Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
In This Chapter
► Thinking with your skin
► Looking at your multidimensional skin (► Recognizing that your skin is on guard
► Understanding how massage affects the skin
Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
"We touch heaven when we lay our hands on a human body." — Novalis (pen name of Frederich von Hardenberg)
Kin is the essence of what makes humans human. How do I know, you
Ask? I saw it in a Star Trek Movie, so it must be true. In the movie, a wily alien treated Data, the android, to a taste of being human by grafting a swatch of flesh to his mechanicaLarm. He already had a brain and a fully functioning body, but the one thing he lacked was sensation. He was just a machine until he had this little patch of skin attached to him, and with it, he became
The essence of being human is the ability to feel. "But," you might respond, "I feel things in my mind and with my nerves, too, not just my skin. And besides, can I really trust Star Trek As a source of anatomical knowledge?" Well, guess what? In this case, the writers of Star Trek Happened to be right on the money. Your skin, your nerves, and your mind are really just different layers of the same thing.
Human.
Thinking tfith \lour Skin
In his book, Job’s Body, Deane Juhan, a researcher into the effectiveness of massage and other touch therapies, says, "Depending upon how you look at it, the skin is the outer surface of the brain, or the brain is the deepest layer of the skin."
This assertion, though it may seem absurd initially, can be proven quite easily if you look closely at the development of the embryo. As you know, you start out as a little clump of cells deep in your mother’s womb. In the very first days after conception, these cells begin to divide into three distinct layers that will later become your body. The Endoderm Layer of cells eventually forms your internal organs, the Mesoderm Forms the muscles and connective tissues, and the Ectoderm Forms the nervous system and the skin.
As the Ectoderm Cells develop, they gradually turn into your brain, spinal cord, nerves, and skin, which are really all one unit. "Nowhere along the line can I draw a sharp distinction between a periphery which purely responds as opposed to a central nervous system which purely thinks"(Juhan p. 36). In other words, your skin "thinks" as well as feels, and your brain "feels" as well as thinks. It’s all one thing. And it starts at a very early age. In fact, at six weeks and less than an inch long, the little embryo can already "feel" light stroking on its upper lip, which causes a withdrawal reaction.
Feeling = thinking
Imagine the following sequence:
1. Imagine a pinprick at a certain point on the skin (Point A).
2. Imagine the sensation that travels up from the sensory receptor near the skin’s surface, to the nerve, and then on toward the spine, which it enters at Point B. From there it continues up to the brain.
3. Imagine your brain processing this impulse somewhere around Point C, sending a further impulse to your mouth, which then says "ouch."
So the question is, at what point does the sensation of the pinprick cause you to pull your skin away from the sharp object?
A. At point A, the exact moment the pin pricks the skin.
B. At point B, a nanosecond later, when the sensation enters the spine.
C. At point C, inside the brain itself.
D. None of the above.
This question is tricky. Most people assume that the answer is C, inside the brain, because that’s where they think they have the thought, "That hurts." But in actuality the answer is B, when entering the spine, for the following reason:
You pull yourself away from the pinprick as a result of a Reflex arc At point B, which is an impulse that enters the spine and then shoots right back out again in the form of a reaction. You actually experience the pulling away before your brain catches up to what’s happening and you say the word "ouch." Ever notice that? For the same reason, your knee jerks when tapped with a little rubber hammer, without your having time to think about it. So, in this sense, your skin and nerves do the "thinking" for you.
Note: Do not try this pinprick experiment at home on friends or family. I guarantee that they won’t appreciate it.
Im’estimating Hour Multidimensional Skin
In his book, Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin, Ashley Montagu offers many pearls of wisdom, such as: "To shut off any one of the senses is to reduce the dimensions of our reality, and to the extent that that occurs we lose touch with it; we become imprisoned in a world of impersonal words, sans touch, sans taste, sans flavor. The one-dimensionality of the word becomes a substitute for the richness of the multi-dimensionality of the senses, and our world grows crass, flat, and arid in consequence."
Sadly, he’s right. People end up ignoring most of what they feel, and as they get less and less in touch with themselves, they become more and more hectic, filling their days with frantic activity rather than just enjoying the sensation-filled miracle of being alive. Instead of hectic, I think people should become more Haptic. A Haptic Person is especially in tune with her sense of touch, or, as Ashley Montagu would say, has a "mentally extended sense of touch which comes about through the total experience of living and acting in space."
Haptic comes from the Greek word, Haptesthai, To touch. To start yourself in a haptic direction, you need to know a few details about the skin:
11^ You have more than 3 million cells in a patch of skin about the size of a bottle cap. Your skin contains 2 to 5 million sweat glands and about 2 million pores.
^ Your skin is your largest organ system:
• 2,500 square centimeters in newborns and approximately 19,000 square centimeters (19 square feet) in an adult male.
