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Hi, my name's Sindhu.
The video I'm about to present is on deep tissue massage.
Now massage is probably the oldest form of therapy.
It's been around since humanity.
We've always rubbed sore muscles.
Anyone can do it.
Our hands remember how to do it.
We may have forgotten in Western civilization, but the hands remember.
As you go through this massage with me, your hands will remember and you'll be able to
do it very well.
Deep tissue massage is different from other forms of massage from Swedish, shiatsu, reiki,
in that it gets into the deeper underlying tissues where the held emotions from childhood
or wherever are.
What we're about is getting into those muscles, removing the emotions, the old stuck emotions,
releasing them.
The materials you'll need are oil.
You can buy oil from a health food shop, prepared massage oil, or you can make up your own as
I do, out of sunflower oil and a couple of drops of essential oils.
Sandalwood's good.
Wintergreen, if you've got tension in the shoulders or something.
Something like a frozen shoulder will respond to a couple of drops of wintergreen in the
oil.
It'll just help to penetrate and soften the muscle that much.
The towels are important.
If you can fold one to put under the chest, that'll drop the head forward so you can get
at the neck more.
Fold another like this and slip it under the ankles.
That takes a bit of strain off the legs.
Then we have to set the atmosphere.
This is important.
You can dim the lighting or light a candle.
Music's important.
Using new age or ambient relaxing music, classical if you like, whatever you like.
Incense I always use.
That's really useful.
Just lots of incense.
Now I suggest you pause the tape for a couple of minutes and get set up in front of the
TV.
I'm using a table because I do a lot of massages and it's easier on the back.
For a couple of massages, it's just as good on the floor.
A thin mattress, a folded blanket.
Get set up with the towels and we'll go through the massage together step by step.
We're all ready now.
We can start the massage.
Oil.
If you cup your hand, you can actually hold quite a lot of oil.
Since I'm covering the whole body, I can do it in one movement.
If I hold it in both hands, spread it, warm it, and like a butterfly, spread the oil and
down the legs.
I use quite a lot of oil.
It's just a personal preference.
We start with the foot.
Sitting here, shaking, loosening, putting the foot through its full range of movement,
something only people who live on mountains do naturally.
We tend to walk on flat pavements all the time so the ankle doesn't get exercised nearly
enough.
Do a bit of that.
Then separate these long bones that run down from each toe.
They form and bend the toes forward.
Sometimes they click.
This one's a bit tight.
This will relate to the neck.
This bit in reflex.
While we're working the foot, we could work the foot for an hour easily.
There's a lot of areas on it.
But I'll just work a couple.
Just get it loosened up and get the energy flowing through it generally.
This little point here on the inside of the instep is a little bit tight.
It's got a bit of calcification, a little lumpiness.
Just push that away.
It hurts a bit, that one.
Shake, stretch it a bit more, and massage all over it.
This bit here, the top of the foot, is in reflexological terms the lymphatic system,
the immune system.
We'll stroke that a bit, quite hard.
Then we've loosened up the foot.
We can drop that down now and look at this muscle.
Now we're getting into the bigger muscles.
These are the ones we're really concerned with.
Because this is where the emotional blockages are.
That hurts a bit.
In this one, the kidney meridian, connected with in Chinese traditional medicine, the
emotion fear.
Now there are a number of strokes we can use.
We start off effleurage, just rubbing lightly.
Then we go a little bit deeper.
Light pressure with the fingertips, deeper with the thumbs.
Up or down.
Some people say you should only work towards the heart.
This is Swedish massage, people.
Chinese that you should go with the meridians.
I go both ways.
I don't think it really matters, as long as we're just working with the muscles.
That's the intention.
I'm finding hard bits of muscle in here.
This is a very healthy body, but the muscle itself, in common with just about everyone
else's, is not that healthy.
There's hardness in there.
It's all right.
It is sore, isn't it?
Loosening all that.
