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Matt is one of our fantastic massage therapists at milk + honey spa 2nd Street District.

Valentine’s Day is upon us. Whether you prefer to ignore the holiday or embrace your romantic side, love is all around us, especially in the touch.

Standard descriptions of our holiday describe a cloudy syncretism of historical figures (all martyrs for love), Catholicism, and pagan rituals Click here for History.com’s take on Valentine’s Day. Historians often reach back to 270-300 A.D. to initiate this romantic drama. Mother nature on the other hand seems to have reached back beyond man, beyond monkey, maybe all the way to the vole.

Have you ever heard of oxytocin? I first heard about this hormone when I was in massage school, but it has since emerged into popular discourse as well. It seems to be present in every mammal on the planet. Human physiology text books echo the initial clinical scrutiny of this nine amino acid chain as a hormone produced by the sex organs for the purpose of letting down milk and contracting the uterus, but subsequent research has revealed a more utilitarian and ubiquitous character to this powerful protein.

First let me kill the suspense, yes oxytocin floods your system before, during, and after all of your sexual experiences. Likewise, laboring mothers experience a massive download of the stuff during and following labor and delivery. The experience of maternal love at first sight, and the amnesia of child bearing pain that sets in when a mother first holds her child, are both moments undoubtedly framed in the pink hazy frill of oxytocin.

I reckon it satisfies some pretty obvious reward systems that perpetuate any species with fur on their bodies, but what is it? A cursory web search describes oxytocin as a wonder molecule that increases feelings of trust and intimacy but it goes deeper than that. Dr Ray Sahelian dryly details a more clinical side to oxytocin on his own forum. He describes a powerful neurohormone and modulator that the hypothatlamic and supraoptic nuclei of the brain, as well as peripheral tissues of the heart and sex organs, produce. The hormone acts on those tissues, as well as the kidney, thymus, and pancreas, resulting in a body-wide response.

As it turns out oxytocin reduces the effects associated with stress and anxiety. It helps reduce blood pressure and cortisol levels, increases our pain threshold and directly affects the amgdyla in tempering our anxiety level. In short, everything you need for your loved ones to announce that “both mother and child are well” can be provided by this brilliant bio-character.

Oxytocin has a more humanitarian and platonic side to it as well. In addition to combating stress, pain and fear, oxytocin stimulates positive social interaction and promotes growth and healing as well. Furthermore, it just makes you feel good, content, dreamy. Put one way, it’s what makes little kids like puppies and makes puppies like little kids. It’s why cats purr. It probably plays a role in pack identity. In his brilliant collection of essays “The Scientification of Love,” French obstetrician Michel Odent extends these implications and explores the role of oxytocin in promoting healthier civilizations in general.

In this light, oxytocin is quite simply the peptide that binds. Since it feels good and is good for you, you may want to up your dose. Given its immense utility, it comes as no surprise that other stimuli outside the range of coupling and mating also trigger its release. Though supported by less rigorous literature visual and olfactory sensations will trigger it. Eating with friends and family trigger it as well.

Call it dinner and a movie … plus a spa day. Increasingly it seems that basic well-intentioned touch and warmth trigger oxytocin as well. Massage in all its forms release oxytocin, though the lighter kinds associated with true Swedish massage and facials probably release more. A few years ago journalist Roni Caryn Rabin reported for the New York Times on the subject, click here to read. Researchers at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles who found that massage increased levels of oxytocin (and decreased stress hormones such as cortisol), and that a single session produced biological changes. That post-massage, wet noodle feeling of contentment where all you need is a nap is in part due to oxytocin.

So basically anytime you get that warm fuzzy feeling inside, oxytocin is probably lurking in the background, marshaling biological changes that promote your health. As our understanding about it increases, it seems to do nothing other than confirm our biological bias for falling in love, for starting families, to look after each other, to live with pets, and to build community. You are built to experience love, connection, and bonding, and that is good for you.

Massage is about knowing when to let go and when to hold on. Photo by TechSavi

Matt is one of our fantastic massage therapists at milk + honey spa 2nd Street District.

Have you ever been on the massage table, and your therapist scoops up one of your limbs, cradling it in the palms of her hands, and suddenly she says, “OK, just let it go”? This seems incongruent. You thought you already were relaxed. Let go of what?

Well, let go of your arm, your leg, or your head, of course. To be fair, “let go” is one of those countless phrases that often assumes more than it communicates. Its utterance assumes awareness and understanding, at the precise moment of its opposite’s presentation. The opposite of letting go is, of course, holding on.

