Many times in the past I’ve marveled at a blind person’s ability to read Braille. I’ve passed my fingers over the raised characters many times while waiting for an elevator, etc., and wondered how a person can develop the sensitivity to distinguish those small dots to create meaning.
Then, this morning, I was working with a therapist who was in town for my Myofascial Mentoring Program. We were talking about the process of being able to feel deeply into a person’s body; taking huge amounts of information that is present when one places their hand on a patient and bringing meaning from that. A novice may not be able to discern any differences; all tissue may feel identical. But with training and practice, the therapist will begin to feel differences in the quality of the tissue. Taking this a step further, those differences, once pointed out to the patient, often are validated as meaningful places of pain, or ones that create pain elsewhere. The loop is closed when the therapist is able to connect their felt sense and their patient’s subjective experience of that felt sense into a validated treatment experience.
While I would never equate learning Braille with mastering the “Feel” in a therapy such as myofascial release, it does call upon the therapist to deepen their senses to a point where previously unnoticed tactile clues begin to be felt. This is the first step to being able to make changes with touch. I call it “seeing inside”. Do you have words for this experience?
A few thoughts:
In vipassana meditation we frequently practise focusing our attention on a particular point on our body and observe what is going on there. With training you can start actually drawing your attention below the surface and perceive density or lightness, pressure or pain and a multitude of other sensation
Feeling a piece of hair under increasing pieces of paper is a classic exercise for this. Also Leon chaitow wrote a comprehensive book called palpation which discusses ‘seeing inside ‘ in detail exer exercisefor
I like the word listen.
To illustrate: one may hear music in a public place and even recall that he heard music there but he did not listen to it; therefore he can not tell you what the music was.
A practitioner may place their hand on a client and feel a tight band and even recall and make a note of it in there records. But they never listened to that tight band. Did they listen to how it responded to breathing, cranio sacral rhythm, movements of other body parts?
Palpation should be to feel as listening is to hearing.
I also like the term “listen”. It has a history in the osteopathic tradition, especially as an assessment technique. I recently taught a workshop on myofascial assessment called Global Listening – Assessing Myofascial Strain Patterns.
Seeing inside is also a very apt term. There is some evidence for people using the visual cortex to interpret information from other senses, when a more complex or discreet interpretation of that information is need. One example is a man, blind from age 3 mos., who could snap his fingers, and “see” a flash of echo feedback . He can tell the distance to an object, size and shape, its surface texture, and even if it solid or less solid like a curtain. When tested in a full time MRI it was revealed that he was using his visual cortex to interpret the sound from snapping his fingers.
I am sure that as we gain more experience at palpation, relate what we feel to our patients experience of that tissue and combine that that with good assessment skills and anatomical knowledge, try to visualize what we are feeling, we build an extremely detailed picture of what is going on. We may even need to use use our visual cortex to interpret this volume of information. If so we would definitely be “seeing inside” with our fingers.
As I continue to practice there is a sense of an intuitive “see and feel,” using both the physical and the emotional. Leaving the thoughts of the day behind improves my “seeing” and “listening”.
Thank you Walt, Hans, and John!
Thanks for all of your insights. Any more?
When I was an osteopathy student many years ago, we learned Leon Chaitow’s palpation through the phonebook exercise. I was also lucky enough to have a lecturer who was very good at teaching us how to “listen”with our fingertips. Many years later, now practising massage, I still rely very heavily on that listening and have added to that, actually “feeling” (sometimes within my own body) what is going on in my client’s body. I can see in my mind what is going on under my hands and frequently get images or words to describe what is going on in their life that has contributed to the pain/contraction/ache or whatever it is they are experiencing.
Shan,
I love reading how various people both interpret and report how they gather this information. The words we choose seem to say much about how WE process information, including our preferences. Every patient we touch present this information; it is up to us to receive.
I have recently acquired a client with over active bladder. She has had appendix surgery and nothing more. I understand the fascia can restrict the bladder causing the Urge. Other than working both front and back of the pelvis any suggestions.
I would pay attention to the appendix scar, assuming it is well healed. These pelvic scars can have far-reaching effects on the bladder. Slow, sustained lower pelvic floor releases sound like another treatment choice here.