Massage takes to the water: watsu or "water shiatsu" is a California bodywork that's wet, wonderful, and a little wild.. (Bodywork)

Autor: Thomson, Bill

Publicação: East West 0888-1375 July 1990, v20, n7, p60(6)

TRANQUILIZER SALES SURGED IN CALIfornia after last fall's earthquake. My own remedy included a trip to some ancient hot springs to get a massage that I'd heard could melt steel, which was precisely what my shoulder and neck muscles felt like. What sounded especially appealing about this massage was that it wasn't going to take place on terra (not too) firma. My jumpy body would be massaged in water-in the silky, healing waters of Harbin Hot Springs, a popular retreat two and a half hours north by car from San Francisco. I was going to get watsu-ed.
Watsu, " water shiatsu, " is part Japanese massage part chakra (energy center) work, part meditation, part tantra (yogic sexual discipline), and part whatever the people involved in it want it to be. For some, watsu is a floating, swirling journey back to the primal waters of the womb, where safety, nurturance, and love are assured. To its most ardent admirers, watsu is cosmic, harmonic, orgasmic bliss.

Credit for this moist miracle goes to Harold Dull, a youthfull, soft-spoken, fifty-four-year-old former beat poet who hung out in the late 1950s in San Francisco's North Beach district along with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg. A long-time writer and English teacher, Dull began to learn massage in 1975 and eventually studied in the U.S. and in Japan with some of the world's foremost shiatsu teachers-Zen shiatsu developer Shizuto Masunaga, Zen priest Reuho Yamada, and Wataru Ohashi, who inspired development of the Ohashiatsu style of shiatsu. Today Dull is director of Harbin's School of Shiatsu and Massage and travels to Paris, Munich, Rome, and other European cities to teach watsu and tantra, the Eastern spiritual practice sometimes called "sexual yoga."

With watsu, Dull has invented a unique approach to bodywork grounded in tantric philosophy. He defines tantra as the practice of freeing energy, which he says can be achieved in different ways: individually, using meditation or yoga; with an intimate partner, in "tantra of union"; or with anybody," using bodywork tantra, " which is the subject of his 1987 book Bodywork Tantra on Land and in Water, published by Harbin Springs Publishing. Watsu and tantsu (tantric shiatsu massage, done on land), are Dull's bodywork tantra creations. Fashioned from tantric tradition, watsu plays at the edge of a razorsharp line separating most bodywork techniques from sexually arousing physical intimacy. It's a line that most bodyworkers steer carefully away from.

Dull, however, believes that a certain physical closeness bordering on sexual intimacy can be used to advantage in some bodywork, if it is done without sexual intentions. Because such closeness is largely avoided outside a sexual context, Dull thinks we're failing to use the considerable energies that fuel sexual feelings. After all, say tantric teachers, sexual energy is the greatest force on earth.

Not everyone will like Dull's bodywork philosophy, particularly since the road he took to discover tantra's riches was not always clear of his own sexual intentions, a fact he openly discusses and writes about. Dull's watsu massage, however, is a sure winner in some circles. Watsu, in fact, is used therapeutically in a center for the disabled, where it gets rave reviews partly because it does include the intimacy that Dull feels everyone deeply longs for.

Under a brilliant noon sun on a late fall day, I arrived at the fifteen year-old intentional community officially named Heart Consciousness Church. Trees over the hills shimmered. In these parts, people heap praise on Harbin, a 1, 160-acre sanctuary of tranquility.

In my Rent-A-Wreck car, passing a sign that read "No Pets, No Drugs, No Alcohol, No Smoking, " I climbed a dirt road leading to the office where I was to meet Harold Dull. In the distance a naked man strolled along the path around the guest cottages. Modest first time visitors should be aware that those who wear bathing suits in the pools draw more attention than those who don't.

Inside the office, Dull greeted me. Wearing loose cotton pants and shirt, he was dressed entirely in white, with hair and beard to match. With pink, glowing skin and clear, silver-blue eyes he was the freshest-looking old beatnik I'd ever seen. He suggested that we drop off my things at my room, after which we

walked a short distance to one of the bathing pools. A dozen or so people were in the water wearing nothing but their jewelry and rapt expressions. Couples, entwined like pretzels, appeared to be refining their watsu technique, a popular pastime at Harbin.

