Issue link: https://www.massageandbodyworkdigital.com/i/885423
A B M P m e m b e r s e a r n F R E E C E a t w w w. a b m p . c o m / c e b y r e a d i n g M a s s a g e & B o d y w o r k m a g a z i n e 55 are receiving and be willing to respond to that. This trust develops over time, as we build a library of sensation and track treatment outcomes. Assessment becomes "taking a baseline," to borrow a concept from Emilie Conrad's Continuum Movement method. It's asking, "What is happening in this body right now?," rather than measuring against a set of standards. Evaluation and the treatment become more of a conversation (sometimes including words, sometimes silent) than executing a plan. Assessment is repeated at the close of the session, not to see "how the plan worked," but to notice what this new moment's baseline is, providing feedback to both the client and practitioner. For those of us who are trained to "do to" our clients and accustomed to crafting and executing a plan, this can be a challenge! But it's a challenge worth exploring. It leaves us open to finding out more information without being limited by what we already know. With this expansive awareness, our touch can be more sensitive and flexible to meet the needs of clients at each moment in time. When we are palpating from a place of allowing information to come into our hands, we are able to identify more clearly when there is something novel or different from what we're used to feeling. In a recent multihands session (where a client has more than one therapist in a session), we were with a new client who reported having several abdominal surgeries in the last year. She told us she had a high pain threshold and made light of the surgeries as if they were not all that significant. On assessment, we noted her abdomen was relaxed, without much fascial tightness. This itself was interesting, because usually with abdominal surgeries there is a lot of tightness and many directions of pull. Given our client's ease on the table and her lighthearted tone (and the fact that CST is performed with clothes on), it might have been easy not to appreciate just how extensive these surgeries were. As we stayed with the tissue, we noticed that in addition to that uncanny ease of motion, there was something else we couldn't quite identify in a large section along the midline. With a few general inquiries about her surgeries and no answer to what we were feeling, we continued working in silence for several minutes. The client then suddenly said, "Well, they took out so much scar tissue and so much of my skin they did have to use pig skin to close the wound in the last surgery." All of a sudden what we were feeling made sense, and we were able to treat that area with more precision. Much of the rest of the session involved the client feeling beyond her own tissue and into that new skin, incorporating it into the felt sense of her body. And, as a bonus, our hands now know what pig skin feels like in a human body, increasing our felt-sense library of knowledge! A MODEL IN ACTION As CST practitioners, we are accustomed to encouraging our clients' body awareness and their experience of touch and internal sensation. We recognize that it's the client's body that makes helpful change, more than any technique we can employ, so it's useful to engage them in the process. We will often ask, "What are you aware of right now?" as a prompt. Clients report that, over time, they become more aware of their bodies. Their treatments are more effective, too, because they're now better equipped to respond to their bodies' needs. When we started working together in multihands sessions, we began to ask each other the same question: "What are you aware of?" We each perform an assessment and settle in to work. Asking each other to state what we're When we are palpating from a place of allowing information to come into our hands, we are able to identify more clearly when there is something novel or different from what we're used to feeling.