Words that Touch

How to Ask Questions Your Body Can Answer - 12 Essential 'Clean Questions' for Mind/Body Therapists

Nicholas Pole

• Publisher: Singing Dragon
• ISBN:
  9780857012920
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Alternative & Complementary Medicine

In this practical guide, Nick Pole explains the philosophy and practice of Clean Language, a simple and highly effective way to facilitate mind/body communication in bodywork therapy. He explains how to use language to get to the heart of a client's physical problem, to engage the mind in the process of the body, and to create somatic change.

Words that Touch provides compelling theoretical explanations and practical case studies to describe the importance of language and relationships in the practice of mind/body therapies. Practitioners of yoga, shiatsu, acupuncture, physiotherapy, The Feldenkrais Technique and more will find the guide transformative in increasing the connection with clients and developing their practice through language.

PART 1

THE BASICS

1

A LONG WAY FROM YOURSELF

My Japanese shiatsu teacher never said much when I went to see him for a treatment. He would simply give me a cheerful smile and wave at the mat. The message could not have been clearer: ‘Words are not important here.’ What he did, how he listened, inquired, suggested or questioned, he did in silence. The qualities of his presence, warmth and total attention made a session with him seem more like a tea ceremony performed through touch than the normal mixture of detailed questioning and advice-giving I was used to in most forms of bodywork. Sometimes at the end he would smile again and ask, ‘Did you enjoy the treatment?’ I never knew what to say to that, since entertainment wasn’t what I thought I’d come for, and anyway, it seemed like his way of discouraging any attempt to think about or analyse what had happened in the session.

Then one evening, my treatment was the last one of his long day and afterwards he invited me to sit down with him while he relaxed. He poured me a glass of wine, and one for himself, and after a bit of talk of other things, fixed me with a friendly but frighteningly penetrating gaze and said, ‘You are a long way from yourself.’ It took me by surprise; I felt confused. I probably nodded; perhaps I managed a wry smile and pretended to know exactly what he meant. I do remember a defiant little voice inside me wanting to say, ‘That’s what you think!’ Even then I was a keen student of how language can be integrated with bodywork to help the client make some sense of what they experience in a session, and the words he’d offered me broke all the rules. They weren’t framed as a question, they had no relation to anything I’d said to him, they were his opinion, not mine, and they certainly invited no reply. At least, I couldn’t think of one at the time.

At another level, of course, he was absolutely right. It took me maybe 15 years to find the self that he was talking about, the self that cared enough about the possibilities of integrating language with bodywork to eventually get this book into your hands. But I still wonder what might have happened if, instead of just leaving me with a koan, a conundrum, he had asked me a few simple questions, with that same gentle, compassionate, demanding curiosity his hands conveyed through touch – a few simple questions that might have given my stubborn mind some sense of the self I was so far away from.

When I first discovered Clean Language, I was struck by the way it seemed to do with words what he could do with touch. There is something very Japanese, very Zen, about it, about the way, by using the fewest and simplest words, it can create the potential for profound change. Clients not only experience real insights, they also feel the somatic shifts that show that insight has been embodied and embedded. And there is the same deep respect for empty space, a listening clarity that doesn’t interfere, which simply waits to be met. My teacher’s way of working with the body was usually very gentle but it could also sometimes be energetic, emphatic – more Aikido then tea ceremony – but it never seemed imposed on you. It came from a simple willingness to sit, to respect the other person’s space, to leave a kind of a stillness in which the slightest ripple might be the start of a whole process. Clean Language seemed to mirror all this by keeping formal structure and technique to an absolute minimum. In fact, it seemed the perfect complement to my teacher’s way of working with the body, since both methods seemed to allow as pure as possible a response to what was really coming from the client.

