My mother was right: When you've got nothing left, all you can do is get into silk underwear and start reading Proust.
Jane Birkin
...or spend one night in bed with Brigitte Bardot. As a much older male literary friend once said to me , one night with Brigitte Bardot would make up for not reading Proust and answer any existential questions one would have about life and meaning.
Unfortunately most of don't have that luxury and so the next best thing to do is to try and read Proust.
‘À la recherche du temps perdu’ (In Search of Lost Time) is a novel dedicated thoroughly and deeply to love. In a sense, it serves as a compendium of the different ways we can love, do love, and should love. Of course, one of its central insights is into the ways that we shouldn’t love - whether that means loving the wrong person or in the wrong way. If you’ve ever wondered whether Proust is more about love or heartbreak you realise, once you’ve actually read him, you realise you can’t cleanly separate the two. Proust routinely explores the very specific strain of sadness that can only occur in romance. In doing so it is also in part about virtue, vice, prejudice, and folly.
Reading Proust expands your universe and your inner life for at the core is a set of big, wonderful, difficult questions about life. Here are a few of them: how we can feel at home in the world; how we can find genuine connection with other human beings; how we can find enchantment in a world without God or if indeed is it possible; how art can transform our lives; whether an artist’s life can shed light on her work; what we can know about reality, other people, and ourselves; when not knowing is better than knowing; who we are really, deep down; what memory tells us about our inner world; why it might be good to think of our life as a story; and how we can feel like a single, unified person when we are torn apart by competing desires and change over time.
Moreover to read Proust is to read about ourselves through someone else trying - and ultimately failing, as we all fail - to capture the past. We are interested in our pasts, not least because our past has made us what we are. Our past is filed with treasures and disappointments, missed opportunities, and regrets, all of which fascinate us: the full value of the treasures can never be recovered, but as compensation we have the rest to mull over as we sip our tea and take a bite of a Madeleine.
Touch is the sensory mode which integrates our experiences of the world and of ourselves. Even visual perceptions are fused and integrated into the haptic continuum of the self; my body remembers who I am and how I am located in the world. My body is truly the navel of my world, not in the sense of the viewing point of the central perspective, but as the very locus of reference, memory, imagination and integration. All the senses, including vision, are extensions of the tactile sense; the senses are specialisations of skin tissue, and all sensory experiences are modes of touching, and thus related to tactility. Our contact with the world takes place at the boundary line of the self through specialised parts of our enveloping membrane.
Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses
Of all sensory modalities vision is the coldest and most distant, the one most conducive to the idealist illusions which de-materialize irritation and precipitate the phantasm of autonomous subjectivity. Vision is so pregnant with incipient rationalization that it tends to involve an inherent negative reflex, exaggerating its difference from touch . This is why scopophiliac investments are not libidinal tropisms like any other, but compromises; coaxing drives into the domesticated state associated with representation, and by this means constraining them to teleology.
I love you in these apple tides, the swell and bloom of first creation, come to where the whispers, no more veiled, divine to soar—the press, the haven, ever to be yours, as breaths do sigh...
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2021 was awarded jointly to David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian "for their discoveries of receptors for temperature and touch".
Barbara Sharp Lmt
Regarding the actual application of this work by massage therapists, I still remember this 4 year old post by Sandy Fritz and Jason Erickson :
KIND OF A RANT.
A recent post by Jason Erickson is an excellent way of describing the progression of experience from basic entry level practice to a more skilled or "advanced" practice of therapeutic massage. Why there is such confusion over this concept has befuddled me for years. The textbooks I write have also reflected this progression of skills for over 20 years. I did not make this up-- I learned it, primarily from two of my greatest teachers, Dr. Leon Chaitow and Dr. Gurivitch. It does not matter what you call it or how fancy and complex you make the application-massage/manual therapy is some sort of push or pull period. The push/pull creates mechanical force that acts on the tissues by moving or deformation. If you are attempting a focused outcome, then the push/pull should target the physiology and interact with the anatomy to mimic normal to support homeostasis. So if you think superficial fascia needs to slide better in an area you need to be on the superficial fascia.
