Palpate This

We're finally learning how to palpate in my Massage II class, and it's both an extremely exciting and extremely frustrating adventure.

Palpating is the action of examining a person through touch, a seeking out of any abnormalities with the hand and fingertips. It is probably one of the most integral abilities a massage therapist needs to develop in order to be successful. And learning it just reinforces how amazing the power of touch can be.

When palpating, the body becomes a sort of Braille to the massage therapist, and strangely, they kind of "blind" themselves to all other senses, directing all these seeing-energies into their sense of touch which allows them to "read" their client's body kind of like a book of Braille, seeking out explanations of what is going on in there, reading their muscles and tendons and the history and wear placed upon them.

Or perhaps a better analogy would be the story of the Princess and the Pea--as massage therapist, you are trying to fine-tune your sense of touch so that you can easily find that pea, regardless of whether or not it's hidden between twenty mattresses and twenty eider-down beds.

Learning to palpate makes you very quickly realize how unfamiliar you are with the nooks and crannies of your own body. Someone who is skilled at palpation can very quickly zero in on a pea-sized knot of muscle tissue that you didn't even know existed and which, when pressed upon, can make your whole body twitch in pain. And you can do the same for someone else, stumbling across a node or trigger point that they weren't even aware of. We are so unfamiliar with the composition of what we lug around every day that it it's almost startling when you come to realize how little intimacy you have with what hinges you so physically to the world around you.

It is such a powerful thing to be able to palpate a person, but it is also extremely frustrating because *it is not easy*, and as someone who is in their first year of massage therapy, it is even more difficult because you're not yet familiar with what you're *supposed* to be feeling when you palpate (muscles, tendons, organs, bone, etc.) so you often find yourself *thinking* you've stumbled across an area that needs work when in reality, you're just feeling something that's *supposed* to be there. For example, last night, being the big nerd I am, I'd be like, "I feel something! I feel something!" and it would end up being a fricking rib. Talk about anticlimactic.

But I am getting better--I found a couple trigger-points in T____'s back last night in class. If you hold down a really surly, painful trigger point for a long time, it will jump and buck beneath your fingertip, kinda like a wild horse or two people fucking. Unfortunately, I could not get any of hers to do this, which was a bit disappointing. But I was pleased that I am starting to read people's tender areas and muscle aches through my fingertips. (If you would like me to poke at your trigger points sometime, just lemme know, as I would love to see if I can make you get all twitchy underneath my fingertips--it's so much fun.)

I am a very very touch-oriented person. And, though I'm not sure why, I often find myself feeling starved for touch, like I've gone for weeks or months without having quenched this thirst. So just the simplest placement of a hand on my shoulder, a hand on my thigh, a hug, etc. is filled with a potent and powerful surge of emotions and meaning to me, be they good or bad, sexual or non-. Some days I feel as though I'm going to crack open, as though my emotions will come pouring forth, just from the simplicity of a hand against my skin. Some days such a small gesture can literally make me just want to cry.

I feel so much more connected to other people and the world around me when I can feel it running beneath my fingertips. So I really am finding myself at home in these classes, just being able to touch and be touched. And I like the ease at which our boundaries are slipping away as well--we don't even think twice anymore about reaching out and touching someone, palpating them, massaging their shoulders, even just extending a gentle hand to place on their back in reassurance. It is quite a lovely thing, these connections.

Learning to palpate is kinda like being a seer of some strange sort, like you have divine powers that no one else has. It's kind of like divining someone's history just from touching them, like you're reading them and understanding them more closely than they are themselves. And it has a kind of strange intimacy to it.

I am also coming to realize that this is probably what makes me feel all mushy and gushy sometimes towards my instructor--not any huge erotica, but just the intimacy of his very careful touch, and the fact that he uses touch with such ease that it seems almost otherworldy and, thus, extremely powerful.

Touch is such a terribly intimate thing, and we all read it differently, sometimes reading it correctly, sometimes misinterpreting. But regardless of how we read it, it is unavoidably a connection to the person doing the touching. And the connection never fails to be an amazing and powerful one.