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by David Palmer
(Note: This is an updated version of an
article originally published in the British magazine Positive
Health in 1998.)
Chair Massage is fast becoming the most popular form of professional
touch on the contemporary bodywork landscape. In airports, shopping
malls, convention centers, corporate board rooms, supermarkets,
street corners, dentist offices, and hospitals you can now find
practitioners making chair massage as common and acceptable as a
haircut.
How has this form of bodywork, virtually unheard of before 1986,
managed to capture the imagination of a growing segment of the U.S.
population and, more recently, begun to impact Europe and the UK?
In this article I will attempt to describe some of the significant
landmarks that have marked the evolution of Chair Massage.
Ancient
Roots and 20th Century Pioneers
Massaging clients who are seated is hardly a contemporary phenomenon.
Centuries-old Japanese block prints illustrate people, having
just emerged from a nearby bath, receiving massage while seated
on a low stool. Indeed, many styles of Japanese table or floor massage,
including the one in which I was trained, traditionally perform
a portion of each session (often at the beginning or end) with the
client sitting up, rather than lying down. We can safely presume
that, for as long as people have been rubbing away each other's
aches and pains, some of the massaging has been done while the receiver
was in an upright position.
Likewise, in this century, working on seated clients has always
been an option and has been found in a number of different contexts.
For example, seated work is specifically integrated into a variety
of bodywork modalities, such as Rolfing and Feldenkrais. And, with
the current high visibility of Chair Massage, we are beginning to
hear from some of the elders of our profession about how they utilized
seated massage in their regular massage practices.
A good example, which came to my attention recently, is the story
of 76-year old Ginger Robinson from Fort Worth, Texas. Ginger has
been a professional bodyworker since the late 1960's but says she
has been doing massage since she was six years old. She remembers
giving "shoulder/neck" rubs to workers at General Dynamics, where
she worked for 30 years. Later, as a massage professional, she recalls
demonstrating her seated massage techniques for participants at
the Texas state convention of the American Massage Therapy Association
(AMTA) in 1978 and later at an AMTA national convention.
Finally, we need to acknowledge that in the late 1970's and early
80's there were already a few practitioners who were beginning to
sense that massaging clients in a seated position might be something
more than just an occasional tool in a table practitioner's toolbox.
Kathryn Hansom-Spice, originally a bodyworker who later became
Director of the Potomac Massage Training Institute (PMTI) in Washington,
D.C., developed a community outreach program in 1981 for specialized
populations that specifically incorporated seated massage. Her program
eventually became an integrated part of the PMTI curriculum for
training massage professionals and has been replicated in dozens
of other schools across the US.
Then there is Michael Neal, who began doing seated massage in early
1982, and probably has the oldest continuous Chair Massage practice
in the world. Every week he still takes his stool to provide Chair
Massage services to such clients as Disney Corporation in Southern
California.
In the realm of non-professional Chair Massage, Jeanne St. John,
an educator with the Santa Cruz County (California) Office of Education
initiated an innovative program in 1980 that provided acupressure
seated massage to severely handicapped children. For the next 13
years her organization trained over 50,000 educators, parents, and
others in therapeutic acupressure techniques performed primarily
on seated recipients.
All of these bodyworkers, and many more, deserve much credit for
laying the foundation for the creation of the Chair Massage portion
of the skilled touch profession.
Birth
of Contemporary Chair Massage
While I have been credited as being the "father" of contemporary
Chair Massage, as we have seen, massaging seated clients has been
around for a very long time. My greatest contribution was to shine
the public spotlight on Chair Massage in a way that highlighted
its unique features. My work has been to educate bodyworkers, massage
schools, the media, legislators, and the general public about the
significance of Chair Massage.
My interest in Chair Massage was born in 1982 when I became the
Director of The Amma Institute of Traditional Japanese Massage.
My teacher had decided to return permanently to Japan and had designated
me his successor. In my new role as a trainer of professional massage
practitioners I was immediately struck by how few bodyworkers were
actually making a living doing work that was so desperately needed
in our culture.
I was mystified. Hadn't massage changed my life? Hadn't it had
a significant impact of the life of every bodyworker that I knew?
Why was the interest in professional massage growing so slowly that
practitioners seemed to be fighting over the same 5% of the population
who appreciated the benefits of skilled touch? What was the point
in training skilled touch professionals if there were no clients
for them to massage?