VERBAL MIND AND BODYMIND

When I started to integrate Clean Language with bodywork, this opened up a very special possibility. Any bodywork therapist knows how hard it is to describe in words what we actually do: what it’s really like to engage with another person’s physical being and perhaps all the rest of their being, with movement or touch. And for most of our clients too it’s just as challenging to find words for their experience of that. One reason for this is that the parts of the brain that are most directly involved in processing language do not find it easy to communicate with the parts of the brain that give us our somatic sense of self. Both sides of the brain are involved in each of these functions, of course, but there is a growing consensus among neuroscientists interested in mindfulness and the mind/body connection that what I will call the ‘verbal mind’ lives mostly in the left hemisphere, while the right hemisphere has much more direct access to that somatic sense of self which I will call the ‘bodymind’. Though I can only put this in a very simplified way (and one that would make any self-respecting neuroscientist cringe), research that you can read more about in Part 2 suggests these two kinds of mind communicate in very different ways and have very different priorities. As far as the verbal mind is concerned, feelings don’t really exist until they have a name, some kind of label by which they can be recognised and fitted into an existing structure. But for the bodymind, those labels can often seem like an attempt to close down any real dialogue between conceptual knowledge and felt experience. To call a knee pain ‘arthritis’, or a chronic gut problem ‘irritable bowel’, may be medically accurate but doesn’t help the client to connect with their knee or their gut in any healing way; in fact it tends to cut off communication with the symptoms and sensations which are the native language of the body.

When we ask ‘Clean’ questions, the opposite happens. By focusing attention on a symptom, and by asking the kind of questions that we do, the body begins to sense that it is being listened to in an entirely different way, perhaps in a way that it has never experienced before. Because Clean questions make no judgements and bring an absolute minimum of presupposition to the dialogue, they leave room for all the subtlety and ambiguity which is a natural part of how our bodies process information and communicate. The normally dominant verbal mind, with its tendency to think of the body simply as a machine made up of individual parts, can easily become impatient with this. It prefers to use language as a way to categorise than to connect, language that takes the client away from their direct experience of the body. Clean Language, on the other hand, brings the spotlight of attention to the very simplest elements of experience, the ones that are hidden most of the time by the artificial complexities that the verbal mind is constantly trying to create.

Using words in this way offers me a way to interact with my clients at almost the same level as I would by using touch. At the same time, it involves the client in the process and brings their body into the conversation as an equal partner. This means that when we arrive at a point where the client feels ready to begin the bodywork, there is already a triangle of trust between their verbal mind, their bodymind and me. For me as the practitioner, that trust gives the work a truly enjoyable depth and flow, a flow that comes from somewhere my verbal mind has almost no connection with.

Clients often say, after any kind of bodywork, how much more in touch they feel with themselves. That’s not surprising, because no matter how much the verbal mind likes to deny it, a genuine sense of self is always a meeting between body and mind. As bodywork therapists, we are expert at working with the body but rarely get specific training in how to work with our client’s verbal mind. Clean Language is an elegant way to bridge that gap. These simple questions give the verbal mind the tools it needs to begin a dialogue with the body: a dialogue which most of our clients will never have thought was possible before.

2

WHY CLEAN LANGUAGE?

This book is intended as a friendly and practical guide to using Clean Language in bodywork therapy. How you define bodywork is up to you. You may be a physiotherapist, CranioSacral therapist or shiatsu practitioner, for example, and want to help your clients connect with their own inner responses as they learn to inhabit their bodies in new ways. Maybe you’re an acupuncturist wanting to make sense of the peculiar metaphors your clients come up with under the influence of your strategically placed needles; perhaps you teach yoga or qi gong or Feldenkrais and are looking for ways for your clients to give language to movement; you may even be a mindfulness teacher, or a psychotherapist working mainly with words but curious about how people can connect more easily with bodily sensations and the meanings behind them. In all of these, Clean Language offers enormous potential for helping clients make their own sense of what is going on for them, both in the treatment room and as they take your work with them back into their everyday lives.

Clean Language is now being used in areas like education, business, medicine and government as well as in the world of therapy where it began. Its simplicity, accessibility and adaptability help to explain that growing popularity. When someone asks you Clean questions in a skilful way, you can’t help but notice that those questions seem to come from a place of profound respect for, and curiosity about, you and your relationship with yourself, and that they offer a surprisingly direct way to the heart of any problem that’s affecting that relationship. Clean questions help us rea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Part 1: The Basics
• Part 2: The Theory
• Part 3: The Practice
• References
• Index
• Join Our Mailing List
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements
• Copyright
• Of Related Interest
• Endorsement