A bit of a shake.
Now we can use compression.
This is compression, squeezing.
Basically squeezing the blood out, letting it flow back in, squeezing it out, letting
it flow back in.
Then we can pull the energy that we've unleashed from there out onto the skin and scrape it
off with the backs of the fingernails if you keep them short.
It's a bit softer now.
That's good.
That's really all we have to do.
Then we move on to another area.
Taking both legs from the bottom, we may as well just loosen up this one as well while
we're at it.
The thighs.
It's harder to get into thighs.
They're bigger, deeper, and we want to get quite deep in the end.
We start off on the surface because the pain's on the surface.
We'll take off that little bit and then we'll go deeper.
Just rubbing.
Do what your hands feel like doing.
Just flow with it.
I use the knuckles quite a bit on thighs just to warm it all up.
This one's really tight.
This is in the gallbladder meridian, the outside of the back.
This is the stomach down the side, the side towards the front.
The emotion associated with the stomach meridian is anxiety with the gallbladder meridian is
resentment, old anger, old stuck anger, irrelevant these days.
This is about, as I said, the calves moving forwards.
Thighs are about holding onto childhood stuff, which we may as well get rid of as efficiently
as possible.
Now, we've loosened up the muscles, warmed them up, gone in, caused a little bit of pain.
Taking it out.
That's just like chook packing.
That's what it's called.
Petrissage.
Taking it off.
We've used the fingertips, we've seen how the fingertips have been used for light pressure,
just exploratory.
Then the thumbs for a heavier, more direct pressure.
Then the knuckles, a bit tougher.
Then we go deeper in like this, tapping it first and going like this.
This really releases all the unblocked energy that we've let go.
Now we're up to the really painful bits.
Now I'm causing Helen a fair bit of pain here by going into that area.
That's because she's holding pain in there.
I'm not causing it.
It's hers.
I'm just showing her where it is, outlining it.
In the process of becoming aware of that pain, she's breathing deeply, slowly and letting
the pain out.
When I go in like this, she's breathing out and I'm breathing with her.
That way she can handle quite a lot more pain and we're releasing it.
It's going.
Take it off and flick.
That's something to remember.
Often flick the energy off your hands or you'll pick it up and it'll get stuck in your arms.
Just keep flicking it off.
We're working with something that's almost palpable.
It becomes palpable after a while.
You can feel it.
It's energy.
It's like static.
Right.
Back into here, we've got quite a lot of tension in the buttocks.
Same thing.
Going deeper.
In an anti-clockwise fashion, we're sedating this muscle.
If we go like this, we're tonifying it.
If you get a muscle that's really flaccid, lacking in time, then tonify it.
Usually it's tight bits, excess energy locked in there that we're trying to release.
Sedation, either anti-clockwise or we just sit on it.
Just go in deeper and deeper.
Hold on there while your patient breathes.
Right.
Breathing in and then out.
Apply a bit more pressure.
Again.
These are gallbladder points down here.
You can feel them.
Sitting on them takes a lot of pressure off the lower back, off the kidney area.
All lower back pain, lumbago and all that can be eased by leaning on those points for
a while, sedating out this area.
This bit over here is in the gallbladder meridian.
It's to do with resentment.
The gallbladder has to do with resentment.
Children who are forced to stay at home, look after kids when they'd rather have a career,
tend to get gallstones.
It's resentment.
It's held in here.
It's possibly sexual resentment.
This lump is in just about every female body I've ever touched.
We can get rid of it.
It hurts.
On the deep strokes, go slowly and check the breathing.
The patient's breathing with you.
They're working hard as well.
When the buttock tightens up, if I go too hard, I'll feel it go tight.
Then I have to back off a bit.
Not quite as hard, not quite as deep.
Going more slowly.
You can take a long time over this.
The standard massage will take an hour or a bit more.
You've got plenty of time.
Just keep working away.
As you do, it'll relax naturally.
