For many, massage conjures up an image of a pampering service, a luxurious treatment that leaves you with a rosy glow for a while. The reality is that massage therapy can provide essential health benefits that promote a vibrant, healthy life. Consider four levels of increasing complexity that describe just how massage therapy can transform your life.
Level 1: Nurturing Space
When you build trust with your therapist and know your massage therapy space is secure, you can enter a deeper level of relaxation, allowing your body to open up to the skills of your therapist. To aid in the process, we will also attend to each of your senses, ensuring you feel engaged without being overstimulated. Warmth, softness, soothing music, gentle aromas, and mild lighting allow your mind to rest without anticipation of sudden new stimuli.
Whether your intention is a relaxing spa afternoon or you’re seeking relief for your overworked shoulders, attending to these details will set the foundation for your transformation.
Level 2: Neuromuscular Facilitation
Your body is a miraculous suspension structure (ask me about “tensegrity!”), where bones create space-holding resistance to compression, and your muscles create both a counter-balancing tension and inspire movement in your body through space. These dynamics mean that each of your joints is a balancing point across which two or more muscles work. There is no version of life where we don’t use our muscles continuously. With use comes disruptions to these balances, increased muscle tension, and the occasional injury or dysfunction, which can produce pain.
A skilled massage therapist is adept at feeling the subtle and overt tension patterns in your muscles and can shift the behavior not just of your muscles but also of your nervous system to relieve aches, restore balance, and protect your body from future injury. By pressing, squeezing, and gently drawing the tissues in your body, your therapist cannot only relieve your aches but also help change structural patterns, resulting in less frequent pain and injury.
Level 3: More Than Cells
Each muscle is composed of bundles of fibers, and each fiber, each bundle, and each muscle is wrapped in an extracellular matrix (ECM) composed not of cells, but of a web of various structural proteins, filled with a special fluid. This ECM is the primary structural system of your body, as it also wraps around and roots in each bone, wraps and secures your precious nerves, and holds your organs in place.
This matrix flows seamlessly from the top of your head to the tips of your toes, and we give it different names depending on what it is doing; for example, when the muscle runs out of muscle cells, we call it a tendon as it flows onto and around the bones, where we then call it periosteum. The structure provided by this ECM allows our muscles and bones to function as they do, and it also sets the stage for every physiological process in the body. Each of our cells lives within or on this ECM, and the provision of nutrients and the removal of waste all occur within its fluidic space!
With advanced training, a therapist like me can sense the nuanced dynamics of tension within this ECM and stimulate it to rearrange itself, while simultaneously flushing the fluid space to clear stagnant cellular waste and invite in fresh nutrition. This may produce a boggy feeling or aches when you first experience it, as you are suddenly cleaning up junk that was previously under the rug, but this will become a feeling of freshness and vigor with regular care.
Level 4: The Human Ecosystem
The fluidic space within the ECM runs throughout your entire body and sets the foundation for the activity of every specialized cell in your body. Not just the human cells, because a human being is a SUPERorganism; a thriving ecosystem of human and non-human cells alike. Every ecosystem is composed of a web of relationships, and every relationship thrives on one simple thing: communication!
The human body has four broad categories of communication: biochemical, bioelectrical, biomechanical, and optical. We will focus only on the first three here. We understand that our body responds directly to functional chemistry, as well as specialized, circulating chemical signals in the form of hormones and neurotransmitters, by stimulating receptors on the cell walls to change the behavior of our cells. In and around our cells, we also have ions, molecules that carry electrical charges. When these ions are allowed through cell and tissue boundaries, we create electrical charge differentials. This is what nerves rely on to convey signals more rapidly than circulating transmitters in our bodily fluids.
These communication systems enable us to rapidly coordinate a wide range of essential activities within our bodily ecosystem. The webbing of the ECM can transmit mechanical signals that alter cellular behavior, much like hormones. The ECM can transmit mechanical signals through the body at around 675 mph, and manual manipulation (massage) of our tissues can initiate such signals!
A skilled massage therapist can flush stagnated fluid out of your tissues and alleviate many potential impingements that can disrupt nerve signaling, including those caused by muscle tension and postural distortions. We can also help your body transform the continuous environment in which every sort of communication takes place, so that your whole system can harmonize and collaborate. The end effect of this is what we experience as vibrant, resilient, personal health.
What seems like “just” a rosy feeling after an hour or more of pampering is, in fact, just a taste of the fundamentally life-supporting richness your massage therapist is liberating within your miraculous body. From there, what else is possible?
Ethan DeFord opened Integrative Alchemy as an ecological health and wellness practice to help clients shift into happier and healthier lives. He calls from a diverse background stretching back thirty years to provide touch-based therapies and mindfulness-based wellness coaching for individuals and couples. His offices are in Guilford, CT, and he offers telehealth as an alternative for long-distance coaching clients.
Reach out at: www.alchemy.link or call/text 203.533.9466 and leave a message!
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