The Blues

This holiday weekend I had the fortune to ply my craft, massage, at the Waterfront Blues Fest. Being saturated in live sounds and greasy festival air got me thinking about music and healing, rhythms and patterns, and the vibratory nature of existence. Let's go for a ride.

Music and healing have been joined together by too many traditions throughout human history to be mere coincidence. So many people throughout time have written songs and choreographed dance into the very fabric of their culture for the express purpose of healing. Even in our metamodern times when physicians all too often lack rhythm we intuit something special about the power of song, We play sad songs when we are down and will play something a bit more groovy when we need to burn off energy. Humans instinctively know that we can intensify and augment our emotions through the vibration patterns the music we submerge ourselves in.

While we now may have more sophisticated ways of mending our bodies I don't think we have or could have a better form of preventative care than dosing ourselves in song. New songs that bring about novel neuro patterns, old songs that induce nostalgia, songs that rekindle our connections to friends songs that connect us to our ancestors. So much of what inhibits our health are chronic maladaptive patterns. Why would we or any self-preserving entity persist in patterns that were harmful to itself other than an emotional disturbance of some kind? Through most of humanities evolution, humans relied on banging stretched out skins and blowing air through hollowed-out bones to correct whatever imbalance we have in our emotions before they became maladaptive patterns. Before those patterns become our afflictions, and before those afflictions became our identities.

So it was with these ideas that I undertook my part in trying to help people out through the art of bodywork while working this festival. I pondered what exactly are “The Blues”. What I come up with is that the blues are about disappointment. So many sometimes happy sometimes sad songs about love gone wrong, being broke, being down and out, or just having life smack us around a bit. We can all relate no matter how fable our life outwardly appears. I think there is wisdom culturally encoded in how we even talk about the blues that we can learn from. We talk about people having the blues, as opposed to the all too often repeated mantras of “I am (insert negative emotion here)” Noone defines themselves as being blue, rather it's just some often heavy emotional suitcases we carry around till we figure out a way to release it.

It seems though we become more estranged from this common-sense sagery with every passing day. It has never been easier to fall out of the rhythm of nature, of seasons, of our place in the world and in our community. It seems we are becoming more entranced with the algorithm of technology and progress. And yes, I am very much aware that I'm using technology to communicate these ideas. I’m not making a Luddite argument. I am trying to make a case for us to struggle to maintain the balance between these two worlds. That as we chase the algorithm of pure reason through our electronics we maintain grounded in the rhythm of the earth. That's the way energy works. We need a live wire and a ground wire. Vibrating between these polarities seems to be what enables life, existence, and consciousness. Finding rhythm within the vibration is what allows us to have meaning.

So why am I writing this on a massage blog? Because like music, massage is about patterns. It's about disrupting old patterns and creating new ones. It's about bringing awareness to patterns so we can evaluate whether they are serving us or not. I have observed how bodies loosen up during a session. How they can go from being rigid, where If I were to move an arm or a leg I am giving resistance. How the movement stops as soon as I relish force, as opposed to later in the session where the movement of energy ripples freely throughout the body. There's an integration that happens in almost all massage sessions where all our different body parts, that are all too often working independently of one another, becomes connected with one another. I can no longer just move someone's arm or leg, as whatever way I manipulate any joint will translate through the whole body. There's a mimicry of music and dance in massage that I feel is needed as our lives are pushed in ever more fragmented directions. So let's all do what we can to keep the vibes good.

Anthony Bruni