It's a natural way of doing it.
Then going into the deeper structures, just contacting them.
There are a couple of deeper muscles right in here.
You can see when I hit it.
See how it runs down there?
Sorry.
I can follow that one down.
That's a really tight one.
It's running from here, the lower part of the spine through to the front of the leg,
right through the pelvis, causing tension this way, that way, pulling around the knees.
That single tight muscle can cause everything from bunions to migraines.
So we'll loosen it up a bit.
Watching the fingers is a good indication of where the level of tolerance is, where
the pain is.
We're just touching it.
If the fingers start to curl, you're going a bit too hard, back off.
It's really easy.
Anyone can do it.
You just have to watch your patient.
Although it's very easy.
I mean, this is easy.
There's nothing easier.
It's wise not to massage anyone with any serious illness without checking first with their
practitioner.
It's just wise to be safe.
If for instance you massage a varicose vein and there's a clot in it, you can cause problems.
The clot will move.
Massage moves things.
It moves all the fluids in the body.
So make sure there's no problems with the heart particularly or the lymphatic system.
Right.
Now the sacrum.
We've taken a lot of pressure off the buttocks.
There's a bit more to come off here.
I'll go deeper like this, just plummeting into the muscle and then taking it off.
Bending the legs back just to stretch the muscle at the front of the thigh just to balance
it out a bit more.
That's good.
And effleurage off.
Effleurage with the flat of the hand stroking.
Now we come to the back.
And starting with this bit here, this little shield of bone covered with gristle.
It feels a bit like stewing steak.
And we can turn it by massaging it very hard, not too hard, over a fair length of time into
something resembling veal.
Nice and soft.
At the moment there's a lot of gristle there.
And most people have a lot of gristle in here.
The gristle is formed in the connective tissue to hold the muscle tight.
This muscle is being held tight, holding the pelvis back and up.
This is really common, really normal in our society.
We can loosen it up and loosen up the whole system.
It's a major power junction, energy junction here.
The energy flows out down the legs.
If this is out or if there's a lot of pressure here, a lot of tight muscle in here, then
you get inefficient energy flow down the legs, inefficient blood flow.
And that causes varicosities and all sorts of symptoms.
Now we're moving on to the kidney area.
The kidney area rules the pelvis.
And the kidney's about fear.
It's also a basic sexual energy in the kidneys.
This is Chinese.
This one is tighter than this one.
So here we have the tension here and flowing over to here.
It'll probably flow back that way later.
But this left kidney is really tight.
The kidney itself isn't tight.
It's just sitting there.
But it's under stress because it's a case of burnout, low energy.
The kidney's overworked and it's protecting itself with a shield of muscle.
And that shield of muscle is protecting itself with another shield around it.
We can take a lot of pressure off that with a stroke like this, just taking it off or
using both hands like a waterfall.
Each of the organs in Chinese medicine has an element.
And the element of the kidneys is water.
So this is flowing and taking pressure away from it.
Do it down the other side to balance and then taking the energy off.
Now we can loosen up the lower back.
All right.
You don't have to do all these strokes.
You can just pick up some of them now, another few next time.
It doesn't really matter which strokes you use in which order if you're working on your
partner.
As long as you're getting in there, gradually getting deeper, taking the energy off, going
in deeper.
Now a favorite stroke for this area of the back is with the knuckles, running up both
sides of the spine.
First lightly, then a bit heavier.
What we're doing here is running up and down the urinary bladder meridian, which runs like
this and then up there again.
On the urinary bladder meridian, there are a number of points relating to individual
organs.
We've got this small intestine, kidney, stomach, spleen, gallbladder, liver, heart, lungs,
on.
By running up and down like this, it's as though we're hitting each of these points
like that, which is tonification of the organ.
If I hit this point, I'm tonifying the gallbladder.
So just doing this stroke and nothing else will confer therapeutic benefits.