• An adult male’s skin weighs approximately 8 pounds.
Your skin gets strength and form from collagen, which comprises 70 percent of your skin’s dry weight.
You have approximately 640,000 sensory receptors embedded in your skin.
Your skin ranges in thickness from Xo Of a millimeter on the eyelids to 3 or 4 millimeters on the soles and palms.
\S Your skin becomes softer in summer and more dense in winter.
Because you have so many sensory receptors in your skin (pain cells are the most plentiful, followed by a variety of pressure sensors, cold sensors, and warmth sensors), it’s no wonder you can be so "touchy" if you’re "rubbed the wrong way." And no wonder that a caring, calming massage can be so soothing.
All you really have to do to get back "in touch" with your true, haptic self is to tune in to your senses, your skin, and your environment, like you did when you were six years old and mud puddles were sources of unending pleasure. To help you get back to that sacred sensory space, you can try the sensitivity exercises that follow.
Sensitivity exercise #1:
The Zen cantaloupe ceremony
Consider, for a moment, the word "cantaloupe." Nice, round word that evokes the picture of the fruit itself in your mind. Perhaps the word even summons up a sweet cantaloupe memory or two. But too often the word itself is a substitute for the fullness of the thing, a crutch people use to classify this or that specific bit of reality, filing it away for easy reference.
If you want to move yourself beyond your mind’s habitual categorizing mechanisms, try the Zen cantaloupe ceremony:
1. Buy or borrow a fresh, ripe, high-quality cantaloupe.
2. Find a quiet, private place (where no one can see you and make fun of you) and sit with your cantaloupe placed on a plate within reach.
Have a knife handy. Then close your eyes.
3. Spend five minutes or so just calmly breathing and slowing your mind.
4. Slowly, with your eyes still closed, reach your fingertips out until you make contact with the cantaloupe.
Do not attempt to pick it up. Just feel the surface in extremely minute detail, as though you’re trying to decipher a message encoded in the fruit’s convoluted furrows. Pay attention to your fingertips.
5. Begin to lift the melon up, using your fingertips alone.
Spend a minute feeling the weight, shifting it from hand to hand. Then slowly bring the fruit up to your face, rubbing the rough texture against your cheek.
6. After this thorough tactile encounter with the melon, place it on the plate again, and then slowly and ritualistically lift the knife and begin your incision, slicing out just one sliver, cleaning off the seeds.
Open your eyes while slicing but then close them again.
7. Lift the slice to your nose and take three long inhalations.
8. Open your mouth and place the cool orange flesh inside your lips, but don’t bite down at first.
Let the juices gather on your tongue and savor the sensation.
9. Let your teeth literally sink down into the fruit, and then let the piece melt in your mouth for a minute before chewing.
10. Repeat the biting and chewing until you eat the whole sliver.
Breathe deeply for a few minutes again. Then, finally, open your eyes.
If you pay attention to the feelings that you have at each step of the ceremony, you’ll discover that cantaloupes have much more depth than just the word "cantaloupe."
Just as the original Zen tea ceremony was used by Samurai warriors in Japan to calm their minds and bring them into the present moment, the cantaloupe ceremony can help focus you on the tactile reality underlying your ongoing reinterpretation of the world through thoughts and words. You can repeat the experience with other fruits, vegetables, and just about any safe, non-toxic foodstuff.
This exercise is a great way to help yourself get into the right frame of mind for giving a good massage. You don’t have to think so much. Don’t speak. Just touch. Feel. Be with the world you come into contact with, including other people. Performing the Zen Cantaloupe Ceremony is a great way to sensitize your fingers and your mind immediately prior to giving a massage.
Sensitivity exercise #2: The texture of the utorld
Your fingertips have the largest concentration of sensory receptors of any part of your body. This feature is quite convenient for giving massages, which requires a real sensitivity to the person you’re touching.
With their unique sensitivity, your fingers can actually "see" objects, a fact you confirm every time you fish through a purse or pocket, searching for keys. You can develop and fine-tune this capability through a simple attune-ment exercise called the "texture of the world." The exercise helps you gain a certain sensibility that is crucial for getting and giving good massages.
You need a partner for this experience — someone you trust.
1. Have your partner gather four or five objects and arrange them on a table, without showing you what they are.
See why you have to trust your partner? You don’t want someone who may choose bird droppings, tar, rotten dairy products, and so on.
2. Have your partner blindfold you and sit you in front of the table, within arms’ reach of the objects.
If you haven’t been blindfolded since playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey as a child, be prepared for a startling and powerful experience.
3. Reach out and touch one object at a time, picking it up and using your fingertips to try to determine what it is.
If your partner has been creative in choosing the objects, you should have an interesting experience. Use just your fingertips for this exercise and resist thetemptation to get your nose or other senses involved in the process.
4. Override your mind’s tendency to identify the object and then create a visual picture of it, categorize it, and dismiss it.
Your mind goes into its automatic pattern the moment you realize what the object is. Instead of giving in to that tendency, continue to explore the object, discovering properties you overlooked before. If you can’t guess what the object "really" is, that’s okay. In fact, that’s good. Just continue to feel it. When your mind can’t categorize something, you’re forced to perceive it in a new way.
5. Based on your present tactile encounter alone, rename the objects.
A golf ball, for example, may become a dimple-nut. Have your partner write the new names down on pieces of paper and place them next to the objects.
Little skin, lotta feeling
Do you know why little tots seem so extraordinarily sensitive when it comes to touch? Children up to three years old have a total of 80 Specialized sensory receptors called Meissner’s corpuscles Per square millimeter of skin, as
Opposed to 20 In a young adult, and 4 In old age (Montagu, p. 7). That’s why babies are so overwhelmed by tickles and touches. They feel more than we do.
6. Remove the blindfold and check out your work.
Just being blindfolded greatly alters your perception of the objects. Unable to take them for granted, labeling one a "golf ball" and another a "yellow stick-on note," you will quite likely discover something about your ability to feel, and in the process increase your touch-ability (see Chapter 5 for more on touch-ability).
Layering It On
Your skin, like every other part of your body, is a living, growing, changing thing. In fact, you have an entirely new outer layer of skin every 27 Days, which means you’re an awful lot like snakes, lizards, and other animals who leave their skins behind periodically. You just shed your skin one skin cell at a time, so it’s not so obvious.
The Epidermis, The outer portion of your skin that keeps replenishing itself and flaking off, is made up of several layers. The bottommost layer keeps reproducing new skin cells, which are then pushed toward the upper layers, collectively known as the Horny zone. It is called the horny zone because the cells there are hardened, like horns.
So, what you’re really seeing when you look at somebody’s skin is a whole bunch of dead, hardened cells that are about to fall off. In fact, Exfoliation, A particular type of spa treatment that I explain further in Chapter 15, assists the skin in this process.
Keep in mind that certain skin conditions make performing a massage inadvisable (see Chapter 10). For now, I’m talking about basic, healthy skin in an average person.
The hazards of breathing
The "dust" particles that you see floating in a shaft of sunlight are mostly dead skin cells from the epidermis that have recently been shed by you and any other people who have inhabited the room. As you breathe, you can’t help but inhale some of these flaky cells, thus sucking cousin Bob, Aunt Julia, the refrigerator repair
Man, and even your own self into your lungs. This situation presents no biological hazard and is usually not a cause for concern because most people don’t know about it and therefore don’t get grossed out.
Whoops.
^tMty/ Beneath the epidermis lies the Dermis, Which is filled with fat cells, blood and c" " " lymph vessels, oil glands, sweat glands, nerve endings, and hair follicles. The dermis also helps to bind the outer layers of the skin to the subcutaneous (which means "beneath the skin") tissues below. In this area, you find some very important cells called Fibroblasts, Which are responsible for producing connective tissues. You owe a great debt of gratitude to your fibroblasts, especially after you break your skin in some way, because these specialized cells are responsible for rushing to the area and filling it with connective fibers, mending you back together. Massage can also affect these fibroblasts to enhance the appearance of your skin.
Getting the Skinny an Hour Personal Border Guard
Throughout your life, your skin defines the intimate boundaries of your existence. Skin is the millimeters-thin line that separates you from the rest of reality and allows you to perceive that reality. Here are the six major functions of your own personal border guard, the skin:
P0 Protection I** Absorption
Secretion and excretion
Heat regulation
Respiration J> Sensation
The importance of getting licked
Have you ever watched a cat give birth? Directly afterwards, mamma cat begins licking her babies all over, with a special concentration in the genital area. The same is true for dogs. And horses. And cows. And aardvarks and antelopes and giraffes. In fact, every species of mammal with the exception of man lick their young immediately after birth.
At first, you may assume that this licking is to clean off the gooey stuff plastered all over the newborn’s body. That’s partially true, but far more important than the cleaning is the licking itself, the touch of tongue to flesh or fur.
I was in my first massage therapy class, in California, when the instructor stated that massaging a newborn baby’s Perineum (the area between the genitals and anus) with a warm moist cloth was a good idea to simulate the
Action of licking engaged in by other animals. In other words, he was advising us to metaphorically lick the baby’s butt.
At the moment, and for several years afterwards, I thought this California massage instructor was a little too "out there" for his own good. But now, after discovering the importance of this type of stimulation in every other species of mammal, it makes perfect sense. This critical form of early contact jump-starts the newborn’s gastrointestinal tract and is perhaps the most primal type of "massage" that we can offer our
You can recreate the natural sensations of lick* ing for your newborn by taking a baby-wipe or moist towel and rubbing it gently over the skin in this important area a couple times a day for the first few months of life, starting on day one.
Protection
Whenever anyone tries to pass over the border from Spain to France, say, he or she is stopped by the border guard (usually men in sadly decorative hats, with sour expressions on their faces). The same basic thing happens with your body. Your skin says "Stop and present your papers" to anything big and obvious trying to get inside of it, such as steak knives, harmful bacteria, #2 pencils, and so on. Having the men in the sad little hats there to protect us is a very good thing, as I’m sure you can appreciate when you think about what kind of chaos would ensue were millions of Spaniards to suddenly turn up in your pancreas.
Absorption
Once in a while, you want to allow some people across the border to spend those tourist dollars and improve the economy, right? Your skin can do the same thing through a process called absorption. Your skin can absorb certain cosmetic products, chemicals, drugs, and water in small amounts. Unfortunately, certain items are not beneficial to your body, such as toxins
And pesticides. Your skin is equally capable of allowing these terrorists to cross the border, which means you should stay on guard regarding the products you come into contact with.
Excretion and secretion
Your skin can also get rid of toxic elements, like exiling unwanted characters from the country. This process is called Excretion, And it’s handled by those ruffians, the sweat glands. You have several million of these glands, and they eliminate waste products via perspiration.
In addition to excreting, your skin secretes as well, issuing forth an oily substance called Sebum That coats the skin and helps preserve moisture. Secretion is a good thing, because the skin is about 50 – 70 percent moisture, and you don’t want it to dry out.
Heat regulation
Your skin is constantly monitoring the temperature in the environment and helping to maintain your body’s internal temperature at an even 98.6T (37°C) through adjustments of blood vessels and sweat glands, which dilate or contract in response to heat and cold.
If you don’t touch mer Til die
Touch is literally a matter of life and death. The philosopher Bertrand Russell noted the importance of touch, saying, "Not only our geometry and our physics, but our whole conception of what exists outside us, is based on the sense of touch." For this reason, it’s urgently important that infants and small children receive an abundant supply of human contact.
In the early 1900s, Dr. Henry Dwight Chapin reported that when orphaned babies were routinely put in homes and left to wither away with
Essentially zero human contact, a startling 99 percent of them died within one year of admission (Juhan p.43). Those who survived suffered signs of retardation and maladjustment
To say that the world would truly be a better place if more people received massage — especially as part of their developmental years — is not an exaggeration. Touch is a vital part of human growth, for individuals and for the entire community.
Respiration
Oxygen comes in through the pores of the skin, and carbon dioxide goes out, just like in the lungs, but on a smaller scale. If you’re a James Bond fan and saw the classic movie, Gold Finger, You may remember the famous opening scene, which featured a woman painted completely gold and then left on a hotel room bed in Miami Beach. In the movie, she died because her skin couldn’t "breathe," and a similar fate could happen to you in real life if all of your pores were suddenly blocked.
Sensation
If skin were basically just nature’s way of keeping what’s inside of our bodies in and what’s outside out, life wouldn’t be nearly as much fun as it is, and, as it turns out, those guards at the border have a sensitive side beneath their hats after all.
Providing you with a rich, complex variety of sensations is by far the most personally gratifying of the skin’s functions, which is something you’ll develop an even greater appreciation for as you practice the techniques in the other chapters of this book.
Touching the Skin through Massage
Recently, even the U. S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has become convinced that massage offers undeniable results. My co-author, Michel Van Welden, has worked with the FDA extensively and has substantiated some claims for the effectiveness of massage. Following are some of his findings:
Scientific evidence points to the fact that massage can positively impact skin tone.
Pigs love massage.
It’s true. In a series of experiments at Vanderbilt University and UCLA, Michel worked with a team of ace physicians administering a series of massage experiments on some very special subjects: Flopsy, Zeus, and Peewee, three Yorkshire pigs.
The three pigs were chosen for their high moral character and love of luxurious spa treatments. No, actually they were chosen because pigs (even though you may not like to admit it) have remarkably similar skin to humans. Twice a week for 13 weeks the three brave little oinkers received deeply stimulating
Massages with a device that strongly affects circulation. The FDA eventually approved this device as an effective way to tone the skin and improve the appearance of cellulite. Here are some of the findings of these experiments, as reported in Newsweek Magazine, November 1998:
U* This type of massage, called Endermologie®, stimulates fibroblasts, which produce collagen.
V0 An increase in collagen fibers can improve the elasticity and youthful appearance of the skin.
Michel should know. He’s been a physical therapist in France for almost 30 years, and in that country the physical therapists do an awful lot of massage. In fact, each of the 35,000 practicing physical therapists in that country gives an average of 4,374 massages a year, most of them paid for by national insurance. Perhaps that’s why the French have a saying, Bien dans son peau, For someone who is happy and content; the phrase means "good in his skin."
Chapter 4