I recently attended the Bodyology one-day intro to massage taster. Recommended! The instructor Dror was excellent, with a teaching style correctly based around telling you why things are done the way they are, and then giving you lots of time to practise finding how your own hands best achieve the goals.

Why did I try massage?

1. The ever-present desire to find meaning (c.f. applying for the RAF reserves); it’s common knowledge that directly and viscerally helping others is something that people find very meaningful.
2. Wouldn’t that be a neat skill to be able to reveal that you’re bizarrely, impossibly good at! (“Sometimes, magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.”)

Interesting lessons

• Move from the legs. This is obvious every single time it comes up anywhere, and it comes up all the time, but somehow I still never generalise the lesson so that I know it without being told in any given situation.
• I find it really stressful to have no real-time feedback on what I’m doing. Pretty much everything I do has a tight feedback loop, but the feedback loop for massage is really long: it breaks the immersion to be constantly using your mouth-words during the session, and if the victim is face-down then your only source of feedback is literally just “try to read someone’s back”, unless you are much more empathic than I am (which would certainly come with practice). I was a lot more relaxed when my subject and I were maintaining pretty constant verbal communication.
• This is even worse for head massage, where the subject tends to fall asleep (or get very close to it), which I guess is a positive signal but also is a complete lack of any other signals.
• Massage also gives you no objective feedback, so it falls into the category of “things where my System 1 expects explicit positive feedback to be false”. I can’t stop myself interpreting other people’s feedback as “this person is trying to make you feel better about your terrible performance”, at least without a bit of time getting to know that person first.
• Cultural hangups around grabbing a woman by the neck. There was an entire session on neck/traps/shoulder massage, and it took me a solid two minutes before I was able to grip the spinal erectors hard enough to have any massage-related effect at all. This is hard to do when for thirty years you’ve had a culture screaming “YOU WILL NOT GRAB A WOMAN BY THE NECK” at you! (I also suspect I was under more internal strain than I explicitly felt, because I choked up slightly when I gave a sentence explaining my light touch afterwards.)
• A massage often begins with a simple laying-on-of-hands. This is actually a communication channel! Take it slow: you’re greeting the subject, setting the terms of engagement, letting yourself adjust to their rhythm (mainly their breathing). A therapist who moves their hands around feels indecisive, and remember that time will feel like it’s passing faster for the therapist because they’re upright and in control. Different people communicate different things this way, which surprised me a lot. I really felt (for example) that, while I was the demo subject, the instructor was saying hello to me through his hands, and that I was replying through my body’s breathing movement. (One breathing cycle lasts many seconds; if the therapist moves their hands before you’ve even finished one breath, that actually feels pretty rude: they’re literally interrupting your communication.) By contrast, during a practice session, someone gave me a very firm and assertive greeting, “I am in control” (which is certainly not bad, it’s just very different!).
• Sunflower oil works just fine as a massage oil; in fact the instructor recommended it over other oils.