That's starting to loosen up.
Now the main thing we've got to do with this long muscle is separate it away from the spine,
stretch it out.
I'm pushing away from the spine, running down the muscle.
It's easier to slip over the top.
It doesn't matter.
Really it'll loosen up and we can get in more deeper and deeper, as long as we're not hurting
anyone.
And then the other side, same way, pushing it out.
Now as you run up here, you'll discover lumpy bits, hard bits.
There's one.
It's a muscle in spasm.
It's a large knot.
The muscle's been tight for a long time.
The back is our structure, our support.
When we don't feel supported in life, when we haven't got enough money or enough people
to support us, our back will give way.
So we build up these big muscles to protect ourselves and hold ourselves together.
They stay tight.
The muscle being tight all the time, not relaxing, means that the blood flow is not taking away
the waste products of the reaction that keeps the muscle tight.
A muscle is designed to tighten and then relax.
The blood flow is in, takes away the waste product.
The calcium salts, the uric acid, lactic acid, whatever is in there.
This is not happening and it deposits itself, these waste products, in little pockets of
connective tissue.
The connective tissue is the sheath around the muscle, like if you peel a bit of fill
at stake, there's a thin membrane around it that you take off because it's a bit chewy.
That's where the tension goes in the form of fibrous tissue, fibrous connective tissue,
in these little pockets of waste products.
Now, we can break those up.
They'll be taken away by the increased blood flow.
We'll just break them up.
It's painful, but we don't do it too hard.
Sedating anti-clockwise.
This is tight.
And running up and down, moving it away from the spine.
You'll feel as you go up the spine, little spurs sticking out, little horizontal muscles.
And they only happen where there's pressure on the spine.
Those are the bits to work.
They're the sore bits.
Whenever you come across a sore bit, that's the bit to work, gently.
And the soreness will go.
You're taking pressure off.
You're taking emotional pain out of the muscle where it's been for a long time and releasing
it.
As long as your partner breathes deeply and keeps breathing without holding the breath,
without gritting her teeth and holding the tension in, then the increased awareness and
just feeling it is enough.
When we started, there was a certain amount of pain in the whole body.
It's like a reservoir of pain.
It's almost measurable.
You can certainly feel it.
With each one of these massages, you are clearing a little bit of pain off the top of the reservoir.
You get less and less pain.
And therefore, the amount of pain that is going to manifest in shoulders or causes headaches
is lessened.
After a few treatments, things like migraines sometimes just go away because the amount
of tension in the system is lowered.
The reservoir is dropped.
It's not going to overflow so easily.
As soon as your partner starts to complain, back off.
Helen's not complaining.
So I'm going in deeper and deeper.
The deeper you go, the more work you're doing and the more beneficial it's going to be.
As long as you don't go too deep, they tighten up and they hold it.
To get under this shoulder blade, this is quite tight over here.
In most people, it is because we've got a lot of energy locked up in our lung, heart
areas.
I lift the shoulder, half Nelson, lifting the shoulder with one hand, just keeping it off
a couple of inches above the mat, and then getting in behind the scapula.
The reason you hold it off the table is so that we don't dislocate it when we push out
on the scapula.
Push that right out.
I'll do it on the other side so you can see better.
We get in underneath it and push.
Just clear out those little knots that hang in there.
And the other side.
You can do it with the flat of the thumb like that, just gently pushing the scapula out and
holding it up at the same time.
That's great.
We collect a lot of stuff in here.
These are the little knots, the small, lumpy, hard ones.
Usually find them in here.
Even on little kids who should have massages more often.
They collect a lot of tension at the moment.
These points here are really worth working on a bit.
This point's sore.
It's a small intestine point, but it's connected with the lungs.
This is the lung area.
The lungs are about grief.
Lung problems tend to be caused by holding onto grief.
We're pushing all this old held grief out.
Maybe you'll even have a little cry afterwards.
You never know.
There is a lot of tightness around here.
You can actually see it in the spine, how it's up at this point.
This is related to the gallbladder again.
That's the gallbladder point in the urinary bladder.
Gallbladder resentment again.
It's old stuff.
It's very common in just about everyone.
It's also the easiest one to move first, I've found.
Once you realize that all this resentment that you're feeling to people around you is
just sitting in your body and coming out, and that you can constantly spend your life
finding people to feel resentful towards, it's your own resentment.
You can just let it go after that.
It's not that easy, but it's not hard.
Loosen up that.
This is very painful in here.
There's a lot of little knots, real hard little lumps.
You'll probably find them too.
What I tend to do is find one.
You can feel them.
They move around a little bit.
Then focus on it and just lean on it.
That'll get rid of it.
Just keep breathing.
That's right.
As she breathes out, I push down a bit harder.
Not too hard.
The buttocks aren't tightening up, so we're not going too hard.
Just a few breaths, three breaths.
We could find a few more.
There are usually points in here that anyone could benefit from.
Anyone with any tension in the shoulders, the neck, it releases tension from headaches,
especially those frontal headaches behind the eyes where the gallbladder starts.
Hangovers.
I'll just lean on those a bit.
That's right.
That takes a lot of tension off.
A bit here, a bit here.
Now we've moved all this blocked energy up here.
We've taken bits off each block, moved it up to the top.
It's just sitting here.
We want it to flow out, firstly from the arms.
What we do here is take an arm, grab this point here, just in the middle, and just give
it a bit of a kick.
You'll be running across a nerve and you'll feel electricity flow down there if you get
it right.
Just like that.
Right on that bit on the outside of the arm.
You've got it there.
You don't have to do that for very long because it hurts.
Then around here onto the back of the forearm, just a little bit there.
This opens up a way of getting the energy out.
A little bit there and then on the other side.
This is the bit where people get RSI, just in there, right down near the elbow.
Just a little bit here.
Got a scar there, but the scar is running along the meridian and not across it.
The scar is not interfering with the flow of energy.
What's interfering with it is the little tight muscle in here.
This is one that the masseur should work on himself, herself because that's where energy
collects a lot.
Right, we've got that flowing out.
There's another big point here, biggest point in the body called colon four.
We'll just sit on that for a while.
Sedate.
Sedating this, right, opening up the point, letting the energy flow out.
Out it goes.
If the patient's getting cool, if your partner's getting cool, just cover them up with a towel.
They've got to be warm.
You've got to keep people warm.
If you get cold, you get tight.
If you're warm, you're relaxed.
Now back to breaking these up just a little bit more.
It feels like little round balls of hard jelly.
As we work them, see I'm working fairly hard here, fairly deep.
As I work them or as I sit on them, they'll break up into smaller pieces.
They start off in some cases like sheets of rock and end up as gravels.
You can move it around.
Right.
Now, taking the energy off the arms helps, but this stroke I'm about to do takes an awful
lot of energy off the shoulders.
This is where we put our burdens.
If I run it down here just along the scapula, just in that blade there, push down and then
grip just slightly over the shoulder, not right down here, just the top of the muscle
and squeeze it and roll it between my fingers.
Like that, we're just lifting it and rolling it down.
That's quite painful.
As you do that, you can feel the fibrous structures running along it.
Sometimes you'll feel a real knot in here.
It might even be too hard to pick up.
You may not be able to get your fingers around it.
In which case, we just work a little bit, loosen it up a bit more and then roll it like
that.
It takes tension off the shoulders.
Take the burdens off and you can do just as much as you did before without the tension.
Now, these vertebrae, because the sacrum is under pressure, being at the bottom of the
spine, the top of the spine is under pressure as well.
It's a matter of how the vertebra line up to cope with the tension here.
If you've got a vertical pile of blocks and you move one at the bottom, then you've got
to move one at the top so they balance.
This is what's happened here and there's a lot of tension around these vertebrae because
the vertebrae are moved out by tight muscles.
I don't know where the cause is.
Looking for causes is a bit of a waste of time.
What we're doing is just finding the muscles, loosening them up.
Now, pushing with the thumb out from the spine, at the top of the spine, along these little
tight ones here, just moves them away.
Takes a bit of pressure off that spine.
The other side, always balance.
You'll find quite often that there's a lot more tension in one side than on the other.
There we are, pushing down, collecting with the thumb behind it and rolling.
Always, on every human body I've touched, there is a bit of tension, collection of deposits
right there, right at the tip of the shoulder blade.
We're just going quite hard there.
People can handle quite a lot of pain, if it's good for them.
Loosening all that up, taking it out the other arm as well, locating colon four again on
the web in there.
We've got it.
The energy's flowing along the arm and out fingers.
Just give the fingers a bit of a flick out the arm.
We've moved all this energy up here and out.
Not all of it, just a bit of it's gone out there.
Now we're getting onto the neck.
Necks are very small, it's only an inch and a half, two inches here.
In terms of the consciousness though, the neck's huge.
To move from here right down to here is a long way.
So we really focus on here, this very tiny little bones and the muscle structures around
them hold a lot of tension.
If you have a stiff neck, it generally means that you, according to Louise Hay, are not
looking at other viewpoints.
You're being stiff-necked about your reality.
If you loosen the neck, then you'll know that you're not being so stiff-necked.
Just pushing with the thumb out, down along the shoulder, along the top of the shoulder
blade, stretching these really tight muscles that connect with the base of the neck.
Now the neck itself, we just pull the, well we've already got a towel under here, that's
what this is, falls forward a bit.
If you've got a neck that's sitting, you see if I hold your neck up like that, it's very
difficult to get into.
You've got to stretch it a bit.
One way of doing it, if you haven't got a cushion or anything, is to fold the arms underneath
the chest like that so that the head falls forward.
There's a number of different strokes we can use.
I like to do this one, just with the knuckles, just running out right along.
That's just to loosen it up.
Then the compression of the neck, using both hands, squeeze gently up.
Just hold and gently feel the muscle flowing out between your fingers.
Don't flick off the top, just let it flow out.
You can do that quite hard, as long as your patient can handle it.
It's all right.
Just taking pressure off.
Then we can work with the fingertips or the thumbs, whichever you're most comfortable
with, around, down from the vertebrae, just on the side, in here, working down the neck,
loosening up all the way.
There's a really tight one here.
It's quite possible, as I was saying earlier, to slip off.
You can slip.
Make sure that your fingernails are very short.
If you do slip, you're not going to leave a great big rip.
There, I'm just loosening up this a bit more.
Go into these points.
This is another gallbladder point, gallbladder 21.
It's right on the tip of the shoulder blade, just over.
You'll find it.
The fingers eventually can find these things without even trying.
They just go straight to them after a bit of practice.
You'll be able to tell by the fact that it's hard muscle, just leaning on it, leaning on
it, and taking pressure off the neck.
Now, having loosened up the neck a bit, I'll work a bit more in here.
It's a bit tight.
Our necks are always tight.
They're pushing the muscle that runs down each side of the spine, just pushing it away,
the same as we did here, pushing it away from the spine.
If you work too closely on top of the spine, too intensely, then you can cause the vertebrae
to fall out of place, and they can constrict nerves or cause a lot of pain.
Just gently on the neck.
If you feel you need manipulation, go to an osteopath.
The deep tissue massage will change the structure of the spine.
It gradually realigns it, but there are vertebrae that have been out for a long time, and they
won't go back in just with massage.
You do need more.
Yeah.
Rolling my thumbs down the side, down beside the vertebrae, out a bit, about that far out.
You're catching the whole muscle.
If you go down here, you're getting into the lymphatics, and that hurts.