In those days it often seemed that the bodywork community somehow
felt that the problem was not with professional massage, but rather
with the lack of sophistication on the part of the public. Most
people, the notion went, were too "uptight" or "unconscious" to
appreciate what our service had to offer. I realized, however, that
we wouldn't be able to solve this problem if we simply chose to
blame the potential clients. Another perspective was called for
and it occurred to me that the problem might be more in the packaging,
not the product. That is to say, when looked at from a marketing
perspective, the general public clearly did not perceive massage
to be safe, convenient, or affordable.
I have often noted that, if you wanted to make certain that professional
massage would never become widely accepted in the Western culture,
here is how it would be designed: force clients to go into a private
room behind closed doors, take off all of their clothing, lay down
on a table, and allow a stranger to rub oil all over the body. With
that approach massage would never make it into the mainstream. There
is only one other time when people get prone and naked behind closed
doors with another person. Consequently, the subconscious, and sometimes
conscious, connection between table massage and sexuality has been
unavoidable.
Add to that the $50 or more typical cost of table massage and it
is instantly a service only the desperate or the well-off will engage.
What we needed to create was a simple touch service package that
avoided the adult entertainment association, was low cost, and was
accessible to potential clients.
Defined from this perspective the solution was obvious. First,
allow people to keep their clothes on, which meant that you couldn't
use oil and didn't require a private space. Second, put the client
in a portable chair so the massage could be done anywhere. And third,
shorten the length of the massage so that you could charge less
making it affordable.
I began training my graduates in this new delivery system for
massage services in late 1982 and shortly after, in 1983, started
a business to place our first Chair Massage practitioners. Our primary
market for Chair Massage was the workplace with a secondary emphasis
on conventions and trade shows. The first year we had limited success
in convincing companies of the value of Chair Massage but our fortunes
shifted in 1984 when Apple Computer became our client.
Apple, in those days, was a high flying, high tech legend that
was not only inventing a new industry, personal computers, but was
also redefining the relationship between a company and its employees.
Apple Computer was more egalitarian and less formal than traditional
employers; our Chair Massage practitioners were often better dressed
than the employees they worked on at Apple. At the peak of our work
with Apple seven practitioners were offering up to 350 Chair Massages
a week with the company paying the entire cost of the massage. We
had visions of megabucks dancing through our heads. Unfortunately,
the tsunami of Chair Massage that I believed was about to sweep
across corporate America turned out to be little more than a minor
splash in a rather small puddle
The honeymoon at Apple ended in 1985 when the first downturn hit
the personal computer industry and Apple was forced to layoff 800
employees. We retired our Chair Massage service at Apple for two
months, until the dust settled. When we returned, the company was
no longer paying for Chair Massage, but rather the employees were
footing the bill, dropping our client base to about 60 a week. Clearly
it was going to take a longer-range plan to impact cultural attitudes
toward massage. So, in 1986 I sold my portion of the Chair Massage
business to my partner, Stephen Pizzella (who still does Chair Massage
at Apple Computer to this day), and started in a new direction.
The most significant result of the Apple experience was the exposure
and attention we got from the media for this emerging concept of
Chair Massage. While we were at Apple, we leveraged our presence
into dozens of national and local stories in the press, television,
and radio. It was the beginning of the media's long-term love affair
with Chair Massage who were always ready for al "Cinderella" story:
Out of the ashes of disrepute and into the corporate boardroom comes
Chair Massage.
The
Pivotal Year
In 1986 three major events marked my post-Apple strategy for introducing
Chair Massage services into the mainstream.
The first came about as a result of the realization that, if we
were going to truly create a new service industry, we would have
to train thousands of new service providers. Consequently my focus
shifted from educating the general public about Chair Massage to
first educating the bodywork professions. To that end I began a
program offering a continuing education seminar in Chair Massage
to bodyworkers who had graduated from other massage schools. In
August 1986, I introduced the concept of Chair Massage to 34 school
directors at a meeting of the American Massage Therapy Association.
The response was immediate and overwhelming. During a 12-month period
beginning in October of that year, I taught 24 Chair Massage seminars
at 24 different locations, including seminars in Sweden and Norway.
Chair Massage was truly an idea whose time had come. Within four
years, by 1990, virtually every massage school in the U.S. was acquainting
their students with Chair Massage and many had developed specific
courses in Chair Massage technique. Since 1986, my own organization,
TouchPro Institute, has taught continuing education classes in Chair
Massage to over 8,600 bodyworkers in ten countries.
