Massage News: Edelson Expected to Keep Amateur Status
On December 7, I attended an Introductory Massage Workshop at the Body Therapy Institute (http://www.massage.net/). This is a one-day workshop, but BTI offers a training program (would you believe six hundred hours?) for those who want to become professional massage therapists. The introductory workshop is expressly intended to give you a sense of what the professional training is like, so that you can decide whether you are led to enroll in it.
Like most of the participants, I had been seriously considering such a career move, and I attended in order to help me to decide whether to do it. It turns out, for me, that the answer is probably "no".
This doesn't reflect a negative impression of BTI. They represent themselves as one of the best places in the country to train to be a massage therapist ... and my experience at the workshop gave me no reason to doubt that they are.
On the contrary: my leading not to enroll in the training was inspired, in large part, by a positive aspect of my experience there. Let me explain.
They make quite clear that, in their approach, massage is not just a matter of mechanics. Even if you are skilled at delivering the strokes, you won't be giving deeply effective massage therapy unless you are a "healing presence"; and that is a matter of your state of mind, your intentions, your presence for the client, as much as anything you do with your body.
They also make the point that you can't be very effective at taking care of your client unless you also take care of yourself. And, in the course of one day, I could see that this was not just a talking point: they devote real attention to ways of doing that. Some of this has to do with, yes, the mechanics: how to deliver the touch to the client in a way that doesn't put unnecessary strain on you. But it goes beyond that. Things we did in the workshop seem to point to developing practices that would help you to maintain, and re-attain when necessary, a centered sense of your own embodied self. And that supports your ability to be fully present for another.
Sounds good, huh? It does to me. How could such impressions possibly lead me away from wanting to enroll in their training?
As my previous post to this journal presumably made clear, I'm a computer geek. I really like to program; it's one of the better outlets for my creative urges, as well as for my tool-building and problem-solving instincts.
I have not liked the quality of many of the human interactions that I've had, when computing was the subject matter. In my experience, work situations in the computer field have varied from consistently awful to pretty good ... for a while. I'm not alone; many people who have worked in the field have expressed dissatisfaction with this aspect of it. Far too often, in this setting, people are treating each other as merely means to an end: as tools, like the machines themselves.
I wouldn't be the first person to leave the field for this reason, or even the first to leave it specifically to become a massage therapist. The contrast is, um, palpable. Instead of abstractions, you are dealing with the concrete here and now. And (more to my point) the person in front of you is not a means to an end; that person's well-being is your goal.
So why not? Well, for me, that would be too much like giving up. I can't let go of the idea that people, in the context of dealing with computers, don't have to treat each other so badly. I'd like to think that I could be a model of how to do it better.
I've had that ambition for a long time. The massage workshop rekindled it, because it gave me some hints as to how to do it. Remember what I said above about practices of self-care, some of which focus on regaining your sense of your embodied self? That could help you to be properly present for another person, even if you were not going to be massaging that person's body, but teaching him or her how to use a computer. Or discussing the "requirements" for a new computer program. Or various other activities in the field.
Sometimes I worry that I'm being grandiose, in thinking that I can swim so much against the tide, the established patterns of human interaction within the arena of computers. And the more so, I sometimes fear, if I think that I can have any appreciable influence on how other people do things.
We'll see, I guess.