Bathing pool etiquette calls for quiet, which was occasionally broken by the pleasurable moan of someone getting watsu-ed, or by more urgent cries such as those normally reserved for bedrooms. This, I later learned, was part of the "rebirthing breathing practices" being taught at Harbin the week I was there and had nothing to do with bedrooms.

Men and women share a warm, woodpaneled dressing room, and signs admonish everyone to shower before entering the pools. Harbin's water treatment system-a sand filter, ultraviolet light, and hydrogen peroxide (soon to be replaced by ozone treatment) has earned high marks from the Lake County Health Department, Dull says.

Water temperature in Harbin's seven pools varies depending on their size and proximity to the springs. Dull and I eased ourselves into a fifteen-by-twenty-fivefoot pool that held four feet of spring water at 94 'F-skin temperature. The smaller, adjoining hot bath that we later used was an energy-sapping 111' F. Next to it lies a rejuvenating little cold bath that'll straighten out your nose hairs.

Slowly we waded into that first pool. Maybe it's the water's cozy warmth or its abundant mineral content, or maybe it's the mysterious healing powers attributed to these lands since the Miwok Indians occupied them centuries ago. Whatever the reason, in this water, peace reigns. Hatred, sorrow, even 7. 1 temblor jitters have a snowball's chance here. I leaned my head back on the pool's edge and gazed high into the fume-free wild blue yonder. Here, I imagined, in this water, buck naked, eyeball to eyeball, is where Mikhail and George should summit sometime.

It was time to begin. For the first few minutes, Dull floated me on my back. I lay still, aware of a light breeze on my face. One confident hand balanced me at my sacrum, the other supported my head and neck. I gradually relaxed and let my muscles loosen, joints unlock, and thoughts drift. Thus, within minutes, my journey into the weightless, formless, timeless world of watsu was underway.

It's crucial that the person getting watsu-ed not get a noseful of water-which is easier said than done. Sometimes watsu is a flurry of motion, and although both watsu-er's arms are needed for positioning the other's body, he or she must free a forearm (or a knee or a wrist) to support the person's neck. Later in the day, I took a shot at watsu-ing two women and, too bad for them, I discovered how difficult this is. During the hour that Dull swirled my body through the pool, however, not a single drop of Harbin Hot Springs water went up my nose. The hands I was in knew what they were doing.

Dull swayed me delicately, and my imagination took flight. Listening to water-muffled sounds, I became a winding cord of ocean kelp, washing back and forth in rhapsodic slow motion ... swish .. swoosh ... in time with the sea's eternal surge. Coiled around Dull's trunk like a sleepy boa constrictor, I was suspended in clear, soothing waters, worry-free, protected from the world.

Dull tucked my neck into the crook of his arm. He drew my head to his chest, holding it to his heart. Then he floated me out and sank his fingers into the muscles along my spine. Suddenly I was spinning through the water, losing my orientation. I felt giddy and laughed. Watsu, a symphony, is largo, then presto; fortissimo, then pianissimo. One movement serious, the next playful. I dozed off, my mind coasting like fluffy clouds.

Dull exquisitely orchestrated the finale of my hour-long watsu and then steered my semiconscious body to the side of the pool, resting it there on a ledge. I reclined, my limbs oozing like jellyfish, my head bathed in breezy light. Watsu had delivered this body.

I surfaced, and for the next couple of hours we toured Harbin's grounds, me wrapped in a blanket of euphoria. Later we had a commendable vegetarian dinner in Harbin's restaurant. The left side of my brain awoke, and it had a few questions.

For example, after Dull watsu-ed me, he watsu-ed a woman who began to breathe more and more heavily before finally sounding-I can think of no other description-like she was having an orgasm. Was this really "rebirthing breathing, " as someone tried to explain to me? More to the point, what about the sexual feeling that's bound to arise when people find themselves in such intimate contact, as Harold Dull finds himself at countless times in classes and in private sessions?

After dinner we climbed the steps to Harold and Valerie Dull's home, a small wooden house snuggled in a grove of tall trees overlooking Harbin. Valerie Dull, seven months pregnant with Dull's fifth child, fell asleep on his lap while her husband, whose appearance and voice bear quite a resemblance to Donald Sutherland's, answered my questions.

