This week’s post is going to be brief in light of the fact that I have to learn how to provide empathy without exploration, reflective listening, and the communication model for psychological responses to massage.
Um, what I really mean is that I have a Professional Development course titled “Emotions and Bodywork” that will eat up all of my usual end-of-the-week free time, counteracting the relaxation and slight calm that had set in following last weekend’s extra day. Couple this weekend warrior course with three quizzes in a row next week and I’m strapped for time, sanity, and a normal digestive process. The one good thing is that I’m sure that any four hour long lecture about “the significance of touch” and “developing an emotional presence with the client” while in a room filled with my fellow irritated and tactilely ignorant classmates will amount to some material for next week. None of us are particularly excited about spending a weekend in school, and we’ve grumbled about it to one another, offering actual shoulders of support. Which is a decent segue into how close my class and I have become, literally.
Touch is, like, powerful. Not just punches in the face or handjobs, but even basic touch. If you’re a human and you’re reading, you know this. It’s why you get that icky crawl-out-of-your-skin feeling when somebody you don’t like brushes by you in the hallway, or why you get that awesome crawl-out-of-your-clothes feeling when your crush’s arm brushes yours in the elevator. The therapeutic application of touch is like harnessing that energy and attempting to use it for good, and getting paid for it, ideally. But in order to get to that point, you need to sit in several classrooms naked, touching the same seventeen people for five days a week, four hours a day. (Well, not including lectures.)
All of my fellow students and I are from different areas of New York, with different backgrounds, work histories, races, age groups, levels of attractiveness, propensity for THC intoxication during school hours, and so on. It’s basically like some omniscient being took a subway car and dumped a bunch of its riders into a trade school. Other than living in the same state and being bipeds, we couldn’t be more different. One would never think we’d get along beyond borrowing pens or comparing anatomy notes. But it turns out that if you spend hours in skin-to-skin contact with someone, something strange happens, and I don’t just mean an awkward breakfast a few hours later.
Performing any kind of touch therapy releases a unicorn rainbow of neurons and norepinepherine into the body from the medulla oblongata, namely. This feels damn good. One of the cool things about the autonomic nervous system is that it doesn’t discriminate between amateur massage performed by a beauty school dropout or a $200/hour deep tissue fusion massage performed by a skilled LMT. That doesn’t stop the Touch Research Institute in Miami from analyzing the impact of touch ad nauseum. MRI data in one of their myriad studied the activation of the orbitofrontal cortex and the caudate cortex during touch, as well as the biochemical and physiological responses such as a drop in cortisol levels and the release of oxytocin into the body. Translation: touching is good for socioemotional bonding and physical well-being, yo.
So for the sixteen of us, as different as we all are, the hours spent under each other’s hands, being groped like doorknobs in the dark, has led to a fast, and somewhat stunning bond…and I’m correlating the two. We seem to get along on a level that we otherwise wouldn’t, and I don’t just mean that we help each other get stuck bags of chips out of the vending machine or lend one another our notes to catch up when we miss a class. I believe this is because of the amount of time we spend with our hands all over each other like little monkeys picking nits off of each other’s backs.
We travel as a pack during break. We trade glances in class like we’ve been friends for years. We’re extremely affectionate, touching each other on the shoulder or arm when we want to get one another’s attention. Maybe all classes or groups of people are like this? I went to a conservatory for college, where competition and being an asshole were prerequisites, and where you didn’t touch your fellow students, unless you drank too much Zima or were doing a read-through with stage directions.
My massage therapy colleagues and I are more like a cult. A touchy-feely, super-nurturing cult, despite our obvious differences. I think this is how hippies happen.
Of course, this could just be personal psychological projection. I might be looking for the importance of touch outside of the research done by TRI, and I might just be sensitive to how I interact with living things other than my dog. Regardless, it’s kind of nice to have student-to-student relationships include the variety of tactile recognition that I usually associate with dating.
Yeah, I think this is a convoluted enough happy ending. On that note, I’ve gotta go study for my upcoming quizzes before I’m taught about Emotions and Bodywork. Oh the irony. Hold tight.
