What happens when your back feels like a brick wall?

I never thought I would consider classical physics or quantum mechanics while giving a massage. 😬

But massage truly is a collaboration, and everything you bring to the table can be used to make your session effective.

It happens in the conversation my hands have with your body.

When I compress your shoulders.

When I make space between the vertebrae of your neck with traction.

When I glide down your back.

When I knead your calves.

When I use sustained pressure on tightly contracted tissues.

When I get extremely clear about what I am doing to your muscles and why I am doing it.

Recently, Massage Mate came to their appointment with the intention of letting things roll off their back, and apparently that opened the door of my imagination.

Once we got started, with my hands prodding into their tight back, I had an image come to mind of a tennis ball bouncing off a brick wall.

The kids in my class used to play a game in grade school that (the internet tells me) is called WallBall or Stitch or Butt’s Up depending on where and when you grew up. I always found it more stressful than fun. It involved throwing a ball at the side of our school, and if you didn’t catch it, you had to touch the brick wall before someone pelted you with the ball.

The tension in Massage Mate’s tissue reminded me of the wall in this game.

I felt a stiffness and solidity in their neck and shoulders that I could visualize as that brick facade of Petrova Elementary. I could feel how they were ricocheting and deflecting all the given-circumstance “balls” they had mentioned during our pre-session chat.

Now, Newton’s third law of motion posits (I think 😅) that for every force one object exerts on another, the second object exerts an equal force back on the first, in the opposite direction.

That got me thinking about what happens when we become the wall. Every impact keeps the ball in play unless some new force changes what happens to its energy.

So instead of pushing harder against the “wall” I was feeling, I started thinking about how I could help it soften enough to disperse the energy; how I could help those balls roll away instead of keeping them bouncing right back at you from different angles.

Here are some of the tactics I used:

To invite.

To coax.

To melt.

To pamper.

To compromise.

To temper.

To mollify.

To disarm.

I bet you are wondering how I could have done those things within the confines of a massage.

That’s the conversation.

Sometimes the work isn’t about overpowering tension. It’s about giving the body enough information, safety, space, and time that it no longer feels the need to be a brick wall.

By the time we are finished, your body can stop guarding.

And those balls can finally lose the momentum that keeps them pelting at you.