Harold Dull was destined for water. He grew up, in his words, where there is a lot of water falling from the sky," in Seattle. As a child he played in the water on the tide flats on Puget Sound. As a grown man, he married his third wife, Valerie, in a pool at Harbin.

Dull graduated from the University of Washington in 1957 with a degree in literature and proceeded to lead an exemplary beat poet life in San Francisco. Over the next seventeen years, Dull earned a living driving a school bus, working for the Postal Service, and teaching. He lived in California, New York, Canada, and Mexico and on the Mediterranean island of Ibiza. He worked at universities and on a Native American reservation. He had two wives and four children, wrote one novel and hundreds of poems, and eventually landed back in San Francisco, where he and his second wife bought a home and took teaching jobs.

In 1975 Dull began to spend time at northern California's hot springs. One day he approached an attractive woman and asked if she'd like a massage. It was a bold move on Dull's part, made bolder by the fact that he'd never given or gotten a massage in his life. When it became apparent that he hadn't a clue what he was doing, the woman, a professional masseuse, offered to teach him.

That day changed his life, Dull says. Massage replaced poetry as the medium of his deepest expression. Watsu could yet prove to be his magnum opus. What happened after he began massaging, he says, "was incredible, the sense of opening out to other people, of being with other people, which is basically the Zen shiatsu philosophy. It's the philosophy of not doing something to someone but being with them. The idea of support. "

Dull later discovered that with water he could achieve another dimension of support: "In water, the person is totally supported. The whole body feels the water. " And, because the watsu-er must hold the person so close, they feel a deep, almost mothering nurturance.

The more a person can relax, the more they are likely to gain from watsu. "The whole principle is freedom. People go through many different things in a session. Sometimes they cry, and the point is to not interrupt that, to keep the flow going. Whatever feelings come up, they find that they can go through them. "

The strongest feelings that can arise are sexual. Dull candidly MU about times when his own libido crept into his massage work. In addition to his first massage teacher, his work with other women, he admits, was sometimes prompted by underlying sexual feelings. To many bodyworkers, this would clearly be unethical. Dull agrees that bringing intentions of sexual activity to bodywork violates a client's trust. But sexual feelings, he believes, are different from sexual activity, and the energy they create can be a forceful and valuable part of bodywork. Everyone craves intimacy. The problem, says Dull, is that we shy away from intimacy because we're afraid of sexuality.

Dull examines the sexuality and intimacy of bodywork in the context of tantra. Though it's perceived in different ways, most tantrists say that tantra leads to "nonorgasmic bliss," or something along those lines. That bliss is available in bodywork, too, says Dull, but unlike much other tantric practice, it's not dependent on a sexual partner. It simply requires someone with whom there can be nonsexual physical closeness and trust.

"For some, " Dull writes in his book, [Watsu] is the discovery of a level of nurturing they have missed since childhood.. . . For many people the fact that they have not been held by anyone in their adult life the way they were held as a child has left a deep craving which cuts them off from this primal source of nurturance. Many might deny the need exists. In watsu,. . that need becomes fulfilled.. . . The strength and healing the child drew from that source are again available in his life. This should not be confused with regression.' It is the absence of regression. It is the not having to become a baby to find that source. . . .

"Many problems people have around intimacy are related to their inability (or [their] partner's inability) to distinguish between sexual feeling and sexual intention. Men, in particular, often have this difficulty. They have been trained that a sexual feeling is something to be either acted on or repressed. . . .

"It is obvious that in work this close, sexual feelings can come up, but, because there is no way to act on them, they can be enjoyed as pleasurable feelings in themselves, as part of the pleasure the whole body is feeling.. . . [Tlhese feelings can contribute to the release and movement of energy throughout the body. . . . "

Some people think that watsu and the way it is presented may do a disservice to more approved forms of massage. Nandi Dubitsky is chairman of education standards for the Florida State Massage Therapy Association and is completing a book on shiatsu. Dubitsky says, "I have not experienced a watsu massage; I have only seen ads for it. But the ads lend an air of sensuality that I don't like. It sounds like a commercial gimmick. Sensual and nice, yes, but it doesn't sound like shiatsu, which in the Orient is a health care practice that someone must study for six years to enter.

