Welcome to the journey
I’ve been teaching and writing about living in our body for just about as long as I've been a massage practitioner. I started with the minimal training that was required to practice in a non regulated jurisdiction - essentially the 90 hour continuing education course from the local community college - giving me the credentials to practice in my city, anywhere else in our Canadian province that didn’t have massage regulation.
I quickly learned the limitations of that training, and its gift. I had lots of questions about what made the work I was doing effective, and had a tabula rasa, an empty canvas on which to ask those questions.
So, I started journaling each session as an inquiry, using the experiences to explore questions like: Why did a technique that worked well with one person not work with the next, or in the next session with the same person? My search for answers lead me to the discovery of the developing field of ‘bodywork’ the wild world of somatic practices, many of them developing in the hermetic crucible of northern California, who were exploring new techniques that appeared to address some of those questions.
I started workshopping those ideas with willing participants - my clients, other practitioners - who helped me think through the techniques and their application to massage practice. I wrote about my ideas in trade magazines and got letters from practitioners in the field as well as related field such as psychologists.
I also took these questions into my own personal work, entering eight years of therapy with a feminist and body influenced Jungian therapist who taught me to be present to my own process when I engaged with others. And I augmented this training with other psychological therapies that helped me become more conversant in the relationship between body and being.
Through this process, I became a voice in upgrading standards in massage therapy locally and internationally, developed as two year massage school as a demonstration program on the integration of somatic principles and mainstream massage therapy training - in short, a guy who had levered himself from the least amount of academic training to a position as a voice for new ways of looking at the integration of massage and other somatic practices. Of course, I eventually had to go back to school and acquire upgraded credentials in classical massage therapy but the essential questions that have driven my exploration of the body through a massage practice remain the reason why I am still doing this work 40 years later.
Taking Somatic Practice home
Why should you be interested in my personal journey, and why would a massage therapist’s experience be of interest in every day life?
There’s a lot of ways of learning to be more present in the world, being a mensch as they would say in Yiddish. And it turns out that being more present to the sensations of your body, just as you are, just happens to be one of those. As I journal about my experience engaging with the struggles for integrity in the bodies of others, you’ll notice that the most important thing I’m talking about is how I process that experience in my own body. Turns out you don’t need to be a body centred professional to make use of my reports from the trenches of body engagement. It’s probably going to be a good companion to practices you might already practice such as yoga or meditation, or just trying to live a decent, open hearted life.
What I’m asking of you
This is a free sub stack. Well, almost free.
What I've gained from my work in this area over 40 years has depended a lot on the voice of people like you. I open my thinking, deepen my responses all because your engagement with the ideas I explore move something within your too. So think of your responses as payment for this service. And as a ‘pay it forward’ to enrich this field for people who will come after us.
This is a work in process
Think of this newsletter as a first draft of a writing project. Lots of room to spitball, grow ideas and even change the direction of the plot. If you have ever been in a workshop with me you would know that there are truly no stupid questions, or wrong answers. I believe that trust is earned, continually, and that because I make mistakes, being willing to be vulnerable works both ways.
I look forward to hearing from you on this journey.
Now, back to work!