Self-massage
{A Written Practice}
Self-massage
A simple way to settle the nervous system
Self-massage is one of those things that people forget about. Yet it is free, easy to do, powerfully healing, and particularly if you don’t like being touched by strangers, or if there is no one else around, solves those problems. Because the skin is a major conduit into the Autonomic Nervous system, and because of Hilton’s law, which states that “the nerves that innervate a joint innervate the muscles and skin superficial to it,” giving yourself pressure around joints, specifically, e.g., squeezing and compression, transfers into the ANS. There are a variety of Chinese self-massage techniques that include touch compression of joints. Take a minute to just squeeze the joints of your fingers, palms, wrists, elbows, and shoulders on each side of your body with the opposite hand, and drink the sensations. What do you notice? Powerful, no?
Now extend that touch to compression of the muscles of the forearms and the upper arms. You can feel it feeding into the body. It is a way of rapidly changing the neural inputs to your whole system. Don’t be shy, no one is watching. What does it feel like to give yourself a hug? What does it feel like to hold our hands over our hearts and just breathe into that? What does it feel like to cradle our own heads in our hands? To massage the junction where our skull meets our necks, another under-utilized portal into the mindbody connection?
If you want to be able to get to your back, there is an S-shaped self-massage tool called the Body Back Buddy that looks rather like a medieval torture device, but is extremely effective in giving you the leverage to dig into your own back and shoulders. It lets you sit on the couch and massage the inside of your shoulder blades, which, although uncomfortable, is something people generally pay a lot of money for.
Introduce a yoga mat, and a ball, a block, or a roller, and the force of gravity, and you can use self-massage on all the other parts of your body. Lots of animals like to do this. If you've never seen a bear or a porcupine give themselves a back massage against a tree you are truly missing out.
An ancilllary benefit, something as psychological as it is physical, is that touching ourselves is reassuring. When we've been startled, scared, frightened, terrorized...when we have responded to threat by moving into a defensive state, often our bodies don't really know that we are ok. Touching ourselves can help us bring the body back to awareneess, back to sensitivity, back to presence. People talk about leaving their bodies during frightening and overwhelming experiences, and this happens, but our bodies can also shift out of connection in very localized ways. Touching ourselves, and particularly caressing, is a way to call the body back in its own language: the language of sensation. Touching ourselves, gripping ourselves, feeling the surface of our own bodies and the depths of our own bodies is way to call us back to Life.
Related Practices:
This is related to all things Polyvagal, as well as ancestral childrearing technologies. See Healing Neglect. See Cello. See Hold Tight to Littles. See Weighted Blanket. See Interocept. It is a way to Change the Inputs to your nervous system. See the Science of Safety (Polyvagal Theory). See Clinical Applications of Polyvagal Theory. If you'd like a brief introduction to the theory, visit our Brief Illustrated Guide to Polyvagal Theory. For a comprehensive exploration of the theory with its developer, see The Future of Medicine and Mental Health, with Dr. Stephen Porges, PhD. See Polyvagal Mapping. With regard to healing traumas and down-shifting other distress states, see Healing Trauma, Coming out of Fight, Coming out of Flight, Coming out of Appease.Photography: | Licensed from Pexels.com, used with permission.