Massage & Bodywork

July/August 2013

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free your focus It does us no good to be focused on our own body, stuck in our own thoughts. Nor is it ideal to be focused entirely, slavishly, on our clients. I was one of these students—eager to work as deep as possible and thrilled by the praise I received. But what I see now is that my careful massage strokes were also a means of stroking my own ego. My desire to help was sincere, but distracting. I saw clients in terms of how I could reshape them, like stunning, shimmering possibilities rather than people who had their own needs. Such vanity would carry me away, down paths of my own devising, and I would ignore the much simpler needs of the body in front of me. After graduating from massage school, I was hired by a wonderful wellness center. I was thrilled to start working. My first day, I calmed my zeal enough to introduce myself to my client and get his intake information. I came into the room and began to apply oil to his back. About two minutes later, my low back was burning with pain. It ached so much that I seriously considered stopping the session. I thought about the loans I had to pay off. I wondered if I would ever be able to do this for a living. I winced and kept on going. Finally, about midway through the session, I realized that I was the source of my pain. I was so eager for my career to begin, so determined to push my way into this (poor, unsuspecting) client, that my whole body was rigid and tense. I was barely breathing. I gradually coaxed my paraspinal muscles out of their taut, hyperaware state of attention and allowed myself to exhale. The pain began to dissipate. Slowing the swing When we know how to fix our clients, as I thought I did, we typically force our way into their body. Our mental hubris becomes physical exertion. We expend more effort than we should and that excess 64 massage & bodywork july/august 2013 tension, that "too-muchness," builds up within us. We start to ache. It was only by loosening up, by not being as focused, that I was able to complete that first massage. If I had continued in that hyperalert state, desperate to do a great job, then I would not still be practicing today. That intense desire—what I have called a faulty, or excessive, focus—can mar our careers. The coupling of passion and ego can become counterproductive. Once we believe we know best, our clients suffer. And gradually, so do we. We think of being stuck in a rut as part of getting burned out, as what happens when we stop caring. But I think we can also get stuck in a rut of focus. We can get stuck trying to do too much, trying to be too good. An impassioned desire to help can lead to selfrighteousness when clients don't respond as we think they should. "I want to help so badly," we think to ourselves, and then ponder, "why isn't my client amazed by my work?" After a while, we start to pay less attention. We feel unappreciated. From there, it is a short distance to dreading our shifts at the spa or feeling annoyed rather than elated when we book a full day of private clients. Our focus shifts from faulty to frayed. But that shift is not final. Our stereotypical image—that slow, steady, inevitable decline toward burnout—is not an accurate representation of our careers. There is no identifiable moment when you stop being an engaged, happy therapist and become an unengaged, unhappy therapist. Instead, the more complicated reality is that both of these capacities are always present within us. Too much focus and too little focus exist as two sides of the same coin. They are counterproductive in their extreme forms, but in proper proportion they are both essential.

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