"I hate to see something that sensationalizes, makes frivolous, and cheapens a major therapeutic modality. We're seeking right now to establish credibility [for shiatsu], and I'm afraid your readers may get the impression that [watsu] is shiatsu. "

Dull agrees that watsu may not be suitable for everyone, but he emphasizes that a person trained in it will adjust to what is comfortable for the receiver. And bathing suits can be worn, as they are in therapy pools outside Harbin. He points out that tantsu is always done with clothing on.

Watsu's value as a therapeutic tool has recently become apparent with its introduction at Timpany Center, a Santa Clara County aquatic facility for people with physical, mental, and emotional disabilities. Timpany clients receive watsu treatments from one of five staff members trained in it, including licensed physical therapists and massage practitioners. Some insurance policies cover the treatments, which must be prescribed and recommended by a psychiatrist, chiropractor, psychologist, or other physician.

Layne Hackett, Timpany Center manager, says that watsu has "worked beautifully" for many of the seventy clients who have received it. For some, says Hackett, improvement "has been profound." She says, "It has increased the range of motion for those with physical disabilities and significantly improved the ability of others to relax. " It has also provided much-needed emotional security for many clients, she adds.

Hackett says that the intimacy issue apparently hasn't presented any problems at Timpany where, it should be noted, clients and watsu practitioners wear bathing suits. Hackett says that since it is a public institution, part of the Santa Clara County Office of Education, administrators were sensitive to the question. Rather than causing problems, she feels, the physical closeness may be why watsu works so well for Timpany clients. "It gives the person permission to be close in a nonsexual way. It is very nurturing. The release of emotional stress can be tremendous. "

Of course, people wanting to practice watsu need a pool, which must be the right depth and filled with water the right temperature. Dull knows of at least one company that manufactures a suitable pool. It costs about $3,000, but Dull foresees neighborhood groups buying them and making watsu a regular part of their life, as it is at Harbin.

Results at Timpany confirm what Dull believes is watsu's greatest potential benefit. "It means freedom for the person, " he says. He sees watsu as a means not just to free the body's energy, but more important, to provide a setting where people can enjoy the deep freedom that comes with being supported in an intimate, caring way by another human being. Fl Resources The American Massage Therapy Association 1130 West North Shore Ave. Chicago, IL 60626 (312) 761-AMTA Associated Professional Massage Therapists & Bodyworkers 1746 Cole Blvd., Suite 225 Golden, CO 80401 (303) 674-8478 International Myomassethics Federation 5188 Picadilly Circle Westminster, CA 92683 (714) 897-5980; (800) 338-8950 American Oriental Bodywork Therapy Association 50 Maple Place Manhasset, NY 11030 (516) 365-5025 The Rolf Institute 302 Pearl Street Boulder, CO 80302 (303) 449-5903 Body of Knowledge (Hellerwork) 415 N. Mt. Shasta Blvd., Suite 4 Mt. Shasta, CA 96067 (916) 926-2500 Lomi School 343 College Avenue Santa Rosa, CA 95402 (707) 579-0465 Rosen Institute 2315 Prince Street Berkeley, CA 94705 (415) 525-1106 Trager Institute 10 Old Mill Street Mill Valley, CA 94941-1891 (415) 388-2688 American Shiatsu Association P.O. Box 718 Jamaica Plain, MA 02130 Jin Shin Do Foundation P.O. Box 1097 Felton, CA 95018 (408) 338-9454 Society of Ortho-Bionomy

International, Inc. P.O. Box 7750 Berkeley, CA 94707 Core Institute of Bodywork and

Massage Therapy 223 West Carolina Street Tallahassee, FL 32301 (904) 222-8673 Feldenkrais Alliance 1972 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 2140 (617) 547-8509 Harbin Hot Springs P.O. Box 782 Middletown, CA 95461 (707) 987-2477 School of Shiatsu and Massage

(at Harbin Hot Springs) P.O. Box 570 Middletown, CA 95461 (707) 987-3801 The Rubenfeld Center 115 Waverly Place New York, NY I 00 I 1 (212) 254-5100 North American Society

of Teachers of the

Alexander Technique P.O. Box 806 Ansonia Station New York, NY 10023-9998 (212) 866-5640 The books Massageworks, Massage Techniques, and Head to Toe Massage by D. Baloti Lawrence are available through Books by Mail, page 111.