Issue link: https://www.massageandbodyworkdigital.com/i/77424
STAYING GROUNDED One reason being grounded is such an issue for some people who practice bodywork may be that they are more mentally oriented to the living, self-aware, self- moving body as an object than they are to it as an experience (soma). People who use ideas and imagining as a way of being grounded tend to remain tenuously grounded. They are often subject to feeling ungrounded in their work and in life, in general, despite their best intentions. One common grounding visualization has toxins, or toxic feelings, flowing from the body into the ground. Other visualization techniques involve fields of white light, subtle barriers, or imagining a grounding cord going from the solar plexus into the center of the Earth. While these are perfectly adequate grounding techniques, some therapists are left a little "untethered" with the results. There's a reason for this. Being grounded has to do with a person's control of their own faculties, with their degree of functional awakening and integration, and with how they take in and process memory impressions. Being grounded in this sense doesn't have to do with the flow of anything. When people ground themselves, many think they are avoiding a toxicity that accumulates or flows into them from a client (as a substance or energy flows). Actually, I would argue that grounding protects us from a functional pattern induced by harmonic resonance between people; it's the pattern that must be addressed, not a substance. To ground yourself, from this perspective, means to avoid getting caught in a resonance pattern that exists both as a physiological state and as residual memory imprints in the body. SOMATIC CONTAGION Everybody has had the experience of seeing someone yawn and then feeling a yawn coming on themselves. The same is true of laughter, fear, attitudes in general, and, in fact, any other activity. Whether we think in terms of "monkey see, monkey do," or "the morphogenetic field," there is a kind of contagion—a communication of experiential states—from person to person. You can't shield against that kind of contagion—not with white light, imaginary force fields, chakra balancing, or grounding cords. If you put your attention on someone who is experiencing one state or another, you start to experience that person's state. Your balanced chakras start to resonate with theirs and pretty soon begin to mimic the contagion. Neurophysiological research has come up with an explanation for the phenomenon: mirror neurons—an actual type of neuron that causes a person to feel inwardly what he or she is outwardly perceiving. Call it the Law of Oneness, if you like, or Multiplicity in Oneness. It's a product of harmonic resonance between people. The logic of bodywork makes bodyworkers especially subject to that kind of contagion with their clients. THE LOGIC OF BODYWORK If you put your attention on a client, and are sufficiently free of your own "stuckness," you experience their state. The logic of bodywork is about working on someone. You are doing something to someone and they are "being done to," by you. When you're working on a client, what you are working on is their state of adaptation, or their memory patterns expressed through the physical body as patterns of physiological function, such as muscular tension, circulation, myofascial pattern, cycles of organ DEEPER EXPLORATION Clearly, the subject of somatic contagion and somatic education can be explored with even further depth. As a starter book, I would recommend Thomas Hanna's Somatics: Reawakening the Mind's Control of Movement, Flexibility, and Health, which explains somatic education more technically and provides written instruction in a basic series of somatic exercises. 46 massage & bodywork january/february 2011