Our sovereign real estate

 By that, I mean our body. Our physicality. The only thing we are born with and will die with. 

OK.
It's been a few years since I last posted here. I've been enjoying retirement and not thinking much about treating people anymore, since I don't anymore, or teaching anymore, since others do that now under a DNM banner, which I left trademark (and responsibility) -free. 
I still look after my almost 2-decade old Facebook group though, which still pops up some interesting stuff from time to time.  
What prompts this post is a reflection I had there in response to someone who posted a question about "extended mind," by which he meant, using one's mental faculties to travel through the body of someone on the treatment table. So I wrote a fairly lengthy reply to him, and for whatever reason (maybe he was embarrassed) he deleted his post (and my reply along with it in the subthread), which is irritating, but hey, Facebook, right? 

I wanted to find out if he thought mental meanderings through somebody else's body while treating them was appropriate.  If it was a "good" thing to do, philosophically speaking, to penetrate even just mentally their sovereign real estate, their physical body. 
For sure, a lot of instructors in manual therapy give students all sorts of conceptual hallucinations to ponder as they treat. I remember a class in cranial treatment in which I was instructed to learn to feel the "energy" from my hands flow down through the spine of the lab partner all the way to the end and then back up. I'm pretty sure people teaching these approaches mean no harm, and generally, no harm is done. I'm sure they want people to slow down, so they give them all sorts of anatomical minutia to ponder in hopes they won't be abrupt with their handling.  In another class, however, I was the person on the table and we were learning a move that involved sliding the skin over the sternum down toward the feet. It was framed as a fascia release maneuver. My lab partner was a very nice young man who diligently applied his whole attention to learning the specific conceptual hallucination. I was just lying there, zoning out while he worked on me. But I started to feel like he was falling asleep maybe, or losing track of me, because I realized he was using way too much downward pressure and it was uncomfortable. I asked him to stop, and he did. Maybe it was my imagination connecting this to heart palpitations I felt from time to time for a few years after, and luckily they resolved by themselves, but it made me think that if we lose track of what we are doing with our handling, we could hurt people. Especially if we are large, strong, have big hands, and our focus is on our fantasy, our conceptual hallucination, and not on the person we are treating.
These examples are from my own experience going to classes in the early 1990's, always trying to improve. 
After that I decided most of these approaches were delusional perceptual fantasy. Yes, interesting to learn all about the insides of people, but if that's what you're supposed to think about when treating people, it's a huge distraction. It ends up being operative, and therefore, irrelevant in our line of work as human primate social groomers. I put all notions about fascia, muscles, joints and viscera into the "delete" bin when I pondered treatment ethics. I called them "mesodermal," and denounced them. Later on I called them "operative" and denounced them even more.  

So, back to the reply I made on Facebook. 
I said I thought such mental notions were a distraction, and that as soon as I realized that, I had reshaped my treatment so that it disincluded ideas like that, "extending" the "mind" into someone else's body.
That I had stripped off any thoughts about anything deeper than the skin surface itself, and cutaneous nerves, because I was unable to disinclude those, as they are attached from below the surface directly into skin. (And conveniently as it turned out, there was a whole reality-based mechanism I could adopt instead, neurodynamics.)
That the whole trick was to be interactive with the person, and have neurodynamics to back up one's approach, so, interactive with the nervous system as well. To put the person in charge of their own comfort. To check in with them frequently. To give them explicit permission to choose their preference of handling and tell them I would shift my hands to something most comfortable with their guidance. That they were in there with their own nervous system and could feel it way better than I ever would be able to, so I wanted them to stay aware of how my handling was making them feel.
I pointed out, in my reply, that in reality every person on the table is an unknowable entity full of mystery, and every treatment encounter is like a walk across a narrow footbridge through fog over a chasm of unknown depth. I even posted this picture, which has been my treatment inspiration ever since I first saw it and used it in my teaching many times. And then the guy on Facebook deleted the entire thing. Dang. C'est la vie I guess.  

EDIT: I'm back in here to apologize to the person I thought had deleted his post. Turns out he didn't. Turns out it was a goof on either Fbook's part or my own.