ACDM - Association Canadienne des Massothérapeutes et Autres thérapeutes en Médecines Alternatives
THE SENSORY EXPERIENCE
by Francine
Audet M.A., translated by CATCM's team
Drawing from our experience, let us make a review of the various sensory experiments that we lived in childhood, adolescence and in the adult life including the various experiments of the touch. We all have our " dictionary" , our " hard disk" containing the inventory of these experiments and the significance that we gave them. Each human is single by its genetics, its physical and psychological characteristics, but also by this experiential shutter.
Massaging someone is adding an experiment in the " personal experiential dictionary" of the client, but that can also reactivate one or more occulted or not until this day. From which importance, through this communication, to feel not only with your hands, but through your observations, your felt and your heart. This " professional sensitiveness " (empathy vs sympathy vs compassion...) which respects the other's experience and limit through the touch, that does not judge, that offers an unconditional reception (no matter what is the texture of the skin, the weight, etc of the client) can make the difference and make, subjectively, the former sensory reactivated experiment as less important and this one more nobler. It goes without saying that the experiment to touch, to mass someone can also activate one or more experiments lived by the massage therapist, contained in his personal " hard disk" .
In conclusion to this thought, I bring your attention to some passages of the book L'Abandon corporel*.
p.62
All is sens if we take time to listen and hear, even
the suffering and death. One must find the angle from which one
can look at, hear and understand. The bodily abandonment provides
one of these places to be and discover and observe the laws of the
existence. It allows us to formulate a certain number of assertions
that founded our reflexion on education and our therapeutic action.
p. 63...
The more an organization was marked with negative
and painful experiments, the more the individual will take the most
extreme means to avoid feeling itself, which will often, if not
always, drive him to worse sufferings and sometimes even to his
own destruction.
p.64 ...
As in the " touch-presence" , it is simply
a matter of being receptive, opened to what occurs, to what emerges,
without never neither defining it, neither to control it, nor to
direct it in advance. It is thus a question of taking the risk of
all the relation methods, the risk to go from a mode of relation
to the other, to thus exceed the reassuring dichotomies of the roles.
* Aime Hamann, Gilles Deshaies, Clemence Dubé, Roch Furrier, Fernande Richard, Gilles Rioux, L'Abandon Corporel, éd. Stanké, 1993, 205 pages
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