Just loosen up the neck a bit more, stretching it and softening these muscles as they run
down into these tight bits.
Now, having done that, there are a couple of points right here, one on each side that
require very gentle treatment.
It's those gallbladder 20s somewhere around there.
This is a wonderful point for headaches.
It releases all sorts of tension.
We tend to walk around holding all our tension in our minds, in our heads, in our brains,
and this is where we keep our awareness.
We believe that consciousness is in the head.
In fact, consciousness is in the whole body and probably beyond it, but this point here
is the gateway between the consciousness in the head and consciousness of the rest of
the body.
It's a useful point to work on anyone at any time.
It's relieved an awful lot of headaches.
It hurts, so don't go in there too hard.
A little bit of a scratch to take the energy away, and don't work it for too long.
If you do this for five minutes, people tend to lose it a bit.
They'll spin out.
Yeah, it's pretty tight all around under there.
It usually is.
All of us have this amount of pain in our bodies.
It's just that we're not aware of it because the muscles are tight.
They're constricting the nerves.
We've lost awareness.
We don't want to have awareness anyway of all this pain in our bodies.
It's much easier to take an aspirin, but once we've recognized that it's there, acknowledged
it and started working on letting it go, then we start getting younger.
The reason I scratch here or do this is because when you work on a muscle, you're releasing
energy.
It comes out in various forms, and one of them is itching.
You'll feel the muscles hot or itchy or there's tingling.
That's energy being released from a blockage.
You take it off.
Now the scalp.
Taking the oil off my hands.
You don't want to put it on her hair.
Taking the hair out if need be.
Oh no, we don't need to.
I'll just scratch with my fingertips, not the fingernails or if with the fingernails,
just lightly.
Some people love it hard.
Just find out.
We'll scratch around here where we've just disturbed that little blockage.
Above the ears.
That's a good point for the lungs.
Every part of the body has a map of the whole body in it.
The foot with reflexology, the ear, the acupuncture points, the iris with iridology, and the head.
This area is to do with the lungs.
This area at the back, the liver and gallbladder.
At the front, the kidneys.
When people start losing their hair at the front, that's the kidneys.
When they lose it at the top, this is the heart.
Now standing back, the energy goes this way.
I don't want to cop here.
I just scratch on the heart point last.
Right at the top of the spine up here.
Scratching and then pulling gently, pulling the hair, pulling the energy off the hair.
Sometimes you get to feel a rush of energy coming off the top.
And then going back a bit deeper, just massaging the skull.
Headaches don't happen inside the skull.
They happen on the outside of the skull in a very thin sheet of muscle that goes all
over.
It's hard to believe sometimes, but just massaging the whole thing will increase the blood flow
a lot.
The problem is that we stand upright, so it's hard for our blood to get to the tops of our
heads like as in any animal.
Right, that's out.
We just take it off.
And then taking the towel back to the neck, gripping it as though I'm a cat and Helen's
a kitten, and just lifting.
You might even be able to feel that that area has relaxed.
And then we go down the spine, taking the skin above the spine, directly above it, pinching
it up just gently and giving it a bit of a pull.
The spine's probably never had its back treated like this before.
It's taking pressure off the spine.
Nice.
Right, now we've done that.
We come to the most dramatic part of the massage, the percussion.
Because this stimulates blood flow to the surface, we don't need to worry about the
cold so much.
I cut my hands like that.
The idea is not to slap, and you can tell from the sound whether it's slapping or not.
This is what it should sound like.
That's what it shouldn't.
Just picking up the skin slightly, like a suction cup.
And then we move all over the body.
It doesn't matter about the speed.
As long as you're not slapping and stinging.
And all around the areas we've worked.
Put it on the shoulders.
This is an exercise in awareness.
We're making our partner aware of their body.
So we go all over at this point.
We've been focusing the consciousness all the way up, now back to the whole body.
We finish this, like to finish it here.