If the outcome is better sleep then the focus needs to be on breathing function and autonomic nervous system balance.The nervous system is always involved but so are all the other aspects of homeostatic balance. Nothing works independently. I really get frustrated as an educator about too much focus on needing to learn muscle/skeletal specific anatomy. First, muscles are rarely the driver of dysfunction. Functional movement involved in stability, mobility, adaptive capacity and involving ALL body systems is important to understand--not the specific attachments of an individual muscle that does not really exist anyway. Second, only knowing the names of the individual parts does not lead to understand the dynamic ongoing shifts in physiology based on adaptive demand. I also get frustrated when it is put forth that all that needs to be addressed is the nervous system because it is responsible for everything. It is not.
We function as a dynamic, interconnected, multidimensional network constantly communicating, responding, and adapting. Everything massage does is a stimulus. The physiology takes it from there as does the individuals perception, experiences, support system, resiliance and understanding of the function.
This does not mean that education should not be rigorous and that a solid understanding of anatomy and physiology is not important. How can we can use massage to support "normal" if we do not know what normal is and then understand each individual’s expression of that normal because of our marvelous ability to adapt and compensate and function.
We are just too full of ourselves if we think we can fix anything. There is something important about the experience of a full body general massage with satisfying pressure, a rhythmic approach by a compassionate, quiet practitioner that is focused on the outcome of the total experience. Wellbeing and pleasure is extraordinarily therapeutic. It really twists my fascia when people down grade the outcome of relaxation and wellbeing. It is the most valuable outcome massage provides. It gives me adhesions when people express spa massage as less than "medical " massage. "Medical" is an environment--not a method. "Medical” implies advanced method------ but that is not true.
A complex client required simplification of approach--- not complication. A complex client needs skill massage with ongoing adaptation based on that individual client’s experience. AND--clients with complex issues benefit most from the palliative approach to care-relaxation, wellbeing and pleasure.
Maybe this new generation of massage therapists will actually embrace therapeutic massage and proudly support the focus on wellbeing it provides without having to make it a constant “intervention to fix” something that is likely resourceful compensation anyway and should be supported instead of removed. My generation of massage practice has a few of us who get it. But we also spawned the mentality of -physical therapist want-to -be—because ego was unsettled with the ongoing confusion with the sex trade and looking for separation and a therapeutic identity. Those who think they have created some new form of massage or bodywork or manual therapy need a reality check. As Jason said and I and some others of my generation have said for years—it is intelligent application of basics that expresses expertise—NOT THE METHOD.
Being advanced is about the time and commitment to the practice of therapeutic massage, how each client teaches us, how we learn from looking up information and using critical thinking. It is asking intelligent questions and seeking intelligent responses and being around practiced experienced massage therapists that remain current and up-to day with information and research changes --not so much what we do--but changes how we think and that are proud to be massage therapists.
Jason's Post On Massage Therapy: I don't think there are any advanced methods or modalities. There are only varying levels of sophistication in the reasoning behind the way the therapist works. A gliding stroke applied because it's part of a routine is basic work. A gliding stroke applied because that direction, speed, level of pressure, angle of application, start and end points, and timing are being tailored to the individual client at that moment is advanced work.To the client, they might feel very similar, perhaps identical. There's no reason why basic and advanced work have to feel different. But, a therapist who understands what they're doing well enough to do advanced work is more likely to be successful in practice. Therefore, students should be encouraged and challenged to develop more advanced thinking skills and a deeper understanding of the methods they have learned, rather than told that some modalities are advanced and others are not.
The role of peripheral and unfocused vision in our lived experience of the world, as well as in our experience of interiority in the spaces we inhabit, has also evoked my interest. A remarkable factor in the experience of enveloping spatiality, interiority and hapticity is the deliberate suppression of sharp focused vision. This issue has hardly entered the theoretical discourse of architecture as architectural theorising continues to be interested in focused vision, conscious intentionality and perspectival representation. The very essence of the lived experience is moulded by unconscious haptic imagery and unfocused peripheral vision. Focused vision confronts us with the world whereas peripheral vision envelops us in the flesh of the world. Alongside the critique of the hegemony of vision, we need to reconsider the very essence of sight itself and the collaboration of the various sensory realms.
Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses
