Coming to an Awareness of Touch

By Maggie Uhl

In my hometown no one held hands.
I grew up in an Iowa farm town - just one of hundreds of little places that sprang up around a train stop for grain. Touch in that small enclave - and any town in the Midwest where I spent my childhood - revolved around firm handshakes. The closest most family members sat next to each other comfortably was when posing for family pictures.

I remember a couple who would walk hand in hand in the evenings. The husband would even rest his arm over his wife’s shoulders. But from childhood, I assumed they weren’t from Iowa.

Farmers did not do that, nor did you often catch them with their hands on their children’s shoulders or holding their babies. They did not stand close to one another. Instead, they spent many solitary hours in the cabs of tractors tilling or planting, in the barns repairing machines or outdoors feeding livestock with only their thoughts to distract them from silence.

When I moved away to attend college in Ames, Iowa, life was quite different. Although nestled in farming country, Ames is a city with a confluence of farmers, professors, students from many countries and trades people. There I saw couples at ease standing in movie lines, clutching each other at the hip and fathers holding one baby while pushing another in a stroller.

Oddly enough, touch looked natural in the city and I felt more at home in Ames than in the town where I grew up. It was not that these gestures immediately became easy for me, but I was comforted to see them as intimate pieces of everyday lives.

Touch eventually came into my life through my family during the years my sisters, brother and I attended college. The change was likely the result of being around others in college who grew up in homes and areas where touch came more easily. Now my sisters and I felt more comfortable bringing hugs into the house. With all of us home in that white clapboard farmhouse during holiday breaks, my sisters would put their feet in my lap and I would massage them. I am sure it was then, during those most welcome breaks from college when we sat laughing and telling stories, that I began to understand the genuine nature of and response to touch. I felt the truth and simplicity of transferring my love in that way. I was being transformed. We all were. Touch came easier for us over the years and became more important in
our lives.

After college I met a few massage therapists in passing. The first one I met said clients would walk into his office hunched over, but would leave tall with their shoulders back. A boost of confidence would fuel them during the massage. I began to think touch had the ability to find its way to our very core.

In that same period of time, I witnessed how the utter lack of touch can dismantle a life. Between graduate school and teaching English overseas, I worked in a nursing home. There I saw the residents’ eyes hungrily searching for anything they hadn’t seen in a long time - from loved ones to another’s solicitous gaze. I learned how nursing assistants took pride in their efficiency - their ability to flip on a light, wet a cloth, wipe a mouth and a crotch, maneuver a body up and into its wheelchair, make a bed, comb what hair remained, insert some dentures and leave the room. All tasks were performed with grace at best, but few were performed for the sake of comfort.

As a nursing assistant myself, we would work in this efficient manner up and down the halls until all the residents were up and breakfast was served. It was important to work quickly, because we had so little help and so much to do.

We mostly ignored the fact that the residents’ bodies were able to feel. Comforting touch was absent to the point that many of the elderly lived the remainder of their days through their memories, as if separated from their bodies. Those without minds were simply hollow until their death finally came. I cried to my parents after the first day, assuring them they would never be placed in a home. I knew with certainty at that point some form of touch is needed to live well. It was then I began considering work as a therapist.

Making the Decision
I was an English teacher in Japan when I finally decided to enroll in a massage school. I was 32. I did no research. I just trusted my instincts. I also didn’t know if it was a good plan financially for me as I’d never talked income with a therapist. This decision was a calling.

I brought with me to Japan a brochure for an Iowa massage school. From my small home three hours outside of Tokyo, I phoned teachers thousands of miles overseas and after two conversations, I enrolled. I would fly there in a few months and begin.

I attended college this time on the other side of the state, the eastern stretch of rolling hills at Carlson College of Massage. We were situated on what used to be a tree farm inside a beautifully refurbished old barn. The school had large rooms and hanging on the walls were muscle charts and thoughtful mementos from previous students.

My class of 14 attended school part-time for 10 months. We weathered all the seasons, even the fierce Iowa winter. A wind chime outside the building would sometimes ring crazily in the strong winds and we would give massages as the snow flew at angles to the ground. We could gaze out the windows at the occasional car speeding down the country highway. The nights were vast, star-marked and stunningly quiet.

School was intense with classes three nights a week and every other Saturday. Like so many in the profession, all of us worked at least one job to support ourselves. To keep pace, we had to quickly assimilate information about the major systems of the body and muscle structure. Tests were commonplace.

Our salvation was the massages we received from classmates as we learned techniques for Swedish massage; we practiced and were practiced on. So while we had to balance our lives more efficiently because of jobs, classes and classwork, we learned directly how massage counters stress and cooperates with the body’s innate ability to heal itself.

Wayne Pakulis, a tall, ever-kind and Zen-like teacher, quietly moved about the room during hours of massage and whispered tips to those giving massages. If he watched a student bending in a way that would hurt her own body, he would offer an alternative stance. He would demonstrate a stroke, laying his long-fingered hands on the body before you.

It was easy to learn from Pakulis. He had practiced Tai Chi for years and integrated its various principles into his style of massage. One night we watched him perform an entire massage. As novices, it was inspiring to watch him move with such grace and to watch the massage become a dance. The whole class, not just the massage recipient, was relaxed when he finished.

From Pakulis, we learned giving a massage could be a fluid and dynamic process through which the giver benefits, as well as the receiver. He told us to use all the motion of a stroke, not to waste the stroke after the pressure is applied. And he taught us to make the return movement count as well, using the entire energy of the stroke.

When I would look up from the massage I was giving during class, I saw my classmates moving in waves as they literally rocked on their lightly planted feet. Like waves, there were high points in the motions and a breaking back gracefully into a whole new set of motions - each therapist working with their own rhythm. As a whole, the motions created a synchronicity of fluidity. The sound of those waves could be heard not as a blue roar of open water, but as the softest brushing as therapists worked alongside linens hanging from the tables. So powerfully soothing were these brushing sounds that one could nearly hear the wash of her own body from inside itself.

Pakulis taught us to integrate this fundamental motion of rocking in our bodies, our work and our lives. I appreciate that my body benefitted from this valuable lesson. I now plan to set down an object gracefully instead of having to think about reaching and taking hold of it. It is the follow-through. It is a mother and baby rocking to seek the comfort of balance through opposites. It is the yin and yang.

Finding Myself
I came back to myself in those 10 months of massage school - back from books and ideas and theories to a place where children reside in their hands, liking the feel of certain textures, noting the softness of a dog’s ears and the shape of utensils held in the palm. My hands regained their most subtle selves, not quickly, but with great certainty.

What I thought about massage before I began school was that I would be able to touch those who are suffering and offer solace. It was when my hands began to inform my mind that I understood what massage can accomplish in an even deeper sense - how it can work through the conduit of my body to heal, and how it teaches both the giver and receiver the truth of elements beyond words.

Massage is about hands sculpting over the curves and fissures of arms and ankles and shoulder blades, from newborns to the geriatric, taking inventory of where muscles are supple, where the body trembles from the pain of touch, where scars have formed, where sadness has pooled, and where time has tortured muscles as if pulled tight with a carpet-layer’s tool.

With touch, there is indeed solace. With maps in the educated mind to detail how the body is layered, there is intelligent touch. This kind of touch restores the ease of movement we once enjoyed in our days of innocence. The difference clients feel after a massage - greater movement and vibrance, as well as comforted minds and eased emotions - works to enrich their health on all levels. While I initially aimed at easing ailing hearts, I had no idea how much massage can actually do for the physical body.

It was not in school that my hands began to teach me things. There I was new and a bit off-balance in the arena of touch. It was afterwards, when I began working diligently, that I first felt a muscle melt underneath my palms and fingertips. I was working on a woman who had undergone surgery as a child for spina bifida. One moment the erectors in her mid-back felt like a knot, the next moment they had eased. The muscles responded directly to my touch. I was not telling my hands to do anything special, yet I knew they were.

I cannot describe the intelligence of the hands, because that lies outside the realm of words. It is best called intuition. Athletes have it, and when you see them move so amazingly, you know their bodies are working ahead of, or in tune with, their minds. Everyone has this capacity, so we’ve been told.

It is when our intention is to be aware of intuition that we can witness where it is most at work in our own lives. People call it by many names. But when it happens to you, you realize you speak a language understood by those who also have opened up to something beyond what they have been taught. It is a blend of knowing and letting the knowing go that works well in massage. There is no bigger answer than that which comes from an open mind, allowing the hands to work as they will.

A Quiet Transformation
For me, the change has been a quiet transformation from a world of stoicism to a place where massage therapy is my livelihood. Because I grew up in a subculture where touch was not valued, I now know with marvelous clarity and understanding that love can be felt through the hands. Love is the grandest of shape-changers; it has no shape and can take any.

I used to think that for my hometown Iowan neighbors, little touch was needed. Now I would say there is little touch wanted.

Even those who are grieving a death want little physical comfort. For them, you bake. Take the cake to their home and offer it with your condolences. Your respect and sorrow will be transferred through your eyes and your voice. Your deep concern is felt through cues in the way you set your body. While this is customary and appreciated, I believe physical touch could bring so much more to most lives. It almost creates the need for itself. When touch is integrated and accepted in one’s life, it’s akin to walking for pleasure. The more we do it, the better we feel, and the more we begin to notice along the path.

Touch is finding its way into many lives, as it did in my own. This revolution is certainly fueled by the work massage therapists have been doing for decades. More research is underway on the benefits of massage and the results are trickling down, making their way into the thinking of the general public. A therapist in Iowa told me that when starting her practice, she spoke to her mother’s church group about massage. Near the end of her talk, the therapist asked for volunteers to sit for a foot massage. She had not one taker.

Ten years later she was visiting the very same club, talking to possibly some of the same women, and almost all volunteered that time. She was witnessing her own quiet transformation in relation to touch.

It is not difficult to learn to value touch and then to desire it. It does take time for that transition to happen, as it did for me. This wave of massage is tremendously hopeful in its scope. I can only begin to imagine how massage can bring awareness of touch to people and how that can mean immense change for the better. What a grand thought to imagine this might be the most important revolution in physicality in centuries. How grateful I am to be a part of it all.

Maggie Uhl, LMT, studied creative writing at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and massage at Carlson College of Massage in Anamosa, Iowa. She practices in Prospect, Ky. She can be reached at maggie_7_7@yahoo.com.

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