The Laughing Giraffe

So what really causes tension? This of course, is the $ 64,000 question for all Massage therapists. In fact,

Healers, healthcare practitioners and therapists from all over the world grapple with this one on a daily basis.

The thing is this…. supposing the answer was actually very simple?



Image with kind permission from *fiiish* art uk

In the Bodywork world, tension is synonymous with tightness. If, for example, you subscribe to the religion of ‘Trigger points’ as the CAUSE of all tension, you only have to look a little deeper into what causes a trigger point and what releases a trigger point to soon realise that trigger points are simply the result of tension, not the cause.

Mostly, Massage therapists are dealing with chronic and latent tension or trigger points… Only rarely will we be dealing with tension that is the result of a sudden and recent trauma.    If that is the case, we are normally severely limited in what we can actually do through Massage. Massaging inflamed and damaged tissue is not a good idea! Unless you have specialist training in physiotherapy or sports injury rehabilitation, you need to wait until the injury is healed before looking at Massage.

What we find in the treatment room is that we are mainly dealing with either ‘old and cold’ injuries or aches and pains and sore areas. Very often these tight and painful areas contain many active trigger points. Any short or tight muscle has trigger points. Before Travell they were simply called ‘knots’.

In general what we find is that most often, these active trigger points are really only latent trigger points that have been ignored for a long time. And latent trigger points are simply the result of muscle tension. Pain = tension that has been ignored and accumulated over time.

So back to the question – what really causes the tension?

The more the muscle gets tight (and therefore full of trigger points), the more we generally restrict our movements – to avoid the pain. So instead of facing the tension head on, we generally do our best to ignore it and hope that it will just ‘go away’. Which it does – because this is a strategy that works – ignoring the body. But does it really ‘go away’?

Not at all….

Only in the short term, anyway…

Ignoring the body is only a strategy that can work in the short term. Unless we find the time and space to UNWIND this tension at a later date, what happens is this: the tension, when ignored, just sulks and burrows deeper. It ‘schemes and plots’ until it comes up with a way to really get your attention. What I mean here is a SERIOUS illness. One that can’t just be shrugged off.

In addition to this, without consciously realising it, we restrict our movements so we don’t feel the pain or discomfort anymore. We start to live a restricted life. We wake up in the morning and find ourselves living in a smaller and smaller world…

It is this restriction and fear of pain that is the beginning of serious long term illness, in my opinion. For example:

A pain in the neck which is the result of tension referring from the trigger points in the tight pectoral or trapezius muscles may (if ignored) easily go deeper and start to restrict our breathing. Over time the bits of the lungs that are not being used (because we are restricting our breathing to avoid the referred pain when we breathe deeply) start to fail to ‘clear’ the day to day debris that accumulates in the lungs of us all.



This debris attracts infection and now we are taking antibiotics on a regular basis because of all the coughing and inflammation. As the antibiotics invade the system they reduce the inflammation. However, they also clear out much of our valuable immune response chemistry and now we are failing to fight off the multitude of pathogens that have been a part of this planets ecology for millenia. Only now, modern medicine has removed our natural ability to fight off these pathogens.

Further down the line, who knows? Asthma? Pleurisy? Lung cancer?

All for the want of an easy or ‘pain free’ life.

But let us wind back the film… all the way back that referred pain in the neck from the trapezius and pectoralii muscles….

You decide to get a massage from a bodyworker that KNOWS what the answer to the $ 64,000 question is. This therapist is a simple soul who believes that cause of all tension really only comes from one thing….

THE MIND

Instead of bowing and scraping to the ‘Structural Gods’ of trigger points and ‘fixing’ the problem to help it ‘go away’, this therapists loves to simply breathe and ‘mulch’ the tissues in such a touching way that the client cannot but connect with the SOURCE of the tension in these muscles and realises, in an “aha!” moment that…

Maybe they have been pushing themselves too hard over the last 2 years and with a contented sigh decide to just ‘let go’ of the demon in their head that drives them on and on and on…

Maybe they realise that it is time to let go of anger and make the mental decision to finally forgive those who have hurt them…

Maybe it is time to let go of their anxiety for the future and once again learn to trust in the divine flow of this amazing universe and the love that keeps the world spinning in space…

Maybe it’s time to let go of the crazy idea that they need to put up with this annoying boss that they have tolerated for 20 years? Time to make the decision to simply walk away…

Tension caused by trigger points and tight muscles?

You must be “having a giraffe!”

Its all in the mind…

Happy oiling!

 

ABOUT GERRY:

Gerry has been a full time Massage therapist and teacher for over 25 years. He also qualified as a UKCP registered Psychotherapist (TA) in 1999. 

He is the creator of The NO HANDS Massage Therapy System, which is now one of the most popular Massage approaches in the UK. He has also recently launched the PSYCHOLOGY OF CHANGE, a unique new approach to making lasting change within your life. To learn more about these courses go to www.nohandsmassage.com