In my opinion, due to its vagueness, telling someone to “let it go” or “let go” is about as useful as telling them, “NASA found water on Mars,” and yet I myself am tempted to use this phrase. Usually the therapist attempts to take a limb through a range of motion and/or to reposition the client to gain access to a work area. The client unconsciously halts the action. They either directly resist it or try to help the therapist, which is unnecessary. From the therapist’s point of view, the client really is fighting the movement. From the client’s point of view, they’re probably thinking, “Dinner could be any number of things, the kids need picking up, and that feels pretty good … Oh, wait? Let go of what?”

Once we figure out what “letting go” means, we may see its worth. I advocate it as a worthy enterprise of practice and development. Holding takes place in the muscles and mind. If we could let go of our holding, we would gain an enormous measure of peace, and also get more out of our massages. We want to develop the skill of letting go, because letting go is indicated when holding on inhibits therapeutic or otherwise positive development. As therapists, we want to avoid triggering the “hold on” response.

I argue that both the fault and the solution lies within both the practitioner’s and client’s realm of control. In studying this phenomenon after a while, I discovered at least a few theories, and a few ideas for dealing with it. From my observations I believe the clashing of movement at the massage table results from specific client and therapist modes.

The client doesn’t have the awareness or skills to let go. It may also be that they don’t trust their therapist, have let their attention go elsewhere, or are under too much stress. In short, they haven’t done their homework. The therapist on the other hand has triggered unconscious alarms in the client’s body. Basically the client is either too “switched off” or too sensitive, and/or the therapist is too abrupt, checked out, or is using an ineffective posture.

First, let’s take a look at our physiology. Proprioception is one of our hidden senses. It refers to awareness of our body in space. It’s kind of like a cross between touch and equilibrium, and is what allows you to know where your arm is when you raise it over your head, even though you can’t see it. Specialized cells called proprioceptors, mostly located around the joints, provide this service for you, but you can develop this sense if you want to. Other specialized cells like stretch and pressure receptors, tell us the relative tension of the tendons and ligaments. Finally our nervous system interprets and scales any change of sensory input, such as touch, change of position, sound, or lighting.

The inclination to resist movement must partially relate to our deeply ingrained fear of falling. Usually you stop yourself from even beginning to fall, and the experience almost always resides below consciousness. We also have another unconscious desire to inhibit any movement that overly challenges our joints. I don’t think it provides the same level of fear, but it factors in. Relegating the management of a change in environment, as communicated by a change in senses, to an unconscious level makes sense from a survival perspective as well. If those changes challenge the individual’s survival needs, a reaction is appropriate.

I suspect these biological conditions provide our venue for client/therapist failure. Both of us must work to inhibit these responses.

If I might overstep my scope, I think therapists must know how to create a space of safety. For a massage therapist this means we communicate. We don’t engage the fear of falling or the resistance to joint torque. We must provide the base that supports any manipulation we do. Deep horse stances and T-stances that support our physical center are necessary when we stand beneath the client’s limb. In this manner, we lend our clients a center of balance for movement to occur in their body, and no sense of falling. Secondly, we can expand our attention to encompass the full joint and limbs in our movement. If we approach transitions gently, and manage to minimize our own physical stress and efforts, we could probably defuse most resistance at the table.

Now for the client. It isn’t your fault that you unconsciously don’t want to be controlled by another individual. In fact, the pervasiveness of this habit suggests it’s a universal survival utility. Getting a massage shouldn’t be one of those times when survival instincts are firing though. In my experience, massage is a “co-creative” process. In other words, to the extent that a client is prepared to receive the massage, is the extent to which he or she will derive benefit from massage. Client and therapist should always be on the same side of a goal and the approach to that goal.

Client preparation may include physical, behavioral, and mental preparation. This may mean showing up to session early, taking a shower, stretching, reading, or agreeing to rest your worries on the floor as you receive. If I had to guess, being prepared to let go of your personal narratives would help the most. Write down your to-do lists if you must, but don’t bring them to the table. It may require a deeper practice and mind set.

You can physically learn how to let go by raising your arms and letting them drop of their own accord. You may need to convince yourself that it’s OK to take time off for your own care and maintenance. Knowing what you want from your massage and being able to communicate that will defuse quite a bit of anxiety. Of course in the extreme, no massage therapist worth their salt will violate boundaries by working the breasts or genitalia (we don’t consider the glutes to be a no-touch zone), but you should set boundaries ahead of time for yourself anyway. I think it’s a lot easier to relax if you’ve already decided what constitutes a deal-breaking breech of comfort. It feels empowering to take responsibility for your own sense of safety.

At the heart of this exchange is the relative ability to relinquish control as a client, and provide a safe place as a therapist. It requires practice, communication, a benefit of the doubt, and a little risk, to step out of our habitual holding and controlling, but in my opinion it’s worth it.