, and figures out how to do it — he never thought that was possible.
Fellow bodyworkers, I hope that someone someone may say of you, “(S)He fixes bodies by thinking!”