Massaging the Windows of Life: Where Your Muscles Meet Your Bones

When we do our strokes in Deep Massage, when we pause, particularly at the beginning or the end of a stroke, it creates a kind of “window”. These pauses naturally occur at the beginning and near the end of the muscle – at the origin and the insertion.

As in most stories, beginnings and endings have a special power. The origin and insertion are where the muscle’s tendon attaches to bone. Pausing particularly at the end of a stroke at the interface of muscle and bone gives the person an important moment to feel their full length. It also gives a moment to experience the transition from muscular structure and energy to bone structure and energy.

We “do,” we take action with our muscles, with our will. The window from muscle to bone is a way to see beyond of the world of “will”. Bones, however vital and alive as they are, subside and live underneath our will. They form a living substrate underneath all our efforts.

When we pause near the origins and insertions, the person has the experience of where doing ends and being begins. Underneath all our efforts, there is this energy which abides, like a stream constantly running through us. In acupuncture theory, it’s known as “ancestral chi”, in jin shin do it’s called “universal life flow”, in Reichian bioenergetics it’s known as orgone, in French philosophy as élan vital.

In Deep Massage and Zero Balancing we note, whatever you want to call it, we have within us a deep source of energy which feels to reside in our bones. When we say, “I just know that in my bones”, that is the place we are talking about – the deepest part of us.

The skeletal system has its own unique oneness that extends bone-by-bone through our very center from heaven to earth.

When we pause as life turns from muscle to bone, we see the light in the window, experience calm being within; connecting us to heaven, to mother earth, and to the source energy and core structure of who we most deeply are.