Challenging the Massage Profession

This was forwarded to me today from a friend who is also involved in alternative healing. Makes for interesting reading, possibly pushing boundaries for some, read with an open mind and see where he is coming from

1) Challenging the Massage Profession

"One of the most profound weaknesses in the way massage is conventionally taught is the taboo against including erotic touch in the massage. This taboo is so widespread and so strong that it is hardly questioned within conventional massage modalities. However, I believe this taboo is actually harmful and runs counter to the deepest and most central principals of massage.

Massage therapists are trained to teach their clients that the body is beautiful, that the body is sensuous, that the body can be honored and healed through touch, and they are encouraged to communicate this with regard to every part of the client’s body except the genitals and the anus. These, in contrast to the rest of the client’s body, must never be touched. I believe that this ban on touching actually conveys its own message. What is being conveyed to thousands of clients, in thousands of massage sessions all over this country, is in fact a very deep wounding to the body, as masseur after masseur refuses to touch the body’s most profoundly intimate and tender places – the genitals and the anus.

This repeated refusal to touch communicates a sense that these parts of the body are somehow “unclean”, “untouchable”, not worthy of being honored in the same way as the rest of the body. This is, in itself, a deep wounding to the body. Furthermore, for people in our culture these are also the parts of the body that carry our deepest, most profoundly rooted shame. They are also the places around which many of us carry wounds of abuse. Many of us have experienced some kind of abuse, either as children or with adult sex partners. So when masseurs refuse to touch and honor these parts of our bodies, they not only ignore opportunities for deep healing, but they actually reinforce our underlying feelings of shame and our memories of abuse.

I therefore believe that touching and honoring the entire body, and integrating erotic, genital and anal touch within massage is critically important to actually carry through the core mission of the whole massage movement. I think that when massage schools in this country ignore this, or actually speak out against it, they offer a grave disservice to the massage profession, to individual clients, and to human healing itself.”

2) How is Erotic Touch Healing?

“Erotic touch, especially when integrated within massage, has the potential to be profoundly healing. I would like to consider this on several levels. Firstly, when masseurs integrate respectful genital and anal touch within their bodywork, they physically counter-act old patterns of shame within their clients and within our culture. At the most fundamental level, when we, as massage therapists, are working on the body and we treat the genitals and anus as a ‘no touch zone’, what we are basically saying is that everything here is okay but these areas. This negative message is communicated at a really deep level into the body. However, by contrast, when we integrate genital and anal touch within the massage, honoring these areas as natural, ‘touchable’ parts of the body, we send a very different message, and the body hears that. In fact, I believe our bodies are hungry for this healing message, for this profound touch.

Secondly, I believe there is enormous healing potential in pleasure itself. The sensuous pleasure of massage plays a fundamental role in creating, integrating and releasing a sense of well-being and happiness in the client, and this is actually extended and enriched through erotic touch. In fact, I think that the distinction between regular sensuous touch and erotic touch is a specious distinction. Eroticism is a natural, necessary and completely appropriate response to sensuous touch, and the separation made between them in massage mainstream dogma is false and hypocritical.

Thirdly, integrating erotic massage within a healing modality can have profound importance for people who have experienced abuse. Increasingly, we are, as a culture, coming to realize that abuse of one sort or another has been widespread in this country.

We all recognize that childhood sexual abuse, incest, rape, bad sexual encounters and physical abuse can be deeply destructive of our sense of self-worth and of our capacity for love and joy. However, abuse can be experienced at any number of levels and in many ways. Many people today speak of psychological abuse in childhood, for example, that has left them deeply wounded. Some would say the same about their religious conditioning. Many people today live with paralyzing fear around AIDS and other sexually transmissible infections. At a more basic, cultural level, I would say that living in a sex-negative society is fundamentally abusive. It abuses our bodies, our sense of ourselves, our sense of pride and joy in life – and therefore it abuses our sense of spirit. This is, perhaps, the lost widespread and insidious of all forms of abuse.

I believe that respectful, sensuous erotic touch, and in particular the Taoist Erotic Massage, has enormous potential to help heal abuse on all these various levels. This kind of touch opens us to the possibility of re-programming experience, of returning to the original root experiences and reintegrating them – and reintegrating ourselves – as we, in a sense, put the pieces together again in new ways. At this level, because the Taoist Erotic Massage includes breath and touch and heightens states of energy and awareness, there is the potential to reach very deep into the body and the psyche and open up enormous emotional release.”

3) Taoist Erotic Massage: Levels of growth and Transformation

One of the things I really love about Taoist Massage is that it is so inherently rich, functioning at multiple levels. Over my years of practice with TEM, these are some of the levels that I have discerned.

At the most basic level, Taoist Erotic Massage is about pleasure. It is wonderful to be touched. It is wonderful to be turned on. It is really wonderful to feel every tissue of the body awake, vibrating with sexual energy. This kind of pleasure is not usually available to most individuals, at least in our culture. So TEM is a great way to enhance or expand our capacity for pleasure.

At the second level, there is the potential for healing. TEM is a powerful healing tool. Moving erotic energy throughout the body heals not only sexual trauma associated with the genitals or the anus, but also heals the body as a whole. TEM is an effective way of energizing the body, of building up the immune system, of working with depression and moving the client out of de-energized, deflated states. By building up vitality in the body and awakening a sense of physical well-being, we can effect an integration so essential for any kind of real healing.

At the third level, TEM has the potential to function as a “shamanic tool”. Many people have found that TEM is a way of achieving altered states and entering into altered perceptions of the world. For me, it is a way of awakening my ability to see the world as energy, and as energy forms. When I am practicing TEM and I reach a high enough state of arousal, with enough energy moving in my body, I find I can literally look out into the world and see it as an energy phenomenon, seeing the material world as patterns of organized energy.

The forth level of TEM actually goes beyond this opening to altered states. I would describe it as achieving mystical states of awareness, actually peering into the center of existence. It is a little hard to articulate, but I know I have had classical, mystical experiences through this process, and I know many other people have. For me, the most real, awe-inspiring and exciting potential of TEM is what it can awaken and unleash in terms of out profound visionary capacity.

- Ben Haggard from the DVD Fire on the Mountain – Male Genital Massage.