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2. WHY YOU NEED MASSAGE:

So why is it a good idea to get a massage?  Just apart from the official list of documented medical benefits, such as it increases circulation, reduces heart rate and blood pressure, and that sort of thing, is that the great benefit of massage is that while you are getting a massage, your mind is turned away from the constant flow of your own thoughts, many of them not so great to experience, to the perception of the touch of the hand of your massage practitioner, so the thought process turns down, both the number of thoughts and the volume, the noise of thoughts in your mind expressed in words, and what your mind becomes filled with instead is the extremely pleasant experience of the touch of someone who really knows what they’re doing, how to make touch a really pleasant and absorbing experience, so you get a break from the noise and disturbance of your own mind, the intellect and judgments and worries and anxieties, and you enter into a state of deep relaxation, a mental state that’s in between the ordinary consciousness of daily life and sleep.

 

It’s a special state,  it’s called the relaxation response, and there’s been quite a bit of research done on this, how beneficial it is to go into a state of deep relaxation for a while, among many benefits being that it allows people who have been unable to sleep to naturally fall into sleep. Your attention is turned away from your pressing and pressuring thoughts, and towards the input coming from one of your senses, the sense of touch, a sense that most people don’t ordinarily pay that much attention to. And it’s worth pointing out that the reason many people abuse drugs and alcohol is precisely to achieve that same effect – relief from their own thoughts.  And massage can do it in an entirely natural and healthy way.  

 

I personally feel that nothing beats the touch of the human hand.  I don’t use implements or stones or vibrators or anything like that, my clients are paying for my hands, and that’s what I use.  It’s like in modern popular music, there are very few instrumental breaks anymore, because it’s known that nothing holds the listeners’ attention like the sound of the human voice, and I know that nothing holds the clients’ attention like the touch of the hand.  It’s the best.

 

And in my practice, I am a general massage therapist, I don’t normally get into anything too technical, but the number one problem I am hired to fix is tense shoulders and neck from working on the computer, and massage is great for that, it’s classic to relax the shoulders with a nice shoulder rub. And then number two is actually pain in the sciatic nerve, which is very often caused by a cramped piriformis muscle in the hip pinching the sciatic nerve which runs right underneath it.  People can have nerve pain and numbness in their legs and lower back for years, and they won’t realize that the cause of it is simply a cramp in the muscle called the piriformis, which lies underneath the gluteus maximus, and when the piriformis becomes cramped, it has a tendency to just stay cramped and it can stay cramped for weeks and months and years and then one massage will allow it to relax.  And within a day or two or three, the pain in the sciatic nerve is gone.  And that’s one of the most satisfying things that I do, because with that work I can help somebody with a problem that may have been really bothering them, sometimes for years. So that’s great, that’s the release of piriformis syndrome.

 

And then, some people may have a painful cramp in some part of their body that is not letting go, this sort of cramp is also called a spasm.  And this is often caused by a reaction called “muscle guarding.”  When you’re about to do something where you’re about to seriously injure yourself, dislocate some bones or tear a muscle, your nervous system will stop you from doing it by suddenly contracting a muscle, putting that muscle into an intense cramp.  And this will work, it will save you from doing something that the body really can’t do without a serious muscle injury.  So instead of a torn muscle, you end up with a cramped muscle.  And this muscle guarding reaction can also happen when you experience a sudden impact.   The muscles will go into an intense contraction, which makes them shorter and stronger, and this will keep your bones from flying apart from the force of the impact. So when you have a deep cramp that was caused by the body’s effort to protect itself from an oncoming injury, massage can be really good at getting in there and releasing that cramp.  And then, I see a lot of travelers, because massage is great for relieving the lingering discomfort of a long plane trip.  If you’re alone in your hotel room in a strange city with some high intensity meetings planned for the next day, massage is great for taking away the aches and pains of the flight, and letting you get a good nights sleep.

 

So those are some of the things I do.  And then of course there are the standard medical benefits of massage, just to list them quickly – reduces blood pressure and heart rate, relieves tension headaches, increases venous and lymph flow, enhances joint mobility and flexibility, stimulates parasympathetic functioning – that refers to the relaxation effect that I already described – which improves digestion, reduces pain, pain of all sorts coming from the muscles and nervous system, especially the pain of pinched nerves that are being squeezed by a tense muscle, stimulates endorphin release – those are the body’s natural pain killers, increases immune function, increases mental clarity, reduces anxiety, and promotes a general feeling of well being.  So that’s it, that’s my personal summary, so I hope you give me a call.  Thanks for listening.