Issue link: https://www.massageandbodyworkdigital.com/i/1417136
Asking about comfort can be thought of as asking your client to "turn on" their insular cortex in order to investigate whether they're actually comfortable. Of course, we can scaffold this process a bit by asking in a way that evokes more than just a polite "I'm fine" response. For example, "Check in with your body. Is there a change we can make to help you be even more comfortable now? Let's take the time to get it right." When a client is in pain, or at all anxious, this attending to the insula helps reset its valence to a receptive state. As well as helping assign pleasantness/unpleasantness to an experience, the insula is thought to be involved in our sense of self and our bodily self-awareness. 4 So this simple insula-activating question not only helps tune your client's insula to a valence of "pleasant," but could also assist in tuning up overall self-awareness (the key to self- care) as well. How's the Pressure? Like the "Are you comfortable" question above, checking in about your work's pressure, pace, etc. helps keep the client's insula online and involved in your session. Asking about pressure also communicates interpersonal connection, attention, and care, which further predisposes the insula toward a "pleasant" valence. By letting your client know they have control of the pressure, for example, this question can help head off any tendency to ignore their own body sense. Asking this question can also open a simple alignment conversation around the right amount of pressure. Clients often assume that more intensity will be more effective; sometimes, more intensity is indeed more satisfying, but the key factor in helping the brain renegotiate a pain response, for example, is shifting the pleasantness/unpleasantness valence the insula assigns to the sensory experience. In other words, the pressure has to feel good to do good. What Happens if You Relax Into That? So many of massage and bodywork's beneficial effects spring to their power to help our brain reassess its protective reactions to our body's sensations. The insula assigns pleasantness or unpleasantness (including painfulness) to a given sensation by making a prediction—based largely on input from other parts of the brain, rather than from the body— about context, memories, and associations. The strength of the immediate sensory signal itself plays a much smaller role in the insula's assessment than its prediction about that sensation. This is related to how painfulness, for example, is often not proportionate to tissue injury: Hitting your finger and seeing blood evokes a much stronger pain response than a blow of the same force with no visible bleeding. The difference is the visual input (seeing blood) into the brain's assessment of painfulness. Inviting your client to actively soften into a stroke, sensation, sore spot, etc. aims to help shift the insula's protective prediction into a present-moment-based experience of the sensory signals themselves. The reaction gets teased out from the sensation, and sensations themselves are almost always easier to bear than our reactions to them. Relaxing into experience could be thought of as the essential act that helps shift the insula's "unpleasant" assessment. Framing this as an invitation or inquiry ("What happens if?") rather than as an imperative ("Relax into it, now. Relax harder!") is more likely to evoke Ironically, the hidden key to feeling better is often just "feeling, better": that is, simply refining the interoceptive, inner-sensation function of the body sense. L i s te n to T h e A B M P Po d c a s t a t a b m p.co m /p o d c a s t s o r w h e reve r yo u a cce s s yo u r favo r i te p o d c a s t s 89