The second event was the introduction of the first specialized
chair for seated massage by Living Earth Crafts, a massage table
manufacturer in Santa Rosa, California. In 1984, I began working
with a French cabinetmaker, Serge Bouyssou, to design a portable
chair that would comfortably support the client's whole body and
allow easy access by a massage practitioner. After three prototypes,
we began working on production models with Living Earth Crafts and,
in May 1986, the first production versions of the chair were sold.
Currently there are some 20 manufacturers around the world who have
produced in excess of 100,000 massage chairs, all based on the original
design.
As strange as the massage chair looked back in 1986, it has proved
to be the key element in putting a "face" to Chair Massage. Practitioners
walking down the street today are easily identifiable as massage
specialists because of the chair strapped under their arm or across
their back. The quizzical glances of the past have now been replaced
by longing gazes whenever people encounter the chair.
The final element introduced in 1986 was the term On-Site Massage
to describe the process of massaging seated clients. I coined the
term because, at that time, the vast majority of Chair Massage was
literally taken to the client "on-site," mainly in the workplace,
rather than the client coming to the chair. While the term made
sense then, I have since erased it from my vocabulary. At least
half of the Chair Massage business in the US today involves the
clients going to the chair in fixed locations such as malls, supermarkets,
airports, salons, and the like, making the term "on-site" somewhat
meaningless. Thus, I have come to refer to this work as simply "Chair
Massage" to juxtapose it nicely to "Table Massage" and, for variety,
I sometimes use the alternative term "Seated Massage."
Fifteen
Years Later
Since 1986 the growth of Chair Massage has been steady and impressive.
In the near future I believe that more people will be giving and
receiving Chair Massage than any other style of bodywork. Not because
Chair Massage is any "better" than any other style of bodywork,
but simply because Chair Massage is infinitely more accessible than
any other delivery system of skilled touch. On price and convenience
alone Chair Massage wins, hands down.
But beyond the accessible features of Chair Massage is its accessible
intention. I have positioned the intention of my Chair Massage work
as being a simple relaxation service rather than as a "treatment"
or "therapy." While there are practitioners and teachers who do
define Chair Massage as "massage therapy," in general, I think that
is a mistake.
During the past two decades there have been two major rationales
for massage promoted by bodywork schools and professional associations.
The first has been to define bodywork as a "personal growth" service
and the second to offer massage as a "health care service." While
professional bodywork, in the hands of a skilled practitioner, performs
both of these functions extraordinarily well, they are, I believe,
self-limiting. The vast majority of the US population still views
the concept of personal growth with suspicion and, likewise, relatively
few people view themselves as having a health care problem for which
bodywork is the obvious answer.
The beauty of Chair Massage is its simple message that massage
can make you feel better-whatever that means to you-anytime you
want. You don't have to be sick or enlightened or wealthy to appreciate
its benefits. It is truly massage for the masses.
Chair Massage also acts as the entry-point for
clients into more sophisticated kinds of bodywork. I would
venture to say that more people in the past five years in the US
have had their first massage in a chair than on a table. And, since
the first professional massage tends to be the most intimidating,
Chair Massage clients become the foundation for future table clients.
I know many examples of practitioners who marketed Chair Massage
solely as a way of building a full-time table practice.
The accessible nature of Chair Massage has brought it to the office
and factories, to movie sets and editing studios, to street fairs
and RV parks, to whitewater rafting trips and theme parks, to back
stage, back lots, and back supply stores, to flea markets and food
markets, and in state departments and department stores. As I was
writing this, I got called to watch a news clip on television about
Chair Massage being offered to spectators at the stadium of the
Oakland Athletics baseball team. Chair Massage is being marketed
successfully in hundreds of locations and its future is limited
only by the imagination of the practitioners.
I currently head a professional association, TouchPro®
Institute, which offers training, certification, and support
to Chair Massage practitioners. TPI operates a web-site, a registry
of Practitioners, and sponsors conventions for TouchPro Practitioners
and Trainers. TouchPro also now has an international branch in London.
Whether in Europe, the UK or the US we see the primary task of
all Chair Massage practitioners to be education. The more practitioners
working visibly in Chair Massage the more skilled touch becomes
an accepted part of the fabric of everyday live, whether in the
workplace, the shopping district, the recreation venue, or the home.
My ultimate vision is to have all children in primary school learn
basic shoulder rubs for their family and friends. When we reach
that point I will know that we have arrived at our goal of a world
where touch is recognized as essential to the development and maintenance
of healthy human beings.
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