Buckminster Fuller and the art of massage therapy
If you were to play the old game of seven degrees of separation, you might be surprised to find Vancouver bike racer and massage therapist Sherri Iwaschuk only two steps removed from the famous American visionary and inventor of the geodesic dome, Buckminster Fuller.
Buckminster Fuller – “Bucky” to his friends – coined the term “synergy” as a combination of synthesis and energy, referring to the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Sherri’s mentor in massage therapy, Tom Myers, renowned in the field of “hands-on therapy” and author of a book on body work called Anatomy Trains, studied design under Buckminster Fuller in Chicago in the late 1960s. Fuller was fascinated by the design of systems, and he passed on his passion for “the whole” to the young Myers. Tom was sidetracked from design into therapy, but took Fuller’s ideas about synergy and applied them to the human body.
Fuller believed that there are activities of whole structures that are unpredicted by their parts, and that the whole behaves in a way that is more than the sum of its parts.
Myers figured the human body was like that, too. You can’t, for example, isolate the bicep from everything around it and hope to fully understand what it does. Thus a view of a muscle becomes instead a view of how the muscle fits into the system of the whole body to contribute to its proper functioning.
All of this “just made so much sense” to Sherri – who has been a registered massage therapist for 11 years – when she first heard Tom Myers speak several years ago that she began to study with him.
Which is no real surprise. If you talk to Sherri for a while, you start to realize that she has made a hobby of being a part of greater wholes. In the 1990s, she was a musician, working with a band as a drummer, and she’s currently a member of the Dizzy Chicks women’s bike racing team.
In both activities, she speaks with a certain reverence about the “magic of team thinking,” when it all comes together in the moment and becomes something that none of the individual participants could have produced alone or even predicted.
The way Sherri describes her form of massage therapy sounds like a kind of synergistic teamwork too. She talks about “awareness” and “consciousness” of the body and the need to sense at every moment what the body is doing in order to be able to react to it (which is remarkably similar to the way she describes reacting to other band members during an improv session or to team mates during a race). It can often be what she calls “a bit of a journey of discovery,” but says it “almost always makes sense in the end.”
Another Bucky idea that has found its way into Sherri’s massage therapy practice is called “tensegrity” (from tensional integrity), or the idea that the integrity of structures is based on a synergy (there’s that word again) between balanced tension and compression components. Again, according to Tom Myers, rather than seeing a building as a brick sitting on a brick sitting on a brick, with tensegrity structures, the bricks float in a sea of rubber bands and stay where they are because of the balanced tension between the bands.
Sherri’s equivalent analogy is one of taut ropes and articulated poles. The poles won’t change their position, regardless of how you work on them, until the tension on the ropes is adjusted. In other words, soft tissue determines where the bones are and bones act as “spacers” between the tissues.
Muscles can be forced into a shortened position (the taut ropes) due to trauma, and then become accustomed to being there. Pushing on the poles (bones) won’t make any difference if the ropes are still too short.
And the body compensates in unpredictable ways.
One woman came to see Sherri complaining of knee pain. Rather than addressing the knee directly, Sherri looked at the woman’s whole body, how she held herself and how she moved, and found that she had a sideways bend at the waist. Sherri worked on the woman’s abdominal muscles and the knee pain went away within a few sessions.
Both on the large and on the small scale, it seems there are connections between everything and just about everything else.
That’s why knee pain is connected to a bend at the waist. And why Buckminster Fuller plays a role in the practice of massage therapy.
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