And then this is the stroke you rest in.
With wrists relaxed, you can just let them fall up and down.
And you just run along the lines of tension.
Outside of the calves, inside of the calves, and down the foot.
Switch into the other one.
And up again.
A lot around here.
We're getting the energy flowing down the legs by doing this.
Loosening it all up.
Up these big muscles that we were working on before.
These long thin ones.
And a lot around the shoulders, around this nasty little point in here.
Down the arms.
The whole body.
With special attention to all this knotting stuff in here.
And a little bit of very light tapping on the neck.
And then moving hard.
Remember how I said we don't go hard over the kidneys.
This applies especially to the pounding which happens now.
A light pounding, no punching.
Just on the big bits, the big muscles, the gluteals.
These are the gluteals.
Just there.
Very lightly over the kidneys.
And it can be quite hard around here.
This is very good for smokers.
It's like a good expectorant.
Really loosens up phlegm in the lungs.
This sort of massage will cause elimination.
Elimination can be emotional or physical.
We can be releasing toxins through the system.
It shouldn't be too dramatic.
But we've loosened up all the phlegm.
Worked over the areas that we've worked before.
And finishing long and hard here.
So only as hard as we can go without the buttocks tensing up.
Right.
Now we take it off.
What we started off with, the flat of the hand just moving right along the body.
Taking the energy off.
There are a number of ways you can go with effleurage.
Here's this one.
Running up the outside.
Coming down the middle.
Or running up the middle.
Either side of the spine with the flat of the hand.
Over, down the arms.
Or down the sides.
Pushing up with the right hand going first.
The left following like that.
I'll do it this side now.
Left hand up the left side.
And right following.
Right hand first up the right side.
Left following.
It takes a bit of practice that one.
I'll do it again.
Right hand side.
Left hand side.
And then back to this one.
We're just pushing the energy off the top and spreading everything out.
Smoothing everything away.
Through all that pounding.
It's really nice to have this done to you.
Right.
Now the trick I use is to take a towel.
Take off some of the oil too.
Squeeze the shoulders a bit.
Not much.
Just lightly at this point.
And then spreading the towel like that.
Smoothing it up over the whole body.
And then down again.
Fairly quickly for the first pass.
Fairly quickly on the way back up.
And for the final pass, going down, bringing all the energy back down again.
But I think it's moving the towel very slowly.
This can take, if you like, up to a couple of minutes for one pass.
Just slowly down here.
It does strange things with the energy.
You'll have to experience it.
If you do this three or four times, your partner's likely to fall asleep.
Which is a really good ending to a massage.
Now that we've finished the massage, what's different about this body?
How have we changed it?
Well, we've increased the blood flow to the surface to all these muscles we've worked
on.
We've broken up these little patches of deposits.
They're moving around a bit more now.
You can feel this with your fingers.
Remember what it was like when you started and feel it now.
If you pick up, say, this long muscle, just pick it up.
You can feel underneath another muscle.
And after a couple of sessions, you'll be able to pick that one up as well.
You'll be able to get both layers.
This muscle here is relaxed.
We've taken a lot of tension off.
There may be an emotional reaction afterwards, a release of grief or fear.
You might get frightened.
But we'll know that the fear or the grief or the anger or resentment or whatever is coming
from out of these tissues.
It's not being imposed on you from the world.
It's just coming out.
And you'll be able to let it go quite easily.
You'll know where it's coming from.
You'll know that it's not your partner that's making you angry.
You're just choosing them to be angry at.
The main thing that's happened is that we've revealed the pattern of pain in this body
to this mind.
That's what's really important.
And once that awareness has begun, then the body can start to change quite effectively,
quite radically.
And when the shape of the body changes as your posture improves, then your whole perception
of the world changes.
After a few of these sessions, you'll start to see what I mean about this.
Well, I hope you've both enjoyed the massage.
And I'll see you again on my next video, which